Papacharissi, Z. (2010). Privacy as a luxury commodity. First Monday, 8(2), 1–4.

Notes:

p.2: The balance between privacy and sociality takes on new meaning as Internet–based platforms, like social network sites, afford sociality for privacy, at the expense of personal autonomy. All Web–accessible platforms, offer services, mostly social, in exchange for personal information. This simple step, taken by many, transforms our personal information into currency, and our privacy into a commodity. — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

Imlawi, J., Gregg, D., & Karimi, J. (2015). Student engagement in course-based social networks: The impact of instructor credibility and use of communication. Computers & Education, 88, 84–96. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.04.015

Notes:

p.91: when instructors disclose private information about themselves, like photographs and bibliographies; it positively affects educational outcomes. — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

p.91: appropriate humor does enhance educational outcomes when an instructor is communicating with students outside of the classroom via Facebook. — Highlighted Jan 30, 2016

I cringe at how this post will likely be read - as a fanboy OMG DIS AWESUM! post. Whatever. I promised several people that I'd write up something about my early experiences with the iPad Pro and pencil. 

As part of my role in helping to refine the learning technologies platforms and support on campus, I force myself to use as many different devices as I can in order to make sure I understand what people will be bringing to campus. I used a Surface Pro 3 for about 6 months last year - and while the hardware was OK, it felt comically big. The digital ink, though, was fantastic. In the end, I couldn't get past how horribly the software was (not) designed for touch interaction. I wanted something that size (but not as thick - Surface Pro 3 felt like carrying around a 12" picture frame), but with digital ink that was as good as the Surface pen. But I went back to a combination of iPad Air 2 and MacBook Air as my non-desk computers.

Paul asked about some of the quirks. Easier to show than tell… (based on the instructions linked here…)

Notes:

p.3: Cut-stability concerns a network’s ability to resist being broken into pieces. Connection-stability concerns a network’s ability to resist the spread of viral processes — Highlighted Jan 10, 2016

p.3: These two forms of stability are antagonistic. — Highlighted Jan 10, 2016

p.3: multi-agent framework, Probabilistic Network Models — Highlighted Jan 10, 2016

p.17: But the internet is PEOPLE! — Written Jan 10, 2016

p.17: Is the Internet stable? My conjecture is ‘No’. My argument begins by asserting that two forms of stability occur in any networked system such as the Internet: cut-stability and connection-stability. These two forms of stability can be defined without assuming any particular model of network connectivity. Finally, I contend, that these two forms of stability are antagonistic. It is impossible to design an Internet architecture that would be — Highlighted Jan 10, 2016

I've been thinking a lot about how to visualize online presence and community. There are lots of great tools to do post-hoc analysis, but I'm thinking about something more realtime. It doesn't exist yet, though. In the meantime, I'm playing around with the current tools to get a feel for what stories they can pull from the social graph data.

Yesterday, I followed the howto from Caleb Jones, to pull the social graph data from my Twitter account. The process took about 15 hours, because of Twitter's helpful throttling of API calls. Thankfully, the twecoll python tool takes that into account and gracefully pauses when Twitter API tells it to cool it.

I just posted the set of daily photos for 2015, wrapping up the 9th year I've done a 365photos project.

I'm trying a new publishing tool - instead of generating static HTML from Aperture, I'm exporting 960px-wide images from Photos, uploading those to my server, and using UberGallery to generate the web pages automatically. I haven't done much with metadata for the photos, so I'm just showing the photo and a title if available. I saved a snapshot of the generated HTML as the index.html file for that directory, so the server load should be pretty trivial, and it shouldn't require active PHP scripts to run in the future…

Mike Caulfield has a good post about how Facebook and siloed social media got traction in ways the blogosphere circa 2005-2008 never maintained. He has a good point about the user experience - people aren't going to go look at 10, 100, 1000 different websites with different graphic designers, publishing models, and navigation structures. That's where the simplified UX of Facebook comes in. A single stream, pulling stuff from everyone a person cares about. And that jerk from junior high.

Finn, P. (2015). Critical Condition: Replacing critical thinking with creativity. Wilfred Laurier University Press. Waterloo.

“…critical thinking does not lead to truth’ instead, it leads to stronger and stronger versions of what you want to believe.” (P. 19)

“Simply put, older models of computation were built like arguments from the traditions of critical thinking; newer models are more creative and dynamic and use less control.” (P.25)

“If language matters – and surely it does – then what does it mean that most of our information now comes to us through open, active systems that grow organically?” (P. 25)

I have a stack of old CD-ROMs from projects ranging from 1995-2003. I wanted to save a few of them to add to a portfolio of projects, before the projects were lost forever. It’s ironic - back in the olden days of multimedia, we burned fancy new CD-ROMs that were sold as “100 year archive medium” - costing $30 or more per disk back then, and we figured it was money well spent. Now, just 20 years later, most of those archival “green media” disks are completely unreadable, having degraded already. Thankfully, I have several projects that were commercially distributed, meaning I have actual pressed CD-ROMs rather than DIY burned disks. These disks read just fine - and should for decades to come.

I'm not going to write a year-in-review post. It's been an epic year on many fronts, and next year is already shaping up to be bigger, more amazing and even more exhausting. In great ways.

So. What about 2015? For me, it was a year that I became more internally-focused. I traveled less. I worked more on the local campus context. And that's a great thing. I plan to travel even less in 2016. I think the biggest impact I can have is in helping to foster active networks and communities on my own campus, and to connect people across faculties and contexts.

Wenger, E., Trayner, B., & De Laat, M. (2011, April 28). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework. Retrieved December 22, 2015, from…

Narrative as means of describing networks and communities, and in understanding their value for learning.

Narrative is not automatable. Or is it? How can narratives be generated algorithmically? (See Ship in KSR’s Aurora)

How can the narrative of a network or community be used to enhance learning? To enhance the effectiveness of the network/community? To transform it? To sustain it?