Joshua Chalifour @jc@scholar.social

A prof wanted his class to build a collaborative annotated bibliography on the semiotics of nuclear waste. I had the class use Zotero's group functionality within the context of learning search strategies, being critical of sources, etc. and then to actually create the bibliographies... and it worked really nicely! It seems like so often, technology has glitches and difficulties, which get in the way, so it's refreshing when it just supports exactly what you want people to get from it.

Crowd-sourced publishing... nice post from the Library and Archives Canada blog discussing an example https://thediscoverblog.com/2019/09/05/a-novel-with-soul-or-at-least-half/

This article says "We need collective solutions and big thinking, not individual giveaways..." as it discusses tax cuts that diminish our capacity to enact collective solutions and that shift debate toward market solutions. https://ricochet.media/en/2725/scheers-tax-cuts-favour-the-rich-and-diminish-our-capacity-to-solve-big-problems #cdnpoli

Let's hear it for footnotes! Washington Post article argues for more footnotes, especially in non-academic work to help battle disinformation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/could-footnotes-be-key-winning-disinformation-wars/

Hold the opinions, sit, and care for your thoughts. Matthew Beard writes about how we engage with media, about our fast trading of opinions, and we ought to sit with things more. I appreciate this thinking. https://ethics.org.au/opinion-economy/

Research on Canadian news-getting habits sheds some light on what happens with different groups becoming more or less informed vs. uninformed vs. misinformed. I can't help but see this as more reason to focus on education for critical thinking. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/08/07/news/canadians-media-consumption-habits-lead-misinformation-study-finds

Recent data (BP's Statistical Review of World Energy) show humans burn more and more fossil fuels. This article with charts based on the BP data explains that we've increased 4 times the amount of fossil fuels we burn & renewable alternatives way behind. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/07/31/opinion/fossil-fuel-burning-leaps-new-record-crushing-clean-energy-and-climate-efforts

Open-mindedness... "How Intellectual Humility Can Make Us More Curious, Reflective & Able to Learn More: Read the Findings of a New Study" http://www.openculture.com/2019/07/how-intellectual-humility-can-make-us-more-curious-reflective-able-to-learn-more.html

Nice little guide to spotting "fake news" err, that is to say, it's to help people consider information presented online, through a critical eye. https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/fake-news-misinformation-online-1.5196865?cmp=rss #FakeNews #FakeNewsMedia #MediaLiteracy #InformationLiteracy

Someone / people(?) threatened to release a bunch of Radiohead minidiscs from the mid-late 90s. Instead of paying the ransom, Radiohead put the work on Bandcamp with proceeds going to benefit Extinction Rebellion — what an excellent response! Here's the link https://radiohead.bandcamp.com/

Glad to read these many positive recommendations on copyright reform made by the Canadian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Industry, Science & Technology. They seem to favour more reasonable freedoms & exceptions. Here's a post from the Creative Commons blog about it (with a link to the report) https://creativecommons.org/2019/06/06/new-canadian-report-offers-balanced-recommendations-for-progressive-copyright-reform/

While Wikipedia works to open up knowledge to everyone, commercial enterprise, The North Face, works to manipulate it against its policies, defacing the public site, in the name of... advertising? Bad corporate social responsibility. https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/05/29/lets-talk-about-the-north-face-defacing-wikipedia/

42 countries (including Canada) agreed to a set of principles & public policy recommendations adopted by the OECD on AI and its development. These address things like safety, transparency, human rights, sustainability, etc. https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0449 #AI #ArtificialIntelligence

The fruiterie down the block started carrying these grapes advertised as "cotton candy" grapes. I thought, marketing, but tried them & wow! They're amazing! Totally uncanny that their flavour isn't artificial. Seems people put a lot of effort into making it happen though. hm does that make it artificial in a way? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Candy_grapes

Voynich manuscript news always seems exciting at first... then we're deflated. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/no-someone-hasnt-cracked-the-code-of-the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/

Need help negotiating #OpenAccess publishing rights (or simply retaining your authorial rights) for your article? CARL just released an update of its Canadian Author Addendum to Publication Agreement along with two guides on using it. http://www.carl-abrc.ca/news/updated-canadian-author-addendum-and-author-rights-guide/

You can read Arundhati Roy's Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america

It's an abridged version but still, she covers a lot. Indian politics to forms of writing that don't fit nicely into popular categories, to characters in her books, and the way things may play out against those most hurt by our climate catastrophe.