Month: September 2019

This post originated in a way you may find unusual. My wife was reading our AARP magazine and came across an article about Bill Zimmerman. She remembered using the web site he had created and made sure I read the article. 

Bill Zimmerman decided when he retired that he wanted to learn new things. Among the new skills he took on were learning to sketch and new techniques for teaching. Bill worked as a professional editor, but became interested in teaching because he also had taken up teaching English to immigrants. Because he loved comics, he came up with the idea of using comics to teach reading and writing. Out of these beginnings came the Make Beliefs Comix site.

Make Beliefs Comix offers a wide variety of ideas for teaching writing in the classroom. Among this collection are the tools for creating comics and comic strips.

I had to give one of these tools a try. I can’t draw. Bill’s commitment to learning new things in retirement far surpasses my own so I was happy to use his create a comic strip tool. He has me by a few years (Bill is 78), but I will stick with my present set of hobbies. 

Here is what you do. You designate the number of cells in your strip. You add characters to the cells. You add balloon bubbles and text to the characters. You can actually add more elements, but you can use these basics to get started. Mail the final product to yourself or someone else.

Give this site a try. Even old dogs teach the young dogs a few things.

Social media has as a function of encouraging interaction can also invite inappropriate comments. Twitter is no exception. With Twitter, you can always block individuals who you feel go beyond what you consider an acceptable level of civility, but this still means others who follow your tweets would see the reply or replies that caused you to make the move to block. In reality, you may be more concerned with what others think than with your own reaction.

Twitter has a new approach. You can now hide a comment. This does not actually delete the comment, but readers would have to take the step of making the effort to “view hidden comments” if they wonder whether or not you have hidden responses.

The process works like this.

What you see here is the type of political comment I make that probably begs for an iffy reaction. So I had posted a link to a NYTimes article concerning Corey Lewandowski’s testimony before a congressional committee in which he had refused to explain comments he had made that had appeared in the Mueller report. I had suggested that refusing to answer a question from this congressional committee was an unlawful and obstructionist act as Lewandoski had no official standing allowing him to suggest he could refused to respond to questions based on this being a privileged conversation with the President. Someone (I have blurred the individual’s identify) did not address my argument, but made a blanket statement about the committee. What if I regard this is completely irrelevant and inappropriate.

As the author of the original post, I can access multiple options in reaction to this reply (see image). Among these options is “hide reply”. As I explained above, anyone examining my tweet and reactions would then not see this comment unless they opened the options available with my original tweet and selected the show hidden comments option. I am guessing Twitter is walking a fine line here and has decided this combination of hide reply and see hidden replies is a reasonable approach.

I would not actually hide the reply I used in this example. Knowing about this option I might hide responses that were a personal attack.

I have a mixed reaction to what Twitter is doing here. I think there are clearly inappropriate responses to social media posts that others should not have to read and this is one way of blocking these specific comments. Of course, the same feature could be used by the tweet author to hide appropriate counter arguments.

Perhaps are there are individuals with audiences (say in education) that have to worry about the responses made to their social media activity. In general, I think inappropriate responses are more a reflection on the poster than me or my argument and I am willing to allow others to see both my comments and responses that I assume should be an embarrassment to the poster. It is useful to know this capability exists and each of us have to make decisions about how it used.

I found this Wired article on the future book while looking through my folder of articles I thought might be of interest. The article reviews the history of promises that books will change. For the more mature among you, the history included both recognition of Alan Kays “Dynabook” and some of the early innovations making use of Hypercard.

The author, Craig Mod, concludes that the promise we would experience a different kind of book has not materialized. Books have not become more complex and more interactive as promised. I might note that recently Pearson has again promised a new vision for a learning experience to replace textbooks that would move in the direction Mod promised. 

Mod does propose that it has been the process of publication that has changed pointing to the greater variety of sources for books provided by Amazon. Having written a couple of these books myself, I would suggest that Kindle books although often sold in a digital format are probably more text based than the more complex multimedia and formatting used in most textbooks from publishing companies. The text heavy format is a function of the limited flexibility Amazon expects in offering the digital version of books for different devices of different sizes and I would suggest the demands on authors unable to tap into the capabilities of large publishing companies. No art department. No page designers adding boxes, side bars, embedded call outs. Amazon now offers a new authoring tool designed to allow authors to create more multimedia and Internet capable resources for the textbook market, but there is a downside to this fixed page approach for inexpensive reading devices. From experience, I have noted that the free flow text approach offered a way to adjust text size to device and reader preferences. Apple’s iBook author offers the potential for a different kind of book, but the limitation of products to Apple devices and Apple pretty much ignoring this product has stunted any increase in use of this tool.

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