OLDaily

Are You a Communist?
Simon Wardley, Twitter, 2021/12/31

I'm getting the core image from this Twitter post and combining it with the ad fontes media bias chart to illustrate what I see as an important truth to which many Americans are oblivious: exactly what constitutes 'left' and 'right' wing discourse. View my diagram here. That's why you should take these 'media bias charts' with a very large grain of salt. Via Harold Jarche.

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OK, where do I start with that?
Jo Walton, Tor.com, 2021/12/31

As indexed on Metafilter, "Over at Tor.com, science fiction author Jo Walton has a delightful series where she wanders through her bookshelves, letter by letter, and recommends which book to start with for each author. Start here." I did start there and saw a lot of old favourites and new suggestions (my leisure reading these days is mostly audio, using Audible - highlights included Moby Dick, which occupied a good part of my summer cycling, Don Quixote, which I'm just finishing, and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah).

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Philosopher of the Multiverse - Baudrillard
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2021/12/31

This is another nice addition to Donald Clark's list of influential thinkers, a list that became much more useful once he began looking outside the domain of traditional 'education' researchers. "Rather than seeing the world in terms of the old binary oppositions of appearance and reality, subject and object, oppressors and oppressed," writes Clark, Jean Baudrillard "sees us as increasingly being in a world of Simulacra and Simulations (1981) – ads, TV news and soap operas." And he replaces the traditional conception of agency as production "with a more complex agent as consumer and consumption,  not production, as the new locus of economic activity." This is the world I grew up in - no, not continental philosophy, but rather, science fiction, and especially the cyberpunk work of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson.

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One State’s Bet on ‘Green Schools’ to Prep Grads for Future $1.4 Billion Industry
Rosanne Skirble, Maryland Matters, 2021/12/31

I have long maintained that the true benefit of online learning will be realized when it frees us from the classroom. By that I didn't mean a pandemic-inspired flight, but rather an inspired and informed form of learning that takes places in forests, on farms, or on ships. Or wherever. That's why I like this sort of programme being offered by a school in Maryland. The article is useful, though it has a weird fascination with competitions, certifications by horticulture boards, and political appointments. Ignore that part of it: focus on the good of getting away from 'book work' and into the community. Via the 74.

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Web Stats 2021
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, 2021/12/31

According to awstats, this year downes.ca served 224,140 unique visitors (calculated monthly and added, and means no fewer than 27,069 unique visitors, and probably more), 614,048 visits, 2,844,545 pages served, 4,959,266 hits and 756.55 GB transferred. In addition, My ethics course served 2,157 unique visitors, 5,762 visits, 275,641 pages served, 293,487 hits and 105.60 GB transferred. My fallacies.ca website also had a lot of traffic, serving 17,353 unique visitors through 18,965 visits, 29,027 pages, 249,149 hits and 760.17 MB transferred. The original CCK08 course drew 3,635 visitors through 5,451 visits.

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Why the Future Is Passwordless (and How to Get Started)
Tim Brookes, How-To Geek, 2021/12/31

We're still in that muzzy confusing stage of things where we can see pretty clearly that we won't be using passwords in the future but where it's not exactly clear how we'll do it. Things like Microsoft Authenticator are fine if you want to lock yourself into a single-account Microsoft world, but I can say from experience that it gets very complicated if you depart from that basic model. But it will get simpler. Anyhow, the real value of this article is the diagram about half way through illustrating WebAuthn sign-in. What we need now is for us to be able to choose anything (and not just brand-name apps) to verify our logins, and to make them simple to use. Like passwords, but with things.

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