vinylcast #21: The Cars’s Candy-O

Posted on April 7, 2020 by collector
Day 29 of #lockdown and this album popped into mind based on an 2009 Twitter storm by Brian Lamb talking about using this vinyl to wash away the bad hippie experience he had had. Struck me as a fun story and a good inspiration for a #vinylcast, so that was that.
I love this album, in part because it was the non-stop soundtrack while I was doing work on the first house we bought in Fredericksburg, VA, a listening inspired by Brian’s tweeting, and whenever I listen I think about that old 1930s house where Tommaso was born and the other two grew up in for quite a few years. In was a good house, and this is a good album.
vinylcast The Cars’s Candy-O
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vinylcast #20: AC/DC’s Powerage

Posted on April 6, 2020 by bavaradio
https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/1247121443915251712
NB: I had to do my #vinylcast earlier today given I had a jam-packed day of radio. The Jim & Anto show was on course and I had the unique pleasure of talking with Bryan Mathers on the radio, and I will start posting some of those discussions on this site as a kind of cross-archive of my radio shenanigans. what’s more, this is the first post that will actually have the audio from the #vinylcast, I will go back and add audio to previous posts this weekend. I had a hankering for some Australian rock and roll, and Powerage is definitely my favorite AC/DC, so that was the call for this morning. Tjhere were not too many frills, although the liner notes were fun to read, and this album is just dripping with blues inspiration and driving beats that I can listen to non-stop. https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/1247123873604255749
My brother and I travelled cross-country in 1989, and this was one of the cassette tapes we listened to for seemingly days on end, and it was pretty awesome road trippin rock. I was glad to see at least one other listener enjoyed it ?
https://twitter.com/phb256/status/1247133438366416897 In fact, Paul turned me on to a cover album of AC/DC tunes called What’s Next to the Moon, which he subsequently played on the radio, and that was just another tell-tale sign of how awesome it ll is, it’s not radio so much as it is playing songs for each other. below is the audio from this #vinylcast, enjoy!
AC/DC Powerage vinylcast
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vinylcast #19: Unwound’s New Plastic Ideas

Posted on April 5, 2020 by bavaradio
I was inspired to do an impromptu #vinylcast on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon after dinner upon learning that today was the 26th anniversary of Kurt Cobain‘s death. I was reminded of something I had read in the Domino Records re-release of all of Unwound‘s albums from the 1990s, so dug out New Plastic Ideas from 1994 and spun an album from my favorite band of the 1990s, the Pacific Northwest’s own Unwound. This was one of my very favorite album’s from this band, particularly the songs like Envelope, Abstraktions, All Souls Day and Arboretum. But the reason I was inspired to play the album was the story in the Domino Records collection that talks about Unwound playing a semi-trailer to 30 people on the day Cobain died, and the framing the author does to suggest this was the moment this main was forged in the fire of a scene—and its aftermath. It’s a pretty awesome passage, and I read it in its entirety. After that I read from the liner notes and just rocked out and blogged while side 2 played out. I do love the vinylcast approach to #ds106radio, and I think the fact this is number 19 in just over 4 weeks speaks volumes ? On last detail I forgot to mention during the #vinylcast was that I recently learned that this album was the soundtrack of a 20 year old Chloë Sevigny, which makes me feel kinda cool given that was the case for a 23 year old me. And to think while she was acting in Kids she was also digging on Unwound.
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At the Scale of Care

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Reverend

On Wednesday of last week I had the good fortune of co-presenting with Lauren Heywood and Noah Mitchell at OER20, which made the switch to an entirely online conference in just over two weeks–can you imagine? 

Lauren and I had been planning this for a bit, and while most of the planning entailed me telling Lauren how awesome the framework she and Noah had created educating their community (what is Coventry Domains Learn), the creation slides and script for the session came together quite quickly and seamlessly. I worked on slides 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 and Lauren did 2,4,6, and 8. The idea was to have a back and forth between me framing Domain of One’s Own and some of the practical elements of this approach, and Lauren digging in on some of the philosophical vision of the project.

We built out the entire presentation in SPLOTpoint, a WordPress template site that acts as a slide deck but then is an ongoing website made by the King of SPLOTs, Alan Levine.

Click to visit presentation site for At the Scale of Care

I think the presentation was fun, and I appreciate it inspired Doug Belshaw to blog about the precarity of our current DNS system, domain names, and possible alternatives. It was also cool to have folks like Liz Hudson chime in and testify to the awesome work Lauren and crew are  doing on the ground, and I felt like I was just part of that chorus for my part of the presentation 🙂

We had over 80 folks attend, and there was lively discussion and a tremendous amount of good will and support. 

Also, it is really encouraging to see Lauren Heywood nail the broader philosophical frame for Domains, I feel like my head has been in the weeds the last few years with just trying to keep up with running the trains, and it takes a new generation of edtechs like Lauren to frame the how and why of Domains, so it was an absolute honor and privilege to present alongside her. 

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USS Missouri as experienced on #ds106radio

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Reverend

The #ds106radio has been on fire recently, and I am not going to lie: it gives me a lot of joy and hope in a strange moment. A lot of first timers are jumping on (tune in tonight (day? morning?) for a special sharing is caring broadcast where three friends share songs and stories:

https://twitter.com/ammienoot/status/1246442938801905664

But this mornings impromptu broadcast was from Bill Genereux took six or seven listeners on a tour of the Mighty Mo, or the USS Missouri, via their virtual tour website. It was pretty amazing to go to the site, and then have Bill tour you through the boat telling stories of his time on the battleship during Desert Storm in the early 90s. The idea of being narrated through a virtual experience like that via radio, and then all syncing through the site was powerful for me:

I know a couple of other folks were along for the ride, such as Nigel Robertson and Rowan Peter, and I would be interested in hearing their experience. It was remarkably compelling to be narrated through an experience like this, and Bill did an excellent job orientating you so you knew where and what aft, starboard, port, and fore were when he was talking. We would navigate through degrees of a circle: you should now be looking at 90 degrees, or 180, or 270 based on an agreed upon 0 or 360. It was really wild.

My head starting swimming with all kinds of possible applications, like touring folks on the radio through Trento when Anto and I talk on the radio. What’s more, why couldn’t we broadcast the audio and screen sharing through ds106.tv? The vertical and the horizontal, baby! I tried as much when Bill was touring us around in Reclaim’s video conferencing tool, Whereby, and it worked seamlessly.

All this to say it was pretty freaking cool to be given a “walking tour” half way around the world at a moment when none of us can get outside our current living quarters!

Posted in digital storytelling, ds106radio, ds106tv | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

WordPress and the Headless Web

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Reverend

I was lucky enough to get the PressEd Conference started off this year. All the good stuff came later, and you can track it down using the hashtag #pressedconf20 or through the website. I got started with some much deserved love for the organizers whose vision for online conferencing was ideal for a pandemic 🙂 The seamless way the whole operation works is quite impressive, so thank you Pat Lockley and Natalie Lafferty for another awesome conference. I did not thread my slide tweets given they were pre-scheduled, so I’ll included them below.

A quick note on the presentation is that it is very much a work-in-progress and more akin to open reflection than a solid presentation—not to mention a chance to how far I could push my headless GIF game without going off the rails. I appreciate the PressEd folks letting me present this half-baked idea, but let this also act as a disclaimer for what’s to follow 🙂

As for the presentation, I tried to break it up into 3 parts. The first five slides being and intro and an attempt to explain what the hell headless web development is: 

The next 5 slides were devoted to explaining what Headless has to do with WordPress:

^No one really got this joke, but I thought it was hysterical when I came up with it. C’est la vie!

Finally, the last 5 tweet slides were made to given an example and explain Reclaim Hosting’s own interest in Headless as a way to both scale and syndicate content seamlessly, but I will discuss that in more detail on the blog as we get deeper down that road:

I do recognize that Headless WordPress development is a bit niche, it requires knowledge of APIs and javascript programming, and markdown. Not to mention chances are you would be depending on javascript frameworks like Gatsby, React, or something along those lines for building the static website (WordPress Calypso was exactly this idea). But my thinking was to introduce a fairly edge-case approach it is fairly new to me as well and talking about it would help me learn more. This is especially true given we are considering scaling and sharing some of Reclaim Hosting’s Domain of One’s Own documentation, not to mention Coventry’s Learn resources, but more of that in my next post.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised some folks had seemed to follow, and even had questions. Phil Barker asked about how you get things like contact forms, search, and other features on a static site not using the plugin infrastructure of WordPress, and that is a good point and a fairly significant limitation:

https://twitter.com/philbarker/status/1243119711736475650

PressEd Conference also asked a question about Gatsby, and I pointed them to a webinar provided by Digital Ocean about getting up and running with Headless WordPress:

I was worried going into it that the talk would not be right for the conference, but in the end I think it hit a good balance of exposure to possible approaches while also acknowledging the limits of such an approach. I figure, like the GI Joe cartoon says, “knowing is half the battle,” so once you know you can see its value and/or realize it is overkill for most of your use cases.

Posted in presentations, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

After this there will be no more good clean online fun

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Reverend

I’m not sure how it happened, but I found myself poking some fun at Matt Crosslin and Brian Lamb on Twitter based on this exchange:

It led to a bit of discussion, and I found myself being dragged in regardless of my best impulses. What was supposed to be a drive-by comment tweaking folks turned out to be a bit of a broader issue in my mind, so I figured it was high time to move it to the blog before the 250 character trap failed me even more, not to mention fear of alienating folks I deeply respect. Also, I know that everybody is a bit frayed right now for a variety of reasons, personally I am heading into week 5 of lockdown and it is definitely taking its toll. So, maybe trying to blog through it will be a bit therapeutic, or maybe not 🙂

Online learning should be fast, fun, crazy, unplanned, and inspirational. It should be provided by people who are more like DJs than television producers. It should move and swim, be ad hoc and on the fly. I wish educators could get out of their classroom mindsets and actually go out and look at how the rest of the world is doing online learning. Watch a dance craze spread through TikTok, follow through-hikers on YouTube, organize a community in a Facebook group, discuss economic policy in Slack. All of that is online learning – and (resolutely) not the carefully planned courses that are over-engineered, over-produced, over-priced and over-wrought.

The above quote was the bit by Stephen Downes Matt Crosslin was taking issue with, but it is one I was sympathetic to given I tend to favor the more spontaneous approach to online course design. What’s more, the idea that Clint Lalonde suggested that anything happening now can’t be considered online learning is what Downes appeared to be taking issue with specifically. If you’re teaching a course there should be some assumption around expertise in your take on the subject matter, so there should be some foundation to work within immediately. I was reading Downes as suggesting the nature of the online pivot might open some space for forgiveness for subject experts to explore and experiment a bit. I know this is counter to the bunker down mentality on the frontline, and admittedly I am not supporting faculty directly at the moment so I may be speaking out of turn. But again, I was not seeing Downes as suggesting explore brave new technologies and learn how to broadcast on the radio or something, but rather just be flexible and try different approaches whether via email, LMS, WordPress, Youtube, etc. I imagine some faculty will do this and get turned on to a whole new world of possibilities for online learning, but that isn’t necessarily salvo to the pain so many edtech folks like Matt and Brian are feeling as the try and scale up for this Herculean “pivot.” The concern I have is the idea that what happens in the next few months is not considered “real online learning” might discount some of the emergent approaches born of necessity. What’s more, I tend to associate the idea of extensive planning and real, serious online learning as mandate for big, costly edtech that is overly produced, and I am assuming given his post Downes was making the same connection.

And frankly, I do not think it is crazy given the way MOOCs went in 2011 and 2012. What was supposed to be a more fluid experiment with new approaches quickly became co-opted (one could argue willingly) as highly-produced videos with LMS backends that scale.  That said, given the rapid uptake and seemingly high stakes for R1 schools there was little room for experimentation and pushing the boundaries of this model beyond video-taped lectures delivered at scale, and that was a travesty for the field. I recognize now is no time for experimentation, and that is not what I am getting at here, but I do think the outsourcing to entities like Coursera, EdX, Udemy, etc. over the last decade, not to mention the arguably even more financially disastrous role of the Online Program Managers (OPMs) that have hollowed out entire programs in higher ed, sometimes scandalously, has a role in the current crisis. This points to some of the real questions so many higher ed schools (at least in the U.S.) face more broadly when it comes to investing in outsourced solutions rather than paying livable wages for teams of talented people.

So, I am wondering if more than a few universities are making their staff pay for the undervaluing and outsourcing of their expertise right now, moreover edtech programs are bearing the brunt of this and find themselves faced with an untenable charge. In fact, it’s a broader question of labor and responsibility on the part of HE administrations that have not invested in people.

With all that said, I don’t see this as a reason to say what happens for the next few weeks is not “real online learning,” but rather it might demonstrate the necessity of that expertise as well as some of the limits of those paid third-party services that provide the turn-key solution technically—are they enough to scale online learning?  Maybe it can act as a cautionary tale for schools that did not have the folks on the ground to help. But given there’s a chance that this lockdown could have impact through Fall and possibly next Spring, I am afraid it will be more about big-tech and serious LMS-like solutions than anything resembling innovative and exploratory attempts to explore the very DNA of online learning given the current situation. That was the reason for my original tweaking of Brian and Matt, and let me be clear that I am not suggesting this is the time for wild experimentation, but I hope there will be space for that once the dust settles a bit and folks dig out, that’s all I meant—but I am currently curled up under my desk in the event I am unintentionally inspiring the wrath of edtechs on the ground everywhere 🙂

Posted in fun, Instructional Technology | Tagged | 9 Comments

vinylcast #18: The Sugarcubes’ Life’s Too Good

Posted on April 3, 2020 by bavaradio
https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/1246028002154201089 The Jim & Anto Show: Lockdown Radio has become almost regular at this point, and we are having fun doing it. Today we discussed schooling under lockdown, re-wilding bears and wolves in Trentino, creativity, American candy, and more. After that I played an old favorite from the 1980s, the Sugarcubes’ 1988 hit album Life’s Too Good:
The band received critical and popular acclaim internationally. Their debut studio album, Life’s Too Good, was released in April 1988 to unexpected international success. It is credited as the first Icelandic album to have a worldwide impact and is considered a definite influence on all subsequent Icelandic popular music.
It made me think of my boyhood radio stations like WLIR and WDRE where I was first turned onto the European New Wave scene, along with the rest of American. WLIR was a Hempstead, Long Island based radio station that both New Wave and Rap got an early start on the airwaves, particularly U2 and Public Enemy (which was from Hempstead). It was not a very well contextualized #vinylcast given the Jim & Anto show ran long, and I did not even do the basics of reading the Wikipedia article, cause if I had I would have known Bjork was in bands since she was 11! But that’s what happens when you are an amateur and you are scrambling for lunch between sides, but it was a real fun day on the #ds106radio.
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vinylcast #17: Cults’ Cults

Posted on March 31, 2020 by collector
Antonella and I chatted on the radio again this morning, and we are starting to find our groove. Antonella reports on local lockdown infractions and often times the conversation just goes from there, in general a rumination on life under lockdown. After that I devoted the day’s #vinylcast to Cults 2011 eponymously titled debut album. The story around this album, apart from it ruling, is that I discovered it at the same moment I was preparing to go live with the ds106 course The Summer of Oblivion in June 2011. The release of the album and the launching of that class happened simultaneously, and the coolest part is the guitar player in Cults’ name is Brian Oblivion, and obvious homage to Videodrome, which was my same idea for Summer of Oblivion, so a cool sense of convergence, and it also led to me finding an excellent indie act. The next couple of days we will be taking a break from the radio to enjoy the OER20 conference.
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vinylcast #16: Unwound’s Fake Train

Posted on March 30, 2020 by bavaradio
After a weekend of rest, Antonella and I got another for more radio. It is a welcome break to the day, and talking through our experience has been both fun and damn good therapy! After the Jim & Anto Show the day’s #vinylcast was the 1993 album Fake Train by my band of the 1990s: Unwound. It’s arguably my favorite album by this band, and it is agonized and raw, and the influence of Fugazi and Sonic Youth is everywhere. I have the Domino Records re-release of all of Unwound’s materials, and this #vinylcast features readings from the booklet that came with this collection. Stories and reflections from the band members, and inspired by David Kernohan’s awesome show on Friday about U.F.O.rb I tried to keep up the standard of providing some context and continuing to tease out that moment of music (namely 1993) from my perspective.
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