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By chris, November 7, 2011 9:11 am

I’m a big fan of LaunchBar–the best quick launcher for Mac I have yet found–and have become a heavy user of Toodledo for task management–which I also recommend. So it was natural that I would want a way to add tasks to Toodledo quickly using Launch Bar. The easiest intermediary seemed to be Twitter–you can add tasks to Toodledo using a direct message–so after much searching and stealing of code (I’ve never used AppleScript before), I cobbled together the following system using AppleScript and the Twurl command-line Twitter client. This could be modified relatively easily to be a quick way of just posting to Twitter generally.

Step A

If you haven’t already, you obviously need to:

1. Install LaunchBar
2. Join Twitter
3. Join Toodledo

Step B

Install Growl, which I use to notify the user that the addition was successful. You can hack those lines out of the code if you want.

Step C

Install the Twurl package (which is a Ruby “gem”). This is easily done via the command line. Fire up your terminal and use the following command to install Twurl:

sudo gem install twurl

Then add your Twitter keys so Twurl can post to Twitter using your identity:

twurl authorize --consumer-key YOUR CONSUMER KEY  --consumer-secret YOUR SECRET KEY

(You get these keys from the Twitter Dev site. If you don’t have anything there yet, sign in and use the create an application link. Choose a name you can remember, such as ASTwitter, and use your web site as the “callback” address)

Step D

Open up the AppleScript Editor and create a new script with a name that matches the command you want to use in LaunchBar. I call mine td.scpt. Paste in the following code, and save the script to to the ~/Library/Application Support/Launchbar/Actions folder:

on handle_string(inTweet)
    tell application "System Events"
        set isRunning to (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0
    end tell
    if isRunning then
        set qTweet to quoted form of ("screen_name=toodledo&text=" & inTweet)
        set twitterPost to "twurl -d " & qTweet & " /1/direct_messages/new.json"
        set twitterResponse to do shell script twitterPost
        my growlRegister()
        if twitterResponse contains "<error>" then
            growlNotify("Error Adding ToodleDo Task", "Post Failed. Twitter Down?")
        else
            growlNotify("ToodleDo Task Added", inTweet)
        end if
    end if
end handle_string

using terms from application "Growl"
    on growlRegister()
        tell application "Growl"
            register as application "Toodledo Add" all notifications {"Alert"} default notifications {"Alert"} icon of application "Growl.app"
        end tell
    end growlRegister

    on growlNotify(grrTitle, grrDescription)
        tell application "Growl"
            notify with name "Alert" title grrTitle description grrDescription application name "Toodledo Add"
        end tell
    end growlNotify
end using terms from

Step E

Use your new action! Invoke LaunchBar and type the name of the script (aka the shortcut):

Press enter and add the title and other info for your task:

Press enter again and when the Tweet has been posted, you will receive a confirmation from Growl:

Notes

• Your mileage may vary. Use at your own risk. No lifeguard on duty.
• I’ll try to help if you ask in the comments, but I have limited time and expertise to do so!
• The script doesn’t actually check that the task was added to Toodledo, only that the Tweet was sent. There can be a lag between the Tweet and your new task’s appearance on Toodledo.
• This code is cobbled together from various sources and help files… thanks to all those folks.

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By chris, November 6, 2011 5:37 pm

via @jasongreen — and there are more (ymmv).

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By chris, October 9, 2011 5:03 pm

I’ve been hesitant to ask questions about Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure project because I fear that it will be yet another issue that divides me from most of my friends and peers (and idols) who work in education. The last time I questioned what looked like echo-chamberish activity in my own network, I was so frustrated by the result that I left blogging for almost a year. I hope this time I can handle it differently!

The bottom line: I don’t understand the inordinately negative reaction to the Open Badge initiative amongst those with whom I am generally simpatico.

Continue reading 'Open Badge Brouhaha'»

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By chris, October 9, 2011 10:16 am

With the recent death of Steve Jobs has come a flood of amateur hagiographies and, as one would expect, a similar flood of responses seeking to separate the man from the myth. I get it.

But what bothers me are those who take the opportunity of the death of an innovator as an opening for myth-making of the “there are no individual geniuses” kind because–if such discussions are to go beyond mere angel-counting–then they need to take the very real world of real individuals into account. And the debate, such as it is, often confuses two different notions of the individual, both of which are present in “the network,” usually carrying (or caricaturing) them to extremes.

Continue reading 'The Myth of the Myth of “Individual” Genius'»

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By chris, September 19, 2011 5:37 pm

Reasons I’m “participating” in the #Change11 MOOC:

• Because MOOC sounds kind of like “kook”
• Because I’m already massive so I might as well figure out how to be open
• Because MOOCs are the new Mauve and
• Because all the kool kids are doing it
• Because the ‘C’ in MOOC could stand for Conference or Constellation or Collective but not Corporation
• Because things that people do or make but have no definition of are usually interesting things for me
• Because I can’t get enough of those short Canadians
• Because I need evidence that GeorgeDave are not a single intellectual organism
• Because it’s 36 freaking weeks long, which is kind of like The Running Man of education
• Because someday I hope to know what Connectivism actually is
• Because my Erdős number with many of the participants is– and I hope with many other will become– 1
• Because this counts as participation

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By chris, September 12, 2011 6:05 pm

Tom Woodward (aka Bionic Teaching) asks: “still sure that your students want to hear from you outside of class?” and links to this Tweet:

love when my profs decide to post shit on #blackboard over the weekend! I dont check that shit on the weekend bitch!

September 12, 2011 11:22 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@iamMMY

MMY

which is funny and obviously a little provocative. Do I want to be my students’ bitch? And what about those of them that object to collaboration, synthesis, assessment, participation, reflection, open learning, or simply writing? Are there any easy questions in education?

Somewhere outside the creepy treehouse and being an intrusive autocratic presence in students’ lives is some happy middle ground, but it can be hard to discern. Some objections have obvious answers… I would never require that a student use their own blog, though I might (and often do) require that they blog. But how do we answer the more serious objection by students?

When things of this nature have come up in the past, I’ve fallen mostly on the side of being OK with these kinds of challenges to students and their often conventional ideas of what learning is (in comparison to people like D’Arcy Norman I’ve probably appeared downright autocratic if not dictatorial). If nothing else I justify these decisions by seeing them as challenges and provocations, which are an important part of my own practice.

But these are decisions that depend heavily on context: of the course, the student population, the individual student, the activity, my desired outcomes (and theirs), and which constellation is in the ascendant.

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By chris, September 12, 2011 4:03 pm

I’ve been considering the idea of teaching as a kind of art form–and what that would mean to the activity of education research–for a while, but am prompted to do so again because of recent exchanges with and between Dave Cormier (@davecormier), Martin Weller (@mweller), and George Siemens (@gsiemens).

Let me make clear up front: I am not dismissing, reflexively or otherwise, all education research. Design Based Research and Action Research, in particular, seem designed to deal with some of the issues that most trouble me about a fair amount of education research. And I see an incredible amount of value in research and science (I not an irrational lefty worshiping at the altar of mysticism and superstition, but then again, neither are the vast majority of my fellow lefties).

But neither can I be automatically, generally supportive of education research. Valuable educational research focuses on aspects of teaching and learning that can be meaningfully identified within a field as complex as weather systems and which can be practically replicated with enough reliability to give the research itself, and the resulting use, enough value to balance the costs. There’s not nearly enough of that kind of research and as a result education remains as unpredictable as the weather and as mystical as our understanding of the weather in the 1700s (post-invention of the barometer, contemporaneous with the new thermometer).

Consider the possible parallels between the symbiotic pairs: education and teaching, and literary studies and creative writing (no analogy is perfect; I realize I am taking some[!] liberties with the idea of teaching that don’t fully gibe with emerging pedagogy).

Continue reading 'Art, Education, and Research'»

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By chris, September 12, 2011 7:55 am

I don’t have a lot to add to Dan Pontefract’s response to George Siemens’ thoughts on “Losing Interest in Social Media”. For the most part, I also think George is right, at least if we are discussing “social media” with a somewhat narrower definition than I usually use the term and if the only significant value being sought is that of the complex thought that comes from deep examination and reflection.

I don’t participate in that kind of social media (which differs significantly from publishing platforms like blogs and wikis) for those things. I look there for the informal glue that binds together (some) communities, for the connections to people that help create (or reinforce) friendships and peer-relationships, and for the sparks that lead me to new and (sometimes) deeper thinking.

Like so many others, I could assert the strength of social media by citing how I found George’s post, which I probably would have discovered anyway, and Dan’s response, which I probably wouldn’t have, but that’s not the issue because George isn’t arguing that social media doesn’t do these things. What George seems to be talking about is a kind of technological determinism, the strength of which I can’t determine (I am a believer in a weak form of de facto tech determinism): that these media are slippery and lead most often to certain behaviors that are characterized by simplicity and relatively shallow thought. They grease the skids toward a certain kind of activity the same way an axe doesn’t force one to chop wood, but it sure lends itself nicely to chopping stuff up and not so well for opening a car door… at least not in the way we probably want to.

And let’s not forget that much of George’s piece is a response to the social media punditocracy, which would have social media as, if not the transformer of loaves into fishes, at least a miraculous cure-all, in which case assessing social media as a pIace of complexity and nuance (of a particular kind) is a sensible reaction. And I thought he was overtly making a bit of sport at their expense…

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By chris, September 11, 2011 12:01 am

I tired of the invocations of 9/11 by the 2nd anniversary, if not sooner… the 10th anniversary outpouring reminds me why. I viewed the unfolding of the attacks that morning (by chance I was rising earlier than normal to catch a flight, so I saw the coverage from the early minutes) with the same shock and feelings of being in some bizarro universe that many did who saw the fall of the towers reduced to the scale of their television sets. The deaths were a tragedy leaving, as death always does, a variety of legacies for those left behind.

But our country’s response, too often the response of spoiled children and opportunists– and the incredible American exceptionalism that characterizes it even now, 10 years on– is nauseating. Unexpected death is tragic, no matter the form it takes, and in many ways the number doesn’t really matter, or even the circumstances, to the power of the resulting feelings. But to respond to the deaths of these victims like a petulant child, lashing out at whatever he can, and to use those deaths shamelessly to pursue long-existing political agendas?

The irony is that those who espouse this kind of exceptionalism based on a grandiose idea of who and what America is in the world are, by their reactions– the constant encores of security theater, dramatic expansion in the criminalization of speech, and practically irrevocable erosion of our civil liberties and gathering of power to the few– have only served to more quickly and irreversibly destroyed those very characteristics that made our country, in those same eyes, exceptional. But destroying the village in order to save it has a long history in America…

Some see all of this for what it is an operate from a dark, cynical place in order to build power and wealth. But I’m slowly starting to believe that others are just blind to it, their vision impeded by a haze of patriotic fantasy and nostalgia.

David Foster Wallace spoke to the question of the American idea concisely and incisively (and it’s only gotten worse):

The Future of the American Idea

by David Foster Wallace

Just Asking

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom?” In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice– either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer–are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

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By chris, September 10, 2011 9:13 am

As usual, Alan Levine gets at the heart of important matters. Yet, also as usual, I have mixed thoughts and feelings… maybe because the idea that online and offline are one is both true and not true.

Alan writes:

It’s my personal contention that a suggestion of ourselves moving from “offline” to “online” is a false binary construct. We are who we are, period. Yet we selectively and appropriately reveal ourselves, sometimes variations, sometimes less then full representations, not only online, but in different social circles. My personality is different with the locals who hang out in Sidewinders bar in Pine, Arizona then at some academic conference in New York City, but just by shades of difference.

I’d like to be like you (and GNA, apparently) and be able to claim with a straight face that my identity is a single whole no matter the place or medium, different only by “shades,” but for me it’s not true. I am different, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, depending on the place and community where I happen to be. Work me is not the same as poet me, though they share great commonalities, the Chris one might meet at the coffee shop is different from the Chris one might meet speaking at a conference. Of course it depends on how we define difference… in some contexts these are distinctions without a difference for me, but I feel I am often distinctively different, and I’m (usually) OK with that.

Alan writes:

I find even the terminology strange “to go online” as if it were a place. Do we sit down on the couch, press the remote, and say we are “going TV”? Maybe that’s a poor analogy, but using the “go” makes it suggest we are having some sort of out of body experience.

I get the drift. And the shift from static to participatory means the web has made the shift from being like the telephone or like television, where only a limited few could play and be recognize, to something that is different and integrated. For me the contrast is where the differences in me that can vary by medium are natural and where they are artificial… and where it is hard to tell. The online world (now) makes it a place I go to just as surely as I go to the store and just as surely as people appear on television or on the radio. It is not yet ubiquitous for me… and I doubt it ever will be, even if the ratio has shifted and now I don’t have to say I’m going online, because I probably already am at any given moment, but instead have to note (if only to myself) that I am going offline.

This is contradictory in some ways because at the same time that the “circles” of Google+ feel very unnatural and even frustrating to me because I don’t want to be fracture myself, and because I often maintain that splitting my online presence in a very fundamental, subject-based way (between here and Passion Task), was the worst thing I’ve ever done, I still maintain some of the dichotomy between my on- and off-line self.

Not that the relationships in these or any other media or community are lesser, because they are not: they are exactly the same. Which is to say they are good and bad, strong and weak, and they come and go. But I differ… which is one of the reasons I admire people like you (and there aren’t very many of them) who do seem to be the same in these different contexts. And most of the time I think being like that would be better than not, but the times I feel it’s a good thing to be more “context-dependent” (not dishonest) are still significant!

Finally, Alan says, rather poetically:

I am ready to drive a stake into the notions of “online” vs”offline” states of being; such differences don’t exist for me anymore- I am one Alan, not some frankenstein sewed together personality, and I float fluidly on the bits and atom states of the world.

I have to say that I resemble and resent the comparison to Frankenstein. Isn’t it possible that these differences (in people for whom they still exist) don’t represent something monstrous but, if understood, another equally strong way of being?

I love the Sagan quote that GNA invokes, that “we are all made of star stuff.” But I also love Whitman’s thought, which is related:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
[...]
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

So, rather than a put a stake in the idea of many identities, I choose to embrace them as who and what I am, the me that is different built on the same that is star stuff, just as very different seasons are collectively a year, different books a library, and different poems and paintings are art…