OLDaily

Write your own bookmarklet, the tiny program that yields productivity hacks!
Gabriel Koo, 2022/10/21

I spent some time yesterday learning how to write bookmarklets. To be clear, I already had a sense of how to do it, but this article took me quite a bit further, and then through a lot of trial and error, I figured out how to extract indieweb tags (such as p-name) from a web page using a bookmarklet. I've posted the result of my work on GitHub (with more to come, I expect).

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Why audio will never capture the hearts of social media users
Lizzy Lawrence, Protocol, 2022/10/21

Audio and social don't mix. At least, that has been the experience of a series of failed enterprises that have tried. Why? "For one, you can't skim it easily. You have to listen to audio linearly, making it an inefficient mode of consumption. It also doesn't require all your attention." To me these are all advantages of audio, making it great for background or relaxation, rather than study and comprehension. Yet, I still learn from audio, all the time, through podcasts such as TWIT. So how could audio become social? You need to "nail the AI-discovery and audio clipping technology." Creators can just ramble; the AI would pull out the best bits and combine them into a 'for you' feed, sort of what people produce manually using Snipd, or that you get on some radio stations, like Netflix is a Joke.

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Strategic directions in the what and how of learning and teaching innovation—a fifty-year synopsis
R.A. Ellis, Higher Education, 2022/10/21

This article covers an interesting topic: innovation in education as seen through the pages of the journal Higher Education. But it takes a careful reading to extract the trends from the synopsis. Rob Ellis writes, "The overall impact of this change is a growth in complexity of the student experience, in part contributed to by an integrated use of material elements such as technologies in the learning experience." We see this in the 'what' of the student experience: what is taught, ranging from generic skills to work integrated learning (WIL) to global citizenship. And we see it in the 'how' of learning, including online learning, and associations between the what and the how. These technologies form a part of "the negotiated processes through which the material becomes entangled with the social to bring forth actions, subjectivities and ideas." Image: Boston College.

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Meta’s Next-Gen Avatars Were Faked for Connect 2022
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2022/10/21

I have expressed scepticism about Meta (aka Facebook) demonstrations in the past, and this scepticism is warranted. To underline this I link here to an article revealing that the legs on their VR avatars were faked. It's important to underline the wider social implications of casual exaggeration and fakery in corporate media. People look at this, you know, and develop their sense of ethics accordingly.

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Characterizing the Identity Formation and Sense of Belonging of the Students Enrolled in a Data Science Learning Community
Aparajita Jaiswal, Alejandra J. Magana, Mark D. Ward, Educational Sciences, 2022/10/21

This is a good paper (16 page PDF), though I have mixed feelings about it. It asserts that building a sense of belonging helps students complete courses, and studies this through the development of identity and community in The Data Mine (TDM), "a residential learning community that allows students to live and learn under the same roof." So, on the one hand, as I see it, learning a discipline means learning to see the world the way members of the discipline see the world. So there is an element of community formation. On the other hand, the community formation process described here demands a degree of conformity and collaboration that would make me uncomfortable. It may be that most people thrive under such conditions, which would drive statistical results, but some people really don't, and these people are overlooked in generalizations about community identity.

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