Listening to a webinar about how course material costs affect students other than simply financially, and one thing they touched on is the temporary nature of a lot of course materials these days. They're e-books that you rent and then get returned, or physical book rentals, or they're so expensive you have to sell them back to the bookstore to recoup the loss of money. And I hadn't really grokked how much mroe true this was now?
I certainly didn't keep every textbook, but I have a good box I've been carrying around for two decades, and just last month I pulled out one of my old Roman textbooks and gave it to my kid to do research on Rome for his social studies class because I knew it was a good basic resource for what he needed, and he didn't need the most cutting edge research or anything. But students of today won't be able to do that. @academicchatter#TextbookAffordability
@academicchatter As they pointed out in the webinar, this also discourages today's students from becoming lifelong deep learners, because they are conditioned to just think "I only need this resource long enough to pass this class then it is history" instead of "this is a good resource, I'd like to keep it around for the future to return to". @academicchatter#TextbookAffordability
I am looking for new productivity tool and found Leantime. It looked interesting, but I found some conflicting information about what features the selfhosted version contains. Does it contain all features or only core features?How is it as productivity tool and would you recommend some alternative?
I currently use Trillium Notes and Super Productivity for planning projects and time tracking.
Kanban, Gantt charts, milestones, idea collections, file uploading, retrospectives, time tracking, documentation, etc… all supported with the selfhosted version.
These are the “premium” features:
Custom fields
Pomodoro timer
Whiteboard
Program plans (I really don’t understand what is different about this than goals + milestones + documentation + tasks)
Strategies (pretty much just collecting and categorizing goals it seems)
I hope they don’t remove features and make people pay for them. It has plenty of features to make it useful now, but if they start removing them, then I think i will have to find another solution.
"Few documents that survive from #medieval Europe were written by women or even dictated by women. Those that do are often formulaic, full of legal and religious language. Yet the wills and censuses that survive, and which I study, open a window into their lives and minds, even if not produced by women’s hands. These documents suggest that medieval women had at least some form of empowerment to define their lives – and deaths."
@yvonne Thanks for that interesting article by Prof Joëlle Rollo-Koster, which draws attention to the documentary treasures in store for a new generation of historians while perhaps understating the wealth of evidence accumulated by her own!
The will of one famously independent woman in medieval England is available in the original French with translation & analysis on the resource page at https://barnes1.net/FHGE/
New technology to show why images and video are genuine launches on BBC News.
‘Content credentials’ feature means visitors to the BBC News site will now see a ‘how we verified this’ button underneath images and videos on BBC Verify content.
Our audiences deserve to know not just what we know, but how we know it. Using the #C2PA standard, BBC News is leading the way with a brand new feature to securely show how how we check and verify the material we use. Read more here: https://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/news/2024/content-credentials/
Are there currently any Substack replacements that integrate with ActivityPub?
So I'm currently looking for a Substack substitute for taking donations.
I'd want it to feature a blog (and preferably newsletters too) that include a mix of publicly-accessible posts, as well as posts that are only visible to donors.
And ideally, I want it to also integrate with ActivityPub too.
That might mean a Fediverse post is automatically generated when a new blog post is published. Or potentially the publicly visible blog posts are published in full to the Fediverse.
Now, I know there are a few donations platforms that can handle the first part, such as Ghost and Ko-Fi.
There are also blogging platforms such as WriteFreely/Write.as and Micro.blog that integrate with the Fedi.
And in theory you could do both with a WordPress blog and number of plugins, some paid. But especially with paid plugins, that's likely to get quite expensive quickly. (Not to mention some of the questionable things that have happened at Automattic in recent weeks.)
But are there any platforms out there that support both?
Or is the best option at this stage just to get a Ko-Fi/Ghost account for the donations and donor-only posts, with a separate micro.blog or write.as account for the publicly accessible posts?
Automattic is planning to sell user data from its commercial Wordpress hosting service for ML training. Don’t host it with them if you don’t like that.
Of course, people trying to train models are very likely to run their own scraper bots and might suck up anything you publish on the web anywhere.
@TheConversationUS "Like the outlaws Robin Hood and Al Capone, will #Trump become larger in legend than he was in life? "
I've sensed that the outlaw hero archetype of the American collective unconscious, in Jungian terms, has been activated, since vigilantes in cowboy hats were able to defy and other the Obama administration at Malheur (which means misfortune in French) in early 2016. From here in Japan I sensed a disturbance in the force, as it were, and my foreboding has been more than realized as Trump 'rode the whirlwind' and permitted repressed Christians to be their worst true selves, and held Open House for Russia in the White House.
The evil that the outlaw 'hero' does gets lost or laundered in the mythologizing that makes them seem larger than life, legendary. Americans with their collective legacy of the Wild West, Roaring 20s, and notorious con men, are particularly susceptible, as Trump has shown, to following the Pied Piper, or being led into temptation.
The BBC News Verify team has published their first article using a new open media provenance technology called C2PA that we've been working on for the past three years.
This shows where media comes from and how it’s been edited - like an audit trail or a history.