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Trapped: Edtech feminism, Sadie Plant and Librarian Superheroes

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via IFTTT

Edtech feminism, Sadie Plant and Librarian Superheroes #mscedc

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Dr Macleod recommended Zeros + Ones in my Understanding Learners in Online Environments and I thought it sounded perfect for this course. I went to the library early on the way in to work, found it quickly and went through the self check out. Upon trying to exit I set off the alarms and security told me I had to go back in. Checking my phone I had a confirmation email confirming the book was now checked out to me. So I could neither leave with the book nor leave the book behind, and risk getting fined in a month’s time. I returned to the self service machine and it cheerfully told me to report to the desk, which being early was still closed. Trapped!

It was then a matter of waiting inside for the librarians to arrive. As it turned out it took quite a few attempts on their part and several different machines to ‘unsecure’ it and set me free.

All in all a very timely experience demonstrating the need for human intervention in a machine driven world. Librarian superhero!

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Going manual

My applets for Pinterest are stubbornly non-visual so this is how my #mscedc board actually looks by week 7. Seeing it all together it is a lot less messy than it probably should. It is a mix of people and visual data. One of this weeks aims will be to add to this board as much as possible.

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Going manual

So after a morning of frustration and wrestling with my IFTTT applets I am opting to put down a few words manually. This allows me to both vent and introduce some much needed imagery into my stream. Last week I focused on just my thoughts, added to Tweets, and although plain it resulted in a pretty streamlined stream (pun intended), however, as the links weren’t working it was hard work to see what I was commenting on.

Now I have sorted out the links to the original content but still no images and it all looks a repetitive mess so it will be back to IFTTT after I finish this. I next turned to Pinterest as an alternative method to add pictures, however, for some reason this is failing to display the image. A quick search highlighted that IFTTT needs the actual image extension to display properly but when I linked directly to the .jpg it still didn’t show. The perfectionist in me wants to delete my failed attempts as it destroys the aesthetic of the blog in addition to visually publicly showing my incompetence (which as a learning technologist is proving amusing) but it is an important part of my story as I have lost several hours on technical details rather than reading course content and other blogs.

So I stepped aside from the digital for a few moments and turned to my older pen and paper technology and made some notes from Jeremy’s week one welcome to refocus me. Our family robot says ‘hello’ to you all (he actually plays music and dances so he might appear again later in my artefacts). Thank you Jeremy for the suggestion.