Blurts

You may have read something about Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, lamenting the social media platform that he created.

“The days of Usenet, IRC, the web… even email (w PGP)… were amazing,” Mr Dorsey tweeted.

“Centralising discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. I realise I’m partially to blame and I regret it.”

I agree. The Internet feels like it has lost its frontier spirit and participants don’t learn much through the process of participation. Things are too easy leaving participants little insight into how things work and into the motivation of the participants. Efficiency and big company takeovers produced this outcome. 

If you are looking to explore a bit, I would recommend Mastodon. Mastodon is a decentralized or federated social platform that allows short posts called “toots” that are something like Twitter tweets, but potentially a bit longer. Mastodon is decentralized because it is made up of a collection of somewhat independent communities that are controlled by different entities. You can start your own if you have a server and are somewhat technologically skilled. It is federated because these different entities cross-reference. The specific Mastodon installs, often called instances, allow interaction across instances. You can join an instance with a specific focus, but tap into the more general feed if you want. No formal ads are shown and no algorithms prioritize what you read.

If you are interested, you start by connecting to an instance. You can do this from any device. If you use an app, you have several choices. These are a couple available for iOS.

I below to several instances so I like Metatext. This app allows me to read the multiple instances through which I participate (Home), read the submissions from the instance I prioritize (Local), or tap into the federated feed.

The Mastodon app is perhaps helpful to somewhat starting as it offers instances that appear to have different emphases. This might be a great way to explore. This app also allows you to search for and join an app that is not part of its directory. TWIT.SOCIAL is a favorite operated by the group responsible for TWIT (this week in tech) podcasts.

Mastodon instances can also be used from any browser. Just enter the name of the instance as the address (e.g., mastodon.social). The desktop browser-based approach may make more sense if you are just getting started.

The biggest challenge with Mastadon like any other social platform is collecting followers. My only advice would be to interact with folks and offer comments others find interesting and useful.

This article from Publishers Weekly offers a history of e-book issues and explains the multiple legal issues encountered along the way. Amazon, Apple, and Google have each been involved in shaping present publishing practices that while online have also drastically influenced brick and mortar companies. We forget topics such as Google’s efforts to digitize the books in print and the battles with publishing companies over whether this was violating copyright when this content was shared. There were battles between Apple and Amazon over the price to consumers of ebooks and the losses companies were taking to attempt to corner the market. Great read if you are an ebook reader or writer.

I haven’t used iMovie in a long time so when a new version for iOS was released promising a Magic Movie maker I had to give it a try. The update added two new features – Magic Movie and Storyboards. The word “magic” intrigued me and I thoughts of shoveling in a bunch of media files and having a program create an imaginative creation from these inputs. If you are a Google Photos user, you know this service randomly creates interesting “highlights reels” from images the AI selects from your collection. I imagined Magic Movie would do something similar, but better. This turned out not to be the case, but the Magic Movie option is still pretty cool.

The hype for Magic Movie does mention AI and suggests you can identify a collection of clips and photos from your account and it will create a movie. This is kind of true, but you do end up taking many actions and making many decisions to create the final product. We just returned from spending the winter months in Hawaii and I have hundreds of photos and video clips. These circumstances seemed perfect to see what Magic Movie could do. I decided to concentrate on whale watching based on two excursions with this purpose.

The Magic Movie process is pretty simple. You do identify the images and clips you want to include in a movie. Magic Movie does not really create a story from these clips. Once uploaded, you order the clips in a way that makes sense. The clips appear in an order based I think on the times the images were captured. I suppose this order is the assumed order of your story, but in my case combining two different trips and adding specific photos afterward (e.g., a picture of the boat), the times of the images did not tell a story. You drag thumbnails of the clips into the order you want. The AI will select a display length for each click and for the videos this will be quite short. You can expand the time for the videos to more of their actual length if you want. You also can add additional material once you see what the first effort looks like. The image below shows the work area – the screen will play the movie or display a specific clip. The left side of the work window shows the thumbnails that can reorder. The + button at the bottom allows you to add new content. You can add text on screens you select and add stock music or narration in the background.

The following video was my finished product. It is about a minute long and could have been stretched to about double this length by playing all videos included to full length. iMovie is not a tool for modifying the individual clips or images so any adjustments would have to be made before the content was included in the movie. No images were adjusted for this demo so some images may be tilted. If I knew I was going to create a composite from my video clips, I would have taken everything in the horizontal orientation. You will see that the alignment of the clips varies, but iMovie accepts both orientations, The process goes very quickly and is a convenient way to integrate content you have selected.

Magic Movie is easy to learn and use and classroom use would not require that students spend a great deal of time learning the software.

It has been 75 years since Jackie Robinson was the first black man to play in the major leagues. Today he is remembered for initiating this advance for baseball and the country.

Rather than attempt to determine credibility of a source from the source, recent advice is to open a second tab and search for other positions on the same topic. This approach is recommended because web content is becoming more sophisticated so the things on a given site to look for can be shaped to be convincing. The fact-check approach has been labelled lateral reading.

I feed birds and I thought I had read that bird feeders can spread this disease. However, I read a contrary position in our local paper which is typically regarded as a credible source. A few hours later my said I should take down our feeder and pointed me to this source. This report comes from a different local news source also with a good reputation.

What is a careful reader to do?

P.S. – We have since decided to move our feeders inside. We live close to a nature center which has found dead owls and the proximity to birds dying from the bird flu made the decision for us.

I have been rereading Cohn’s Skim, Dive, Surface. This book advocates for the preparation of learners to read and write in a digital format challenging the position of many that students are better off with paper texts. The author argues the reality of learners need to process digital media outside of school settings and suggests that educators should not rely on students heavy use of digital gadgets as providing the necessary preparation.

The author reports asking her students if they had experience using pdf tools to highlight and annotate assigned content. She reports that 30% responded positively. Her point was that educators (she teaches at a university) should not assume that computer experienced students have skills appropriate to benefitting from exposure to such assignments. It struck me that this question should be asked by more educators assigning digital content. I assign pdfs all of the time, but I have never thought to ask how students engage with this content.

Cohn, J. (2021). Skim, dive, surface: Teaching digital reading. West Virginia University Press.