Talking about power tools of the culture

I follow the Twitter writings of Ken Smith, an English professor at Indiana University-South Bend. In early July, he had a thought about “power tools of the culture”:

School shouldn’t be so alienating. Young people are entitled to the power tools of the culture.

They like to hear a faculty member say that aloud in class. They like talking about what it entails.

Education:

1) Shouldn’t be so alienating.

2) Power tools of the culture.

Dave Winer referenced this in a podcast that day. I had some thoughts on this as well, so I have created a wiki page collecting items from Ken’s posting over the past month on this topic, as well as my ideas. If anyone has anything to contribute, respond in the comments!

Creating an aggregator for Portland protest news

Recently, I tried out two tools for creating RSS feeds from Twitter account timelines. My next step was to put this into use for tracking news on a topic. Since I live in the Portland, Oregon area, I thought it would be good to be able to collect Portland protest news from Portland news media, reporters, protest groups, and city/county government into a single easy-to-access source.

My first step was to collect RSS feeds or Twitter handles from news sources. Sadly, the main newspaper in Portland (The Oregonian) does not seem to offer RSS feeds, but I did find some for several other newspapers. What I did find, though, is just about everyone news org is using Twitter to broadcast links to stories. I decided to make TweetsToRss my tool of choice for turning those Twitter timelines into RSS feeds.

Once I had a set of feeds, I made a copy of the single page app for my normal RSS feed reading, and made a few changes to the template. Since I had quite a few feeds, I decided to group them into four categories:

  • News Orgs – Newspapers, TV news
  • Reporters – Reporters from news orgs as well as freelancers and other people covering the protests
  • Groups – Protest groups
  • Government – Portland city government (mayor, city council, police bureau, police union) and Multnomah County government (county sheriff dept)

I then modified my template to add tabs for each of these categories. You can see the result here. I am interested in feedback on the design and in suggestions for additions to the feed list. If you have feedback, send it to andy at andysylvester dot com. Thanks!

 

 

I like hearing from other bloggers about why they blog…

This blog post is dedicated to why you should have your own (independent) blog.

Convocast episode 13 is out – and we have a format change! Starting with episode 12, John Philpin asked his question and then gave his answer – I loved it! I follow his example – so check it out!

I’m now a cop in my hometown, Savannah, Georgia, and I don’t want to fight another war — our “war on crime.” But I’m not going anywhere. I’m just speaking up, to propose that we end what never was a war to begin with. We need to change our mind-set about what it means to “police” in America. At this moment of maximal national tension and outrage, when national leaders are calling the streets of America a “battlespace,” with police officers as warriors who should “dominate” and give “no quarter,” I am telling whoever will listen: Police are not warriors — because we are not and must not be at war with our neighbors.

Cool article about digitized tapes of Grateful Dead concerts on Archive.org!

Wiki resources

I had a collection of links on wikis, thought I would collect them here:

Tom Critchlow – Building a Digital Garden: How I built myself a simple wiki using folders and files and published using Jekyll (his personal wiki)

I liked this article because it makes it possible to have a wiki without a database

Tom Critchlow – Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens – Building personal learning environments across the different time horizons of information consumption

Tom gives Twitter, blogging, and wikis as his examples for his title, also references the article below.

Mike Caufield – The Garden and the Stream: A TechnoPastoral

This 2015 article compares and contrasts wikis and blogs, with a focus on Federated Wiki (created by Ward Cunningham)

Frank McPherson – Site index page for his instance of Federated Wiki (also, his page on setting up Federated Wiki on your laptop)

Andy Sylvester – My instance of Federated Wiki (my New User Setup page)

Rudimentary Lathe – Jack Baty’s hosted instance of TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki – Main site to download your own copy

Chris Aldrich – Summary of Indieweb pop-up session on The Garden and The Stream (includes notes and video)