Educator, Thinker, Consultant

Month: November 2022

Quick Update

Joplin

Well, hopefully, I have my Joplin sync issue resolved. If you are using Joplin and enable encryption, it is best if you make sure to use the same password on all your devices.

Joplin is how I write blog posts (yes, I could write directly on the blog, but, well, habit). Thus, blog posts haven’t been as numerous lately.

Thanksgiving

The kids were otherwise occupied for Thanksgiving. We had intended upon sharing Thanksgiving with some friends, but, alas, a family emergency pre-empted those plans.

Rm did make a wonderful dinner and we had a lovely Thanksgiving. I’m truly thankful for my life partner. She’s absolutely wonderful. She’s kind, funny, fun, sweet, and gorgeous.

The Lions lost, but at least it was a close game.

Fediverse PD

Mastodon is starting to develop educational PD opportunities. I recently found Brenna Clarke Gray’s Blog through Mastodon. She has some wonderful thoughts about education and leadership. (Tip: she doesn’t have an RSS feed on her blog but adding /feed to her URL works).

Fediverse

There was a discussion about Big Social Media, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I found this line:

…think of that old story about the pigs marvelling at how well the farmer fed and looked after them

I think that I’ll leave with that.

Week Note

ACTEM

ACTEM went pretty well. My presentation was a bit too broad for the group. However, a couple of attendees were inspired to work on creating some materials.

Mostly, it was nice to meet some people and make some connections. It’ll be interesting to see if conferences go “back” to what they were before.

I was also intrigued by the keynote speakers. Personally, I wonder how they ended up with the gig. (This is not a criticism of them, just wondering.)

PixelFed

PixelFed is an open-source site designed to share photos. It is very much like Instagram, without Facebook, sorry Meta, owning it.

The neat thing is that it is very easy to use, very graphically pleasing. The negative is that there aren’t as many as your friends (most likely) on it.

There is no tracking. There is no algorithm to determine what you’ll see. There is no advertising.

There are three basic feeds, Home, Local, and Global. Home is the one of people you follow. Local is all the people on this instance, and Global is, well everyone.

If you are on PixelFed, connect up with me.

PrePandemic Weekend

This weekend was kind of a “pre-pandemic” weekend. Rm and I were able to attend several events. Of course, we masked up for each and every one of these, but still is was wonderful.

Paul Reiser

Paul Reiser may be best known (at least by us) for “Mad About You”. This was one of our favorite TV comedies.

Paul Reiser does observational comedy. He is funny and family friendly. The show included several bits about “getting older”, and was funny and enjoyable.

The venue Waterville Opera House is a nice theater.

Amsterdam

On Saturday, we headed off to see the movie Amsterdam. This was an interesting movie with a few major flaws (like a couple of alternative reality sequences). I would say the movie was good, but not great.

What the movie really brings up is how important knowing history really is. The movie is loosely based on history of a plot to replace Roosevelt. It also brings up the past belief of creating a nation centered on the “right” people. Here it is really important to understand the rise of eugentics.

Violins of Hope

On Sunday afternoon, we headed to the Portland Symphony Orchestra for the Violins of Hope Maine concert. The Violins of Hope Maine is a month long residency program that focuse on playing violins from the Holocaust. The centerpiece of concert is Verdi’s Requim of Hope.

The Violins of Hope Project centers around a private collection of violins, violas, and cellos all collected since the end of World War II. Many of the instruments belonged to Jews during the war. The instruments have been reconditioned and travel the world to share the story with people everywhere.

The Death of Twitter? (And the move to Mastodon)?

Some thoughts about moving to Mastodon from Twitter.

Now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, there is a bit of a hue and cry to leave Twitter. I totally get that. Musk’s recent tweet (since deleted) responding to Hillary Clinton’s tweet about the attack on Paul Pelosi was nothing short of abdominal. Essentially, Musk helps spread offensive, inaccurate lies. He is legitimizing absolute lies. He is pushing for more attacks on people. The tweet reinforces the fears of Musk running Twitter.

However, I’m not yet convinced that people will leave Twitter in massive numbers. There are lots of people who believe and support exactly that kind of thinking. There are even more people who don’t consider that kind of speech “My problem”.

I’ve never seen tons of hate speech on Twitter. I follow a bunch of educators. Mostly, my Twitter feed has been K-12 educators and a few parody or comedy accounts.

I’ve researched leaving Twitter several times. The biggest alternative is Mastodon. However, Mastodon isn’t Twitter. It is different. It has a different intent. It functions differently.

Mastodon

Mastodon is not owned by a specific company. There is no algorithm to provide you content. Rather, it can be what the community wants it to be. That’s the first difference, Mastodon isn’t a single site, but a connection of sites. Each user joins a Mastodon instance (server, community) that fits their perspective. There are a wide range of Mastodon instances (sites) available. Generally, one starts with the Mastodon instance (site) that fits their interest. Instances (sites) centered on things like Art, Music, LGBTQ+ issues, Programming, and much more are available. Here is a quick link to some site listings. However, just because you join one instance, doesn’t mean that you can’t see things from other instances. So, if you join a community focused on Art, you can still follow people from other communities. Thus, you can create a feed of people that you are interested in. Those people can be on any community at all (pretty much, communities can block other whole communities – which is actually a good thing, very few communities get blocked).

Mastodon seems to be seeing a huge influx of users. Some have closed registrations (new accounts).

Why Scholar Social registrations are closed

We’ve spent 5 years developing a culture at Scholar that is intentionally different from Twitter and even from academic Twitter (with varying degrees of success)

We’re more chill, we’re in academia but intensely critical of academia, we’re anti-racist and pro-queer; we’re “the teacher’s break room of the Fediverse”

I’m not going to throw that all away, trampled by an influx of users who think that this space is just “different Twitter”

Mastodon is comprised of three basic feeds, whereas Twitter only has one. Those three feeds are:

  • Home – those people you have chosen to follow
  • Local timeline – those people in the same community (server) as you
  • Federated timeline – Pretty much lots of things from different communities

Coming from Twitter, these changes are definitely different. It took me a while to understand the differences. Once you understand that the second column is the instance (community feed), things can make more sense. Following people is easy, but there isn’t a company-wide algorithm to direct you to users. You have to find them.

Here are a couple of guides:

Mastodon is not new. Mastodon has been around for quite a long time. Please don’t join an instance and start requesting changes. The community has debated, and decided, how Mastodon should look, work, and feel. If you are passionate about wanting some changes, please be part of the community for a while BEFORE you start asking for things to be changed.

The biggest issue may be a bit ironical. There are fewer users on Mastodon than on Twitter. The same network effect really isn’t in place. One of my frustrations has long been that there isn’t really a Mastodon targetted for K-12 educators. Maybe Twitter will get so screwed up that people will leave and look for something similar, but different.

I’m not yet convinced that Mastodon will replace Twitter. I still think that it’s too early. It is an interesting time though. I’ve tried to make the change a few times. If enough people do try out Mastodon and stick around for a bit, it really could be a better experience.

I remain an open-source advocate. I hope that more and more people will realize the advantages of open-source. Having control is a good thing.

Another resource:

If you have issues with your Mastodon account and are on mastodon.social, take these steps:

  1. Go to https://instances.social/ & do the wizard
  2. Select any instance that pops up that looks nice to you
  3. Create an account there
  4. Set up an account alias by going to Settings -> Account -> Account Settings -> Moving from a different account
  5. Move your account by going to https://mastodon.social/settings/migration

The #Fediverse is distributed, you don’t need to be on the most popular instance to participate.

https://chaos.social/@pludikovsky

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