Week 11 – Round Up

I miscalculated. Despite my thinking that Week 10 was the last round-up, it’s actually week 11!

On Monday/Tuesday Philip posted an article about how AI should be feared according to tech-entrepreneur Elon Musk, who previously announced plugging us in to the machine would keep human development at pace with AI. I’m perhaps missing something here, but fighting fire with fire has its own risks for sure.

Thursday saw Audrey Watters’ excellent talk on “Driverless Ed-Tech” and the automation of education, which is particularly relevant to my intended subject for the Digital Essay. As was mentioned by others on the accompanying YouTube chat, I found it very engaging to be online, tweeting (11 times) and discussing the points I picked up. This level of engagement would be much harder in-situ. However, where my tweets have persisted, YouTube chat transcript has not.

Week 11 included April 1st, which I do enjoy. A MSCEDC-relevant fool from NVIDIA was examined briefly in a blog post which included a tweet and the video.

Some other blog-entries were lighthearted takes on serious issues. Take this look at how relationships and community form (or not) online in VR. Not everyone jokes on April 1st however. A sober lesson that even “techno-utopians” can be weathered down by constant exposure to some elements of the internet’s wider community also featured.

I was spending time reviewing my Lifestream, and I sorted out some issues, and also revisited some “old” posts, and themes.

I was looking ahead too, not just to the Digital Assignment, but also to the rest of the year. I look forward to seeing if 2017 brings about practical application of the trends we might expect to see.

Meta: Page Selector

As I draw this blog to a close, I found myself struggling to navigate with the default settings. So I’ve tweaked them a bit. At the top of the blog, there is a “page selector” menu item which allows anyone browsing to jump quickly to a page. I added this because the user experience of reading in reverse chronological order is otherwise very frustrating, but having ~400 posts on one page load is probably not a good idea either! However, without access to the PHP driving the site, or to add additional modules, I can’t see how to create jump links to the bottom of the page, you still have to scroll down to start reading in reverse chronological order.

Obviously anyone browsing this blog from start to finish could do so at an individual post level, in which case considering this additional feature is moot, but it’s there now in any case and was relatively trivial to set up.