889 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2016
    1. Finally, in order for data-driven interventions to be wide-spread, institutions must sustain a culture that embraces the use of data, and create incentives for data-driven activities amongst administrators, instructors and student support staff. Large-scale, data-driven policy changes are implemented with minimal friction and maximal buy-in when leaders demonstrate a commitment to data-informed decision-making, and create multiple opportunities for stakeholders to make sense of and contribute to the direction of the change. Users not only need to be trained on the proper ways to use these tools and communicate with students, they also require meaningful incentives to take on the potentially steep learning curve.[40]

      Thankfully, this paragraph isn’t framed as a need for (top-down) “culture change”, as is often the case in similar discussions. Supporting a culture is a radically different thing from forcing a change. To my mind, it’s way more likely to succeed (and, clearly, it’s much more empowering). But “decision-makers” may also interpret active support as weaker than the kind of implementation they know. It’s probably a case where a “Chief Culture Officer” can have a key role, in helping others expand their understanding of how culture works. Step 1 is acknowledging that culture change isn’t like a stepwise program.

    1. But fandom without limits makes Team Internet vulnerable.
    2. This kind of dynamic -- between a digital influencer and a fan -- has become commonplace in the “Team Internet” community. Over the last few years, dozens have come forward to share stories of creators who have had inappropriate relationships with those who see them as bona fide celebrities.
  2. Aug 2016
    1. Shawn and Cory and Tom are three of my best friends in the universe, they know me better than I know myself, and I met them online, thirteen years ago, on an Animal Crossing message board. Like, what the fuck is that? That’s beautiful.
    2. We were all about authenticity, but we were also brilliant fabulists. We were the first generation to really be born into the internet. Everybody had sixteen fake accounts on every website. It used to be so easy to lie — all you had to do was log onto the Neoboards and post a message that said “hi im hilary duff” and voila, you were Hilary Duff, at least for the next three hours. I had a sock account that was supposedly my French friend Lucie. I would have two-way “conversations” with myself that I just ran through Google Translate, and nobody ever busted me. We were kids; we were catfishing before catfishing was a thing. Nobody knew how to investigate anything.
    3. We were thirteen, fourteen, and we were reaching into this shimmering expanse, and other girls were reaching back. They could be across the world or in the next town over, and they were just like us.
    1. Boy George turned 55 this year, an age so many men of my generation—friends who taught me to feel proud when I proclaimed "I'm gay"—never lived to see. The world needs smart, mouthy, middle-aged queers.
  3. Jul 2016
    1. Google’s chief culture officer

      Her name is Stacy Savides Sullivan. She was already Google’s HR director by the time the CCO title was added to her position, in 2006. Somewhat surprising that Sullivan’d disagree with Teller, given her alleged role:

      Part of her job is to protect key parts of Google’s scrappy, open-source cultural core as the company has evolved into a massive multinational.

      And her own description:

      "I work with employees around the world to figure out ways to maintain and enhance and develop our culture and how to keep the core values we had in the very beginning–a flat organization, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment–to keep these as we continue to grow and spread them and filtrate them into our new offices around the world.

      Though “failure bonuses” may sound a bit far-fetched in the abstract, they do fit with most everything else we know about Googloids’ “corporate culture” (and the Silicon Valley Ideology (aka Silicon Valley Narrative), more generally).

    1. One way to do this is to bring someone into the C-Suite whose job it is to keep an eye on culture. The best-known example of this approach is Google GOOG 3.07% , which added “chief culture officer” to head of HR Stacy Sullivan’s job title in 2006. Part of her job is to protect key parts of Google’s scrappy, open-source cultural core as the company has evolved into a massive multinational.

      Interesting that the title would be appended to the HR director position, instead of creating a new position. Stacy Savides Sullivan has been with the Goog’ since 1999, so pretty early in the company’s history. Not sure if her job is specifically with Google or if covers Alphabet more generally. It does sound like Sullivan’s ideas clashed with Astro Teller’s.

    2. Ha! This was before Grant McCracken wrote his famous book!

    1. un système conversationnel alimenté par le traitement algorithmique de métadonnées
    2. mécanismes de codage, d’indexation et de traçabilité qui sont le propre d’Internet

      codage, indexation, traçabilité + calculabilité : distinguent Internet des médias de masse

    3. les effets de profondeur, d’opacité, d’éclatement, de persistance et de calculabilité qui font tout l’enjeu des modes d’existence numériques
    1. How has learning already been changed by the tracking we already do?

      Alfie Kohn probably has a lot to say about this. Already.

    2. ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed

      That ship has sailed.

    1. But this was before Facebook. It was before we all started merging our online and offline lives. The internet hadn’t gone corporate; websites were ephemeral things. Your friendships on a site existed only within the space of that site; if you lost one, you lost the other.
    1. students were being made to take them several times a year, including “benchmark” tests to prepare them for the other tests.

      Testing has gone sentient. Resistance is futile. At least in the US.

  4. Jun 2016
    1. The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable.
    1. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
    1. What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends.
    1. Not every perceived ill turns out to be bad. Socrates famously decried the invention of writing. He described its ill effects and never wrote anything, but despite his eloquence, he could not command the tide to stop. His student Plato mulled it over, sympathized—and wrote it all down! We will likely adjust to losing most privacy—our tribal ancestors did without it. Adapting to life without community could be more challenging. We may have to endure long enough for nature to select for people who can get by without it.

      This is a very nice analysis: The technology appropriation is definitely a long-term/cultural question.

  5. Apr 2016
    1. massmediarefers to those means of transmission

      When I ask students to post on Youth Voices, I'm asking them to participate in mass media. It's a big jump for some who do very little by friend-to-friend communication.

    1. one of the annotations is simply a link to a Google search for a phrase that’s been used.

      Glad this was mentioned. To the Eric Raymonds of this world, such a response sounds “perfectly legitimate”. But it’s precisely what can differentiate communities and make one more welcoming than the other. Case in point: Arduino-related forums, in contrast with the Raspberry Pi community. Was looking for information about building a device to track knee movement. Noticed that “goniometer” was the technical term for that kind of device, measuring an angle (say, in physiotherapy). Ended up on this page, where someone had asked a legitimate question about Arduino and goniometers. First, the question:

      Trying to make a goniometer using imu (gy-85). Hoe do I aquire data from the imu using the arduino? How do I code the data acquisition? Are there any tutorials avaible online? Thanks =)

      Maybe it wouldn’t pass the Raymond test for “smart questions”, but it’s easy to understand and a straight answer could help others (e.g., me).

      Now, the answer:

      For me, google found 87,000,000 hits for gy-85. I wonder why it failed for you.

      Wow. Just, wow.

      Then, on the key part of the question (the goniometer):

      No idea what that is or why I should have to google it for you.

      While this one aborted Q&A is enough to put somebody off Arduino forever, it’s just an example among many. Like Stack Overflow, Quora, and geek hideouts, Arduino-related forums are filled with these kinds of snarky comments about #LMGTFY.

      Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi. Liz Upton said it best in a recent interview (ca. 25:30):

      People find it difficult to remember that sometimes when somebody comes along… and appears to be “not thinking very hard”, it could well be because they’re ten years old.

      And we understand (from the context and such) that it’s about appearance (not about “not thinking clearly”). It’s also not really about age.

      So, imagine this scenario. You’re teacher a class, seminar, workshop… Someone asks a question about using data from a device to make it into a goniometer. What’s the most appropriate strategy? Sure, you might ask the person to look for some of that information online. But there are ways to do so which are much more effective than the offputting ’tude behind #LMGTFY. Assuming they do search for that kind of information, you might want to help them dig through the massive results to find something usable, which is a remarkably difficult task which is misunderstood by someone who answer questions about goniometers without knowing the least thing about them.

      The situation also applies to the notion that a question which has already been asked isn’t a legitimate question. A teacher adopting this notion would probably have a very difficult time teaching anyone who’s not in extremely narrow a field. (Those teachers do exist, but they complain bitterly about their job.)

      Further, the same logic applies to the pedantry of correcting others. Despite the fact that English-speakers’ language ideology allows for a lot of non-normative speech, the kind of online #WordRage which leads to the creation of “language police” bots is more than a mere annoyance. Notice the name of this Twitter account (and the profile of the account which “liked” this tweet).

      Lots of insight from @BiellaColeman on people who do things “for the lulz”. Her work is becoming increasingly relevant to thoughtful dialogue on annotations.

  6. Mar 2016
    1. Mariquitas are a traditional Cuban snack. Resembling what many refer to as “chips,” mariquitas are made with green plantains. They are thinly sliced then fried in hot oil and sprinkled with salt, creating an easy snack that Cubans love to enjoy while sitting or grab on the run.

      This page shows how to make mariquitas, a delicious snack made from green plantains in oil.

  7. Feb 2016
  8. Jan 2016
    1. Digital technology has evolved quickly from personal computers and networks to participatory social, academic, and political Web 2.0 environments with a new vocabulary and new temporal and spatial interactions.

      resulting from characteristics of participatory cultures as outlined by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel & Clinton (2009), in their book Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, outline the features of a participatory culture.) e.g. low barriers to artistic expression or civic engagement, informal membership, members feel socially connected

    1. To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity
    1. New forms of collaboration made possible by the digital medium sharpen the theoretical question of how explanatory authority is established.

      This is really the most interesting aspect of annotation and the digital humanities (to me at least). And it's not really addressed here. The unlimited space of writing online is less of a problem/potential than the lack of limits on who participates in the conversation.

      It'd be interesting to see an academic treatment of reputation systems online and how they do or don't promote democratic knowledge production.

    1. A few years ago I walked into a grocery store

      Dazzled by manufactured images

    2. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.
  9. Dec 2015
    1. The modern world offers Unprecedented of opportunities for different relationships & casual hookups that ignite people to experience their relationship choices.

  10. Nov 2015
    1. So far, Layous and Lyubomirsky’s analysis suggests that Westerners benefit more from positive activities than other populations, including Asians. One study conducted at UC Riverside found that Anglo-Americans benefitted more from happiness-increasing activities; however, researchers did see a small trend that Asians gained more from activities directed toward benefitting others’ happiness, like writing a letter of gratitude, than activities strictly intended to benefit the self.
    1. Companies need to have realistic expectations of the work-life balance of open source maintainers.

      When you hire an open source developer, you hire someone who works all the time--not just 8-5, not just at a desk, not just on that one pet project that management's currently excited about. They work on that, they work on the related libraries, they work on projects that use those libraries, they work on the next great version of the libraries the company will need in two more years.

      Plan for your own future by letting your developers explore it for you. They already are...even before you've hired them.

    2. effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects

      If anything is missing with regards to open source within companies (of all sizes), it's this situation.

      Teaching "companies" (or rather the entire management stack/chain) how to "effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects" could change the game for those companies, the projects they interface with, and certainly for the developers (inside and outside of the companies).

    1. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and they viewed it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts did. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.
  11. Oct 2015
    1. Thetis Island’s famous ‘Oh-my-God-they’re-on-the-ferry pie’ quick recipe.

      Example of how deeply embedded ferries are in the island culture.

    1. black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature.

      A fact of cultural nature? Culture is created by the society that shares a particular set of values, traditions, beliefs... People can change.. Are we capable of changing our culture?

  12. Sep 2015
    1. THE INTERFACE CULTURE

      "The Interface Culture" section of "In the begining was the command line" stands on it's own as an insightful essay on contemporary global culutre.

    1. Ritual performances may also be viewed as the principal mechanism by which meaning in the built environment is activated (175) or as the key to investing domestic spaces with meaning and transforming their meaning

      Can what we build come alive through ritual performances?

    2. Much research in social production has focused primarily on theoretical development, or, when it has focused on empirical details, deals with them at an abstract level.

      This research seems to have a tinge of philosophical influence to it..

    1. Llamarían Rosas a la avenida SarmientoInformación generalSería el tramo que une Plaza Italia con avenida del Libertador; la Legislatura lo aprobó, pero falta una audiencia pública

      Rosas vs. Sarmiento. Still a problem to this day

    1. No culture in history has been more distracted. If you are wondering why there are no more C.S. Lewis’ in the world, no more stories as good as Tolkien’s, no cathedrals as great as the gothic’s, no music as moving as Pachelbel’s, it may be because the writers of these books, the tellers of these stories, the architects of these buildings and the composers of these symphonies are sitting on their couches watching television. I wonder what’s on tonight.

      Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, gothic cathedrals, Pachelbel suddenly represent the essence of the good western culture.

  13. Aug 2015
    1. Developers above the junior level, no matter their demographics, have a huge number of choices. It's rarely worth it to be The First. But now they're not! You've removed a significant barrier to hiring at the upper levels, by hiring first at the lower levels.

      Huge insight here.

  14. Jul 2015
    1. How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

      Or Restorative Justice these days, I suppose. Yeah, there's something going on here. I need to just listen more.

    2. into the church

      What about school? Can school be a retreat from the culture of the street? Or does it just extend that culture?

  15. Jun 2015
    1. This is important. It means that someone is mixing their public comments related to both their personal views and their work. Effectively, you could say that one is being used to bootstrap an audience for the other. This means that you can't separate these issues by the medium in which they are placed because people are actively mixing their personal and professional speech and benefiting from it in one context while avoiding accountability in the other context.

      A very important point!

    1. You see, along with all the wonderful things our Good White Parents taught us, they also taught us that it was important to be nice and polite and non-confrontational when dealing with the white racists we know. We learned to just ignore grandpa. We were reprimanded when we challenged Aunt Evelyn. We were coached before going into parties that people might be racist, but that was just their “point of view”. We were taught again and again that it was more important to keep the peace with family and friends than it was to stand up to racial injustice. This made sense to us because we understood that arguing with family or friends would likely cause us more immediate discomfort in the short term than racial injustice would.
  16. May 2015
  17. www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu
    1. Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

      Finally an open-source, open access option for sharing research!

  18. Feb 2015
  19. Nov 2014
    1. If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.
  20. Oct 2014
    1. “We should be building platforms to amplify the voices of women in tech, not to cater to the egos of men,” she said. “Men who want to help need to get the hell out of our way, basically. Because we're coming. And we don't need their support.”

      I think this is an immature stance that I cannot support. When you want to be treated with respect by most of the people around you it helps to demand mutual aid and cooperation from 50% of that population rather than telling them to fuck off.

  21. Sep 2014
    1. Avoiding ads doesn't help much either. Because brand images are part of the cultural landscape we inhabit, when we block ads or fast-forward through them, we're missing out on valuable cultural information, alienating ourselves from the zeitgeist. This puts us in danger of becoming outdated, unfashionable, and otherwise socially hapless. We become like the kid who wears his dad's suit to his first middle-school dance.

      Unless you accumulate friends who also avoid ads, who think you're less cool for having allowed yourself to be exposed to them or for deploying them too conspicuous as social signaling, at least when that brand is not favored by that scene. Ironically, of course, most scenes are simply favoring different brands, because it's hard to accumulate any significant set of material trappings that aren't branded.

  22. May 2014
    1. Collaborate for God's sake!: EVERY organization dealing with data is dealing with these problems. And governments need to work together on this. This is where open source presents invaluable process lessons for government: working collaboratively, and in the open, can float all boats much higher than they currently are. Whether it's putting your scripts on GitHub, asking and answering questions on the Open Data StackExchange, or helping out others on the Socrata support forums, collaboration is a key lever for this government technology problem.

      Collaboration is clearly key, but it's not obvious what that means. The suggestion here is a good first step in an organization:

      • scripts on github
      • asking and answering questions on stackexchange
      • and (for data) joining the Socrata support forums

      What does it take to get organizations on this path?

      And what steps are next once the organization has evolved to this point?

  23. Feb 2014
    1. One person who really didn’t seem to understand was Neil’s wife. Somewhat bemused, and referring to us as his “Internet friends,” Neil’s significant other decided tonight was the night for visiting a long-lost (or possibly ignored) relative, rather than sticking around and faking interest.
    2. Community is a funny beast. Most people—the kind who watch talent shows on television and occasionally dip bread in oil in an expensive restaurant—don’t understand people like Neil. Why on earth would this guy decide to open his home, free of charge, to a collection of strangers who met on the Internet? Why would he want to spend an evening drinking tea and making jokes about something called “Emacs”?
    1. The fourth of the theories is as yet the least influential but seems to be gaining strength. Its key ideas are that human nature causes people to flourish more under some conditions than under others, and that social and political institutions should be organized to facilitate that flourishing. What, more specifically, are the conditions or “functionings” that enable people to flourish?
      • Life
      • Health
      • Bodily integrity – protection against physical hazards and against physical and sexual assault
      • Autonomy – in the sense of the ability to choose freely one’s vocations and avocations
      • Competence – the ability to confront and solve problems
      • Engagement – active involvement in professional and leisure activity, as opposed to passive consumption of goods and services
      • Self-expression – the ability to speak one’s mind and express one’s creative impulses
      • Relationships – participation in freely chosen communities
      • Privacy – access to zones of intimacy in which relationships can be nurtured and identity developed
  24. Jan 2014
    1. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.
  25. Sep 2013
    1. ans and counsels them to be of one mind among themselves?

      Tailors argument to audience, appeals to common ideals

    1. Welcome one-on-ones Career planning

      These conversations are important to me. Let's keep having them and having more of them.

    2. Blameless post-mortems

      Tim, thanks for organizing the very first blameless post-mortem-- an important step in our emergency and incident response that will lead to a better system and organization overall.

    3. Create slack time for important improvement projects

      This is one of the intended effects of The Gardener role. By centralizing the duty of interrupt handling into one person's job it will free up time for each of the rest of us to focus on projects most of the time, and only occasionally every couple of months will we each have to worry about interrupts when the role of The Gardener passes to one of us for the week.

    4. They also started to standardize and very deliberately reduce the supported infrastructure and configurations. One decision was to switch everything to PHP and MySQL. This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one: they wanted both Dev and Ops to be able to understand the stack, so that everyone can contribute if they wanted to, as well as enabling everyone to be able to read, rewrite and fix someone else’s code.

      NOTE: "This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one."

    5. and most importantly, a culture that the rest of the world admires.

      Starting with our group here in IDSG, I would like us to lead the way for EECS, CoE, Berkeley, and the UC in fostering a culture that the people around us admire.

    6. Visible Ops Handbook
    7. They have events like “Meetsy” (suggested lunch groups to meet people you may not work directly with) and “Eatsy” (where the entire company eats together).

      Don't eat alone.

      If all we're going to do is talk, let's eat or have a drink in our hands!

    8. Clear documented standards and processes are a must, but they aren’t set in stone. They can and should change as your business grows.
    9. Don’t guess at what’s wrong with your infrastructure–graph it.
    10. The management ideals that started getting formed included: Accept failures but don’t lower standards. Failures happen, and it’s best if they’re visible, understood, and used a springboards to greatness. Trust but verify. Blameless post-mortems Welcome one-on-ones Career planning Happy company = happy community
      • [X] Accept failures but don’t lower standards. Failures happen, and it’s best if they’re visible, understood, and used a springboards to greatness.
      • [X] Trust but verify.
      • [X] Blameless post-mortems
      • [X] Welcome one-on-ones
      • [X] Career planning
      • [ ] Happy company = happy community
    11. They created and implemented the “Developer on Call” program, to address the problem of IT Operations asking, “why should I be the only person waking up at 3am?” To create more developer responsibility and accountability, and to ensure that IT Operations had the necessary resources on hand during deployments, each developer rotated to be on call for one week. With the company’s current size, this translates to one week every three years that a developer would have to be on call 24/7.
    12. They also adopted the mantra, “If it moves, graph it.”
    13. ending the era when management would just say, “Go do this” or “Go do that.” People were happy to come to work, and contribute in ways beyond their job description.
    14. 1) Gain support from the top and bottom to change culture, 2) Increase transparency both within the organization and to the public, and 3) Pay back technical debt as soon as possible.
      • [X] Gain support from the top and bottom to change culture
      • [X] Increase transparency both within the organization and to the public
      • [ ] Pay back technical debt as soon as possible.
    15. We believe that the very first thing that an organization must do when embarking on this journey is to do the following: Create slack time for important improvement projects Keep batch sizes small and the planning horizon short (e.g., weeks, not months) Keep prioritizing higher “the system of work” over “doing work”
      • [X] Create slack time for important improvement projects
      • [X] Keep batch sizes small and the planning horizon short (e.g., weeks, not months)
      • [X] Keep prioritizing higher “the system of work” over “doing work”
    16. My notes are below, but you can find the full recorded video recorded by Damon Edward here and their Slideshare link here.
    17. Community and culture, Rembetsy asserts in the talk, is the foundation of any company. And how does one go about fostering community and encouraging positive culture? You begin by eliminating barriers, getting rid of silos, and encouraging collaboration across the entire company.
      • [X] eliminating barriers
      • [X] getting rid of silos
      • [X] encouraging collaboration across the entire company
    18. At Velocity London 2012, I saw one of the top five presentations I’ve ever seen in my life. In their talk “Continuously Deploying Culture,” Michael Rembetsy @mrembetsy, LinkedIn) and Patrick McDonnell (@mcdonnps, LinkedIn) described the story of their amazing IT transformation that started in 2008.

      @mrembetsy and @mcdonnps