@DrPen@mastodon.social
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DrPen

@DrPen@mastodon.social

Tech society posts and shares from Dr Pen, Digital Media & Humanities academic based in Malta, from London. Late bloomer, a bit pithy.

Previously of home.social

#UserExperience #UGC
#DataSociety #DigitalSociety #SmartCities
#webdev #Fediverse #activitypub

World Citizen

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DrPen, to ukteachers
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In case folks aren't aware, the Internet Archive now has a scholar version with a huge collection of academic work available.

https://scholar.archive.org/

DrPen, to Pubtips
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Today I will be posting thoughts about Aaron Swartz, who died on this day in 2013. The academic community should be much more aware of him, and challenge the massive problem of academic publishing that we are all part of. Let's make it our mission to tell people about Aaron and what he stood for.

Aaron's Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

DrPen, to UX
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Usability = 0
User experience research = none.

(Src unknown)

DrPen, to ai
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When we teach WW1 history and show photographs of men in the trenches, and no one knows if they are real or midjourney fake then we are in deep trouble. Or teach scientific principles through research papers and don't know if the text is authentic human created or response engine output, we are in deep trouble. Imagine a hundred other contexts and you understand why gen ai is such a massive problem.

DrPen, to fediverse
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Creating a city for all of us: a role for the Fediverse in archiving civic urban memory. A preprint on SocArxiv of my paper (Trevor Norris co author) on how the Fediverse could help to create instances of urban civic memory archives using place-name/geocoded posts and instance cache archiving. technically a laymans view (me!), but feedback on technical or other aspects gratefully received :)

#academicmastodon #academicchatter #urbanism #archives #fediverse

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/te2ms

DrPen, to fediverse
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Do people know about the Zotero group, the 'Fediverse Observatory'? Its a long list of relevant information and sources that mention Fediverse related stuff. Check it out.

https://www.zotero.org/groups/4861035/fediverse_observatory/items/LFCK293Q/library

DrPen, to privacy
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EFF are launching a university Tor network.

Announcing the Tor University Challenge | Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/announcing-tor-university-challenge

DrPen, to fediverse
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yes yes yes. Ive been saying this for at least a year or more and am writing about this again in my current paper. Im 100% behind this. My new theme is promoting the idea of civic learning networks that are based on decentralised federated instance models that also integrate with the open social web.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/

DrPen, to ai
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Well hey. I didn't expect my post about Aaron Swartz to get so popular but it's so good to see how many ppl are touched and angry and emotional about what happened. How much we care and what ppl do to share his life and what he stood for.

We must modernise copyright law and deal with digital content in more realistic and fair ways. I mean, we are at the #AI watershed. That's a whole other ballpark. Check this paper out.

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4523551

#academicmastodon #academicchatter #copyright

DrPen, to ai
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Damning report on @BBCRadio4 this morning about the financial situation of UK universities. As Id been told by others involved in UK digital policy, the general attitude is to digitise almost any aspect of UK HE that can be automated, and employ tools to achieve this. To me this is almost a death knell of UK HE standards. No one attends university to learn with a bot, least of all to pay high fees for the pleasure.

DrPen, to BBC
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The are extending their trial of using mastodon. Yey. This is very good news indeed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-02-extending-our-mastodon-social-media-trial

DrPen, to ChatGPT
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The unfolding tragedy of the deconstruction of university learning and teaching. Behold, a post in r/professors about the chatgpt wasteland of student submitted work.

DrPen, to fediverse
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The session at was a missed opportunity. This was a chance to discuss why decentralised socmed is essential going forward - digital sovereignty alone would seem to demand that. Unhooking govt, educational, major industry etc from platform monopolies is a no brainer, single users will follow. Getting wrapped up in who will pay for coders is tbh a small problem, solve the big problem of deplatforming and youll solve other issues.

RichardJMurphy, to random
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Interest rates should be as low as possible https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/05/13/interest-rates-should-be-as-low-as-possible/ The Bank of England is trying to force up interest rates so that they can keep them as high as possible. That’s deeply threatening to our wellbeing by redistributing wealth upwards, reducing the amount of investment in the country and demanding austerity of government. Interest rates need to be as low as possible.

DrPen,
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@RichardJMurphy at risk of saying the unmentionable, this isnt what lot of people would agree with. Higher interest rates allow those with savings to actually make some return on all that hard earned money. The very low/zero interest rates only benefitted banks or building societies, who could invest that money anyway, without passing on any gain to the people it belonged to. We are ordinary people who have managed to save a bit. We are not millionaire monsters.

DrPen, to fediverse
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Im beginning to create the slides for my HCII2023 paper. Its partly about the and as solutions for citizen participation and contribution to civic knowledge repositories, Its the first paper Im writing about this stuff, but it wont be the last :)
Im gonna use a few AI Art creations. It may spark other related discussion.

DrPen, to ukteachers
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Free virtual event on OER and open pedagogy on 11-12th August. It's PST, but all sessions are recorded so anyone can benefit!

https://cptc.libguides.com/TLC/CPTC-OER-Faculty-Institute

DrPen, to fediverse
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hi Fediverse tech ppl! Does anyone have any stats on the amount of data being moved around instance to instance for federated connection/availability? Like Ive read even on a small server (>30 users) it's about 1.5gb a day traffic (github mastodon thread). Anyone have any overall stats, or any relevant info on this?

DrPen, to Futurology
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Patterns have featured an opinion piece in their email re Mastodon for research, particularly focused on gathering data and the non equivalency of direct swap comparison between Twitter and Mastodon/Fediverse ethics and privacy. Its a useful read imho. It's open access.

Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? Here’s what you need to know.
Roel Roscam Abbing, Robert W. Gehl
https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00323-9

#academicchatter #academicmastodon #research #ethics #privacy #fediverse #mastodon

DrPen, to random
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Take a moment to marvel at the DBpedia Linked Open Data cloud.

https://lod-cloud.net/

DrPen, to random
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At risk of blowing my own trumpet, here's my work on the uni repo. Missing one paper, but otherwise a complete record of published work (so far!). Id encourage everyone to put their accepted papers on their Inst. repo, it increases visibility and is usually permitted in author license agreements.
ps I know its not a great number, but Im a late starter at this ;)

#academic #academicchatter #academicmastodon

DrPen, to ukteachers
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I see a lot of talk about decolonising the curriculum or the university.

Can we decolonise from Big Tech global domination of education at all levels?

DrPen, to RSS
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Importing feeds into Obsidian with Simple RSS!

If you want to archive your Mastodon or other app/site feed posts into Obsidian as separate post entries, I wrote a post about how to use the Simple RSS plugin to do that. I cover Mastodon and Grav RSS feeds. I've done the best I can do for now with instructions and a big thank you goes out to simple rss dev Monnier Antoine for being super helpful.

#RSS #feeds #archive #websites #blogging #mastodon #obsidian #obsidianmd

https://penworks.net/blog/importing-feeds-into-obsidian-with-simple-rss

DrPen, to ai
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University Suspends Students for AI Homework Tool It Gave Them $10,000 Prize to Make

Emory University gave students a $10,000 entrepreneurial prize for their AI startup, then suspended them and accused them of cheating when they built it.

https://www.404media.co/university-suspends-students-for-ai-homework-tool-it-paid-them-10-000-to-make/

DrPen, to animals
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Short break from harsh reality

ErikJonker, to archive
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A time-capsule for webpages, i am probably the last to notice this website 😀
Very useful.
http://archive.today/

DrPen,
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@martijnstaal @ErikJonker Harvard's perma.cc is a useful tool to prevent link rot, which is sort of relevant to this. The wayback machine trawls the web and randomly captures content, admittedly a lot, but by no means everything. I don't think you can use it to custom capture webpages but with perma.cc you can.

https://perma.cc/about

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