The Newsletters

Moving to Substack

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 20:20:00 +0000

A quick programming note: I am moving HEWN, the Hack Education Weekly Newsletter, from Tinyletter to Substack. If you are currently a subscriber (as of today), you won’t need to do anything. Your subscription will move over there, thanks to the magic of exporting and importing email addresses in a CSV format.

If you are not a subscriber, you can sign up here: hewn.substack.com.

One of the benefits of Substack is that it handles archives much more nicely. So even if you don’t subscribe, you will be able to read the emails there. (I have no plans at this time to charge for my newsletter, a feature that Substack does offer.)

New Year's Updates

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 10:10:00 +0000

I’ve made some changes to this site, most obviously updating the header image. Thanks to Bryan Mathers. (Why a pigeon?)

Those who look closely will also note that I have also changed the copyright information. No longer is there a Creative Commons license on Hack Education material. This really doesn’t change much, I promise. It just means you have to ask my permission before republishing my work. If you do wish to reprint my writing, please contact me directly.

The Year in HEWN

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 07:50:00 +0000

Here are links to all the Hack Education weekly newsletters (the newsletter known as HEWN) published in 2017:

HEWN, No. 195
HEWN, No. 196
HEWN, No. 197
HEWN, No. 198
HEWN, No. 199
HEWN, No. 200
HEWN, No. 201
HEWN, No. 202
HEWN, No. 203
HEWN, No. 204
HEWN, No. 205
HEWN, No. 206
HEWN, No. 207
HEWN, No. 208
HEWN, No. 209
HEWN, No. 210
HEWN, No. 211
HEWN, No. 212
HEWN, No. 213
HEWN, No. 214
HEWN, No. 215
HEWN, No. 216
HEWN, No. 217
HEWN, No. 218
HEWN, No. 219
HEWN, No. 220
HEWN, No. 221
HEWN, No. 222
HEWN, No. 223
HEWN, No. 224
HEWN, No. 225
HEWN, No. 226
HEWN, No. 227
HEWN, No. 228
HEWN, No. 229
HEWN, No. 230
HEWN, No. 231
HEWN, No. 232
HEWN, No. 233
HEWN, No. 234
HEWN, No. 235
HEWN, No. 236
HEWN, No. 237
HEWN, No. 238
HEWN, No. 239
HEWN, No. 240
HEWN, No. 241
HEWN, No. 242
HEWN, No. 243
HEWN, No. 244
HEWN, No. 245
HEWN, No. 246

The Year in Hack Education Weekly News

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 08:45:00 +0000

Here are links to all the Hack Education Weekly News articles published in 2017:

Annotations, Blocked

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 08:49:00 +0000

I have added a script to my websites today that will block annotations – namely those from Genius and those from Hypothes.is. I have been meaning to do this for a while now, so it’s mostly a project that comes as I procrastinate doing something else rather than one that comes in response to any recent event.

I took comments of my websites in 2013 because I was sick of having to wade through threats of sexualized violence in order to host conversations on my ideas.

My blog. My rules. No comments.

I’ve made this position fairly well known – if you have something to say in response, go ahead and write your own blog post on your own damn site. So I find the idea that someone would use a service like Hypothes.is to annotate my work on my websites particularly frustrating. I don’t want comments – not in the margins and not at the foot of an article. Mostly, I don’t want to have to moderate them. I have neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth. And if I don’t want to moderate comments, that means I definitely do not want comments to appear here (or that appear to be here) that are outside my control or even my sight.

This isn’t simply about trolls and bigots threatening me (although yes, that is a huge part of it); it’s about extracting value from my work and shifting it to another (for-profit) company which then gets to control (and monetize) the conversation.

Blocking annotation tools does not stop you from annotating my work. I’m a fan of marginalia; I am. Blocking annotations stops you from writing in the margins here on this website.

Update to Newsletter Project

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to make it easier for people to sign up for the various newsletters that I publish. Up until now, the only link I’ve provided on my sites is for the newsletter I send on Saturdays via Tinyletter.

I also send newsletters via Mailchimp – these are essentially RSS-to-email versions from Hack Education and my personal blog. The former comes out whenever I update the blog; the latter comes out once a week. (There is currently no RSS-to-email subscription for the posts I post on my “Known” site, aud.life. I kind of like it that way, since I’m using that site as a sketchpad, of sorts, to think and write through ideas.)

To make a long story short: I’ve updated the Newsletter link that’s in the footer of all my sites so that it points to news.hackeducation.com rather than just the Tinyletter sign-up page. Two clicks to sign up isn’t so streamlined, I suppose. Oh well.

All the Newsletters (2015)

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to writing a weekly round-up of the news, I send out a newsletter that highlights some of the interesting things I’ve read each week. To help me prepare for my end-of-year series “The Top Ed-Tech Trends,” I’m gathering a list of all the newsletters I’ve written in 2015.

No. 141

Hack Education Weekly News

Sat, 14 Mar 2015 20:22:00 +0000

Like a lot of folks, I was surprised this week when the tech publication Gigaom abruptly shut its doors. I swore off reading tech blogs a couple of years ago, I confess, because I couldn’t stand the cheery churnalism. But Gigaom was different, offering sharp analysis and not re-written press releases. There’s been plenty of talk about what went wrong –is venture funding a good idea for a media business? – along with speculation about how financially stable other publications might be.

The news about Gigaom was particularly striking as it came at the end of the day of a big Apple press fiesta from which reporters breathlessly transcribed everything uttered on stage. My how, the tech blogosphere loves these! The page views! (The best live blog came from Paul Ford and Anil Dash, of course, who didn’t even have to attend the event to provide coverage that was better than the rest.) A gold laptop! So thin! New keyboard technology! A new power cord! More data collection – “for science”! A $17,000 watch! Who can resist?!

(Well, John Herrman can apparently: “I was an iPhone man once, like you. Then Shitphone changed everything.”)

Meanwhile: “A crash course in privacy and security in the classroom,” by Jessy Irwin. And a series of videos on privacy, trust, and education, featuring Cory Doctorow, Nishant Shah, Dan Gillmor, Ulrich Boser, and me.

And over on Hack Education, I published this and this and this. I'm not going out of business any time soon...

Yours in struggle,
~Audrey

Hack Education Weekly News

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 20:22:00 +0000

Every week, I take all the essays and articles that I’ve bookmarked and sift through them in order to craft this newsletter. I’m always struck by how many weird and ridiculous claims are made about education and technology, both in the “mainstream” and industry press. (I don’t know why this continues to surprise me, and the right response, quite arguably, is to neither link to nor write for these publications…)

There’s the continuous clarion call for more data collection, more automation, more engineering, more scientific management, and of course more disruptive innovation. These are the narratives loudly trying to shape the future.

Of course, these narratives are intertwined with power and policies. As Alan Jacobs notes, we confuse surveillance with care. We confuse surveillance with self-knowledge, Rob Horning adds:

I don’t think self-knowledge can be reduced to matters of data possession and retention; it can’t be represented as a substance than someone can have more or less of. Self-knowledge is not a matter of having the most thorough archive of your deeds and the intentions behind them. It is not a quality of memories, or an amount of data. It is not a terrain to which you are entitled to own the most detailed map. Self-knowledge is not a matter of reading your own permanent record.

We confuse individuals’ acts of (self-)documentation with structural change and justice. We confuse the “sharing economy” for the latter as well. According to Evgeny Morozov:

The citizens, who are not yet fully aware of these dilemmas, might eventually realise that the actual choice we are facing today is not between the market and the state, but between politics and non-politics. It’s a choice between a system bereft of any institutional and political imagination – where some permutation of hackers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists is the default answer to every social problem – and a system, where explicitly political solutions that might question who – citizens, firms, the state – ought to own what, and on what terms, are still part of the conversation.

It doesn’t help that so many of these narratives comes from “a town without history,” as Mike Caulfield observes in “People Have the Star Trek Computer Backwards.” Here’s my latest look at the history of ed-tech: on how, thanks in part to the work of Seymour Papert, Maine went one-to-one. It’s worth thinking how and why that initiative is being dismantled…

Yours in struggle, ~Audrey

Hack Education Weekly News

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 20:22:00 +0000

I re-watched the old Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain” last night, thinking I might write something for my series on the history of education technology. The episode is often derided as the worst of the entire series – I don’t dispute that – but it does highlight how we thought in 1968 (how we still think) about brains, thinking, teaching, and machines.

The latest in my series: “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom.”

Elsewhere on the history/future: xkcd on “Stories of the Past and Future.” Bruce Sterling on the convergence of humans and machines. Terry Elliott on “False Horizons or Failure of the Imagination or ….” Kathy Sierra on skater culture and Silicon Valley.

The week in mansplaining: brought to you by Vivek Wadhwa and as experienced by Marilyn vos Savant.

The week in birds: “The Boys Who Loved Birds.” “The girl who gets gifts from birds.” Also, the week in llamas.

Data is the new “_____.” Liberty University is the new model for higher ed (lolwut). The email subject line is the new way to fill someone with dread.

Peak code. Peak privilege. Peak Boyhood. Peak debt. Peak dress.

Live long and prosper.

Yours in struggle, ~Audrey