574 private links
Classic talk on public speaking and lecturing by Patrick Winston at MIT. Combines general principles with super practical examples.
Critical history of Powerpoint and "the rise of presentation culture".
Newsletter about alternative grading. Some good posts:
Susan Blum discusses the response to her seminal edited volume Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) and points to different approaches.
An insane story of evil corporate gaslighting – of one scientist in particular at the same time as society in general. Just like with climate change, they knew perfectly well what they were doing but did everything they could to keep it secret.
If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.
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We should all strive to be Luddites, because we should all be more concerned with economic justice than with increasing the private accumulation of capital.
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Imagine an idealized future, a hundred years from now, in which no one is forced to work at any job they dislike, and everyone can spend their time on whatever they find most personally fulfilling. Obviously it’s hard to see how we’d get there from here. But now consider two possible scenarios for the next few decades. In one, management and the forces of capital are even more powerful than they are now. In the other, labor is more powerful than it is now. Which one of these seems more likely to get us closer to that idealized future? And, as it’s currently deployed, which one is A.I. pushing us toward?
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The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out. No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination.
Pretty. This is the font used in https://buttondown.email/ownyourweb/.
Collection of essays covering more than 20 years of Jesse Stommel's influential writing and thinking on ungrading.
Great story. Tales of of dozens-of-projectors productions and a whole 35mm-slide-based media industry that just kind of went away.
Origin of the wonderfully useful 'spoon' unit of energy used by the chronically ill and disabled – including myself. By Christine Miserandino.
Both Robins (Rendle and Sloan) recommending the same book of writing advice – Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. That must mean it's good.
The history of Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS). Sometimes the big advances are stupid simple.
Coldicutt describes how strange it is that engineers and technologists (without much knowledge about history, politics, or philosophy) are taken so very seriously when they predict the societal impact of their work, but that vice versa, people without much knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the technology that do have such knowledge are treated as having no authority at all.
Short novel. Fictional account (from 1971!) of a high school deciding whether to go gradeless or not. Teachers, students, and parents discuss the pros and cons of different approaches. The plot includes the social aspect of institutional change.
Russel Davies presents – and demonstrates – the key ideas from his book Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint.
Great advice on giving presentations and lectures. My favourite: "Write headlines, not headings".
There is also a Part 2.
A reflection on work and life with an unreliable and unpredictable body. The concept of ‘crip time’ is a great counterpoint to typical approaches to time and planning, clarifying that and how these create inaccessibility for differently abled people.
Masterclass in how to write as an academic – and why.
Erik Tempelman (TU Delft, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering) argues that we should not grade MSc theses but instead simply judge whether students deserves their diploma or not. Some interesting comments, such as Renee Wever's description of the Swedish system.
Lakatos’ life and thought with reference to Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Laudan.
Complete online textbook. Digital version of Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus Wilke.