Running for school board this year are an anti-trans bigot who wants law enforcement in schools and a guy focused on building HVAC.
No progressive wave here at the school board level in this growing school district next door to Austin. Same old bigots and budget cutters.
We can’t stop producing bigots if we let them take school boards.
“As someone who accurately identitied that raging fever I’ll concede that “corporate” reformers may not be the best description. Rather it was the hedge fund plutocrats of the Financial Privatization Cabal who were most responsible for seeking the privatization of public education.”
Why deem the “corporate” reformers the Financial Privatization Cabal? Because most of the money came from hedge fund and other financial services titans. They ardently seek privatization. And as they knew transparency would be the death of their plot, their strategy depended on a secret cabal.
Source: MassPoliticsProfs| Mr. Lehigh Misdiagnoses a Fever, Ms. Rodrigues Recovers at DESE
Mood: The freedom to learn and develop differently is an expensive and unsustainable privilege.
Education isn’t really public for neurodivergent and disabled people. It’s often a choice between burning time and money to create your own systems or subjecting your kids to compliance, behaviorism, ableism, and identity crushing deficit ideology.
The way the soup has hit the fan with Cambridge Analytica kind of looks like a bat signal to save the open web.
We’ve literally placed the open web behind a paywall, simply by not giving a shit.
With authoritarianism on the rise globally, now more than ever is the time to invest in a healthy, decentralised, diverse, and open World Wide Web.
We’ve forced millions onto closed platforms as we’ve built a web that’s unusable from anywhere else than our privileged urban bubbles.
WordPress has democratised screwing up 30% of the web
Companies from the WordPress industry, together with an ally no less powerful than Google, have joined forces to support contributions to the betterment of the WordPress ecosystem at scale.
A 30% chunk of the web potentially being improved by a single component.Even though individual team members go great lengths in welcoming every new voice, and treat every concern with respect—at their current pace both Gutenberg, and AMP have struggled to build trust in the integrity of their underlying decision making within their communities.
The real problem with performance on the web is that the recipe for fast web pages is boring simple:
Load less stuff.Performance, careful design thinking, good citizenship on the web—these things are virtues. You have to practice them.
AMP wraps all these things into a convenient package and enables you to use instead of practice. There’s no need to change, to learn, to understand, to perhaps become a better person on the way even—just use new stuff.Apparently, we have to be incentivised into our own future, because we can’t be bothered. But it sure sucks.
WordPress is AMP’s ticket to 30% of the web.
I had thought the crisis of the open web could be solved with education, flanked by a standardised, whitelisted library of well-optimised WordPress components—Accelerated WordPress, essentially, or WordPress lite.
In both, my ignorance and arrogance towards AMP I hadn’t even noticed AMP was pretty much just what I believed was needed—only a lot more advanced.I thought I hated AMP. I now realise that what I hated was the fact that a thing like AMP has become necessary, and that I—like you, probably—have contributed to its becoming a necessity.
Great, thoughtful piece on WordPress, AMP, Tide, and the health of the open web with lots of interesting links to explore.
“WordPress has democratised screwing up 30% of the web”
“WordPress is AMP’s ticket to 30% of the web.”
It’s a tall order, I realize. But that’s why student blogs are awesome. It gives students a chance to practice writing in a virtually fail free zone, and they learn important lessons not just about reading and writing, but themselves as writers and what it takes to craft engaging, effective writing. But the freedom of blogging is what makes this type of self-evaluation and practice possible.
Think of blogging as the anti in-class essay.
Of course, you can focus student blogs on any topic, theme, or style to meet any academic purpose, but for me, blogging frees my students from the constraints of what they believe assigned essays should sound like.
For starters, there’s no official rubric or handbook, the style is incredibly familiar, and the pressure of page length is off. Because blogs offer students creative control of layout and themes, it’s this same ownership that encourages not just a unique layout but a considered style and voice in their writing.
My students are discovering over time that who you are on paper is who you are, so they strive to show how interesting and intelligent they are with the voice and style of their writing.
In our blogging project, students have taken cues from mentor texts we’ve studied in class, but just as importantly, they’ve paid attention to the writing of others, both professional and non. They’ve assessed what works, what doesn’t work, and what makes for an interesting and engaging post. And blogging provides them a safe space to play with different craft moves they might not try in class.
Source: 5 Things Your Students Can Learn From Blogging | Moving Writers
“This year, I introduced reflective blogging with my students to slowly release control. They write, everyone reads, and everyone comments. Here’s how it’s made them more independent:”
Instead of me answering questions, my students write through their confusion.
Instead of waiting for my judgement, they look to one another.
“Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the more the writing I ask students to do in the classroom can mirror the world outside our classroom walls, the better served my students will be.”
“Yet if I had to choose just one technology tool I could not live without, it would be blogging, hands-down. It’s not even close.”
Because blogging feels less formal than a traditional essay, students are more willing to experiment with and find their voices. Blogging feels personal, and thus, the person behind the writing shines through in ways that paper keeps hidden.
When students blog, they learn how to use hyperlinks and visual media to support their ideas. They learn how to use categories and tags to help their readers find their work more easily. And when students practice commenting on each other’s blog posts, they also learn how to engage in civil and thoughtful discourse in an online environment. Our students today could be engaged citizens or thoughtless trolls (and everything in between). I think we all know which would be better for the future of civic discourse.
“Students love the fact that their blog is their own space. They can design it however they want and it really adds to the ownership factor. It is not about what I want, it is about them developing their own learning environment that is a reflect of them, not a teacher’s desires.”
“Every element of our media policy is custom-built for the business plan of Sinclair Broadcasting,” says Rosenworcel. “That is stunning, it is striking, and it looks like something’s wrong. And I’m not the only one to think that. We’re burning down the values of media policy in this agency in order to service this company.”
Source: FCC Commissioner: Our Policy Is ‘Custom Built’ for Right-Wing Sinclair Broadcasting
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