I was an early user of Twitter. I joined in June 2008. At first, I used Twitter to connect and share at conferences. I connected with a wide variety of educators. I found a bunch of interesting thoughts and links from educators on Twitter.

Mastodon

In 2018, I really tried to move to Mastodon. I loved the open-source nature of it. I briefly considered spinning up an instance specifically for educators. Mastodon was a bit too abstracted in user interface. Quite frankly, it took a bit too much work to understand. For techies, it was (and is) a phenomenal choice. There are also some really good applications to interface with Mastodon now. Ice Cubes is one that I use.

I really left Twitter for good once it was purchased by Elon Musk. I moved over to Mastodon and have been happy there. There are still some things that could be improved, but Mastodon has many features that I love. For example, I can easily post on my website and allow that post to go to Mastodon. This means that I own the material and have the “original”. I love the bookmarking feature in Mastodon. I use this regularly. The “heart” or like feature is a great way to send some “love” back to the poster without sending it your followers. The “Boost” feature (repost) is great to share the post with others. Of course there is also a reply feature. There is also a “Direct Message” feature (though it isn’t as obvious as it should be).

Mastodon also makes it very easy to share a post. Each post can be easily be embedded into a web page. Heck, you can even use an RSS Reader to follow Mastodon.

There is also an easy way to Block or Report accounts.

BlueSky

BlueSky is having a moment. There has been a ton of positive press about BlueSky. More importantly to me, Educators seem to be moving to BlueSky en masse.

I still have concerns about BlueSky. Although they have promised federation, they are still developing the ATProto federation protocol.

Federation:
What is federation and why is it important?
Federation allows for more than one person/company/billionaire to host the material. This means that the control is not limited to that one person/company/billionaire.

BlueSky is centralized at this point. In fact, BlueSky has raised money through a Series A round of investing. The investors are heavily weighted with crypto-focused cash. The thing with investors is that they are going to want their money back (and then some) at the end of the day. This may be fine. It is, after all, the American way. But as we have seen, this can also lead to the abuse of users. (See Cory Doctorow’s Enshitification post).

The concern is that a bunch of users are leaving one really bad experience for the potential of another.

On the other hand, there is a growing and vibrant educator community on BlueSky. Plus, I have found a pathway to write up a post, like this one, and post it immediately to both Mastodon and BlueSky.

POSSE

In the meantime, I’ve learned the value of POSSE (Post on your Own Server, Syndicate Everywhere). I’ve learned that having all “my stuff” somewhere I control is valuable. (I can’t tell you how many times present me has applauded past me for writing something up and putting it on my blog).

Twitter, er, X now has a lawsuit going where they claim that X, the company, owns all accounts. This means that they can control who has access to those accounts, and ultimately, what that account has published. (This is why all of these companies can sell posts to AI companies for training.)

Conclusion

I’ll keep posting on my blog and let these posts flow to other sites. I’m encouraged by BlueSky and the interactions there. I also enjoy the community of Mastodon. I’ll follow and interact with conversations on both, but I’ll keep control over the things I write.

I found this post by Emily (I don’t know Emily, but apparently Emily Bender is a linguist professor) interesting:

ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom

If we value education, educators, and students, we shouldn’t look to technologists (and especially not techo-solutionists) to frame and solve problems. And we certainly shouldn’t redirect resources away from teachers to tech giants.

Are we going to end up pushing valuable resources and actual dollars to AI companies (i.e. tech giants)?

If we value information literacy and cultivating in students the ability to think critically about information sources and how they relate to each other, we shouldn’t use systems that not only rupture the relationship between reader and information source,

This is a crucial point. Teaching kids to think critically is our biggest challenge. I fear that we haven’t been extremely successful in that of late. However, AI tools are also coming. Those tools will be part of the landscape.

If we value inclusivity, both in terms of making sure all students feel welcome in the classroom and in terms of all students learning to see each other as fully human, we shouldn’t use software known to amplify biases,…

This is a tough one. Bias is everywhere. We are biased. We can’t get away from biases, but we do need to be aware of them. We also need to teach about them.

Anyway, I found the post interesting. I don’t agree with everything in it, but I do think that we need to be critical thinkers ourselves.

Cory Doctorow has a wonderful write up about RSS (You should be using an RSS reader).

I’ve long used RSS to follow the news (and other things). I tried to look up when I started using RSS, but couldn’t find a hard date. Given my remembrances (and a quick search on Middle School Matters), I would posit that it was around 2008. At first, like so many things, I didn’t get it. However, I quickly learned that instead of checking a variety of websites, I could get an RSS feed to see only the things that changed. This saved me tons of time.

With the advent of Facebook and other social media, many people have relied on social media to provide news. That means being at the whim and decisions of Mark Zuckerberg or another billionaire.

In the meantime, I have continued with my RSS feed. I have many different categories that I follow, a couple are educational, a few are humor, a few are sports related, a couple are Apple related, and comics.

One of the main points for me is that I like to read the comics. As a kid, I loved the comics page. As an adult, well, I still loved the comics page. As newspapers started going away, I wanted to continue with the comics. RSS allows me to do that.

GoComics provides an RSS feed for their comics. Originally, I created a single comics feed. That was a bad idea as if I wanted to add or delete one, I had to recreate the whole feed. Plus, if something broke (remember that was the early days). Later, I learned to create a feed for each comic. Now I can add or remove a comic quite easily. I currently have 90 comics that “come to me”.

Personally, I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader of choice (with Feedly to keep everything in sync). Read Cory Doctorow’s write up though, he has some additional suggestions and thoughts. (NetNewsWire has a long history. It is available for iOS, Mac, and iPad. It is open source, free, and wonderful).

RSS is even more useful now than ever. Mastodon and BlueSky both are RSS feeds. (Podcasts are RSS feeds unless they are locked up on a big company site – like Spotify or Amazon). Cory Doctorow makes a great point that many sites do have RSS feeds (though some sites are locked down behind paywalls).

Go read You should be using an RSS reader by Cory Doctorow. If you are interested in comics and would like my feeds, let me know. RSS is easy to share.