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Here’s a box I keep of random knick knacks from bulletin boards and desk drawers that I keep on the top shelf of my studio.
The box somehow didn’t make it into today’s newsletter about nostalgia, which begins:
Last weekend I spent a day at my mom’s house sifting through my childhood. Among the artifacts I saved or discarded from the first two decades of my life: a hundred pounds of notebooks and binders from high school, random junk like chem lab aprons I never returned, letters from former girlfriends, bank statements, rental agreements, brochures, ticket stubs, wristbands, notes, old sketchbooks, a stack of song lyrics and guitar tablature several inches thick, tuition statements, computer manuals, hint books, baseball cards, floppy disks, and best of all, toys. A glorious batch of toys from my youth, including He-Man, Ghostbusters, Robo Cop, G.I. Joes, and even one lone Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
You can read the rest here.
Trance music never went away, writes Philip Sherburne, and I agree. But I’ve not progressed with the sound since I first fell for it 25 years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, impressionable teenage raver. Whenever I listen to my “Old School Trance Favorites” playlist on Spotify, I’m whisked back to 1998 — on some dance floor in some dark warehouse, with a classic track like Three Drives’ “Greece 2000” or Veracocha’s “Carte Blanche” blasting in the room. The trance we danced to in those years was uplifting, life-changing. But as I ventured deeper into this world, the sound was a mere step in a longer journey — it marked a period of raving with training wheels, of hours-long DJ sets of spoon-fed transcendence.
Still, as some of Sherburne’s sources perfectly put it in the piece, there’s just something about trance, and listening to a “vintage” trance anthem from the late ’90s and early ’00s, however schmaltzy it may be, can give me shivers like no other type of music.
Sherburne writes a fun piece about the revival — or perhaps reimagination — of trance among a younger generation of producers and DJs who are outside the scene and, thus, more open-minded and experimental.
But where those projects carried a whiff of mischief, the new wave of trance feels like a more earnest and direct homage. Perhaps it’s a generational shift, as artists who first discovered electronic music from their friends’ stepdads’ Tiësto CDs begin to look back on their own musical upbringing. Maybe it’s just that people are jonesing for all the euphoria they can get right now.
Vestbirk believes that the shift is partly generational. A new wave of clubbers doesn’t have the same prejudices about trance that the old guard did. And the artsier end of the scene is bored with techno, which—in its overground, festival-filling incarnation, with an emphasis on formulaic structures, identikit sound design, and gaudy spectacle—has become as stale, commercialized, and ridiculous as mainstream trance once was.
It seems like many worlds ago, when “MOOC” was not a term I mocked, but as it happens, this month marks the 10th year since Alec Couros launched ETMOOC, the Education Technology MOOOOOOC.
Susan Spellman Cann has been heroic each year in organizing a tweeted reunion
ETMOOC 10 Years TOP 10 https://t.co/B0ln6mDK1b
— Susan Spellman Cann (@SSpellmanCann) February 7, 2023
The linked “smore” site suggest ways to participate
https://www.smore.com/n6y9c-etmooc-10-years-top-10
- Write a blog or vlog of 10 ways #ETMOOC made a difference to you and post to the hashtag #etmooc
- Join us for an online gathering on Friday , Feb. 10th 7 p.m. MT
- Donate to the Mario Couros bursary that ETMOOC created for educators. Ask @courosa how you can contribute.
- Come up with your own way to celebrate and share to the hashtag #etmooc
I’m not sure I will make the list of ten, but, hey I got a blog post started.
This came from the heady days of cMOOCs, following the inaugural MOOC 0 the Connectivism jam of Siemens, Downes, and cormier of 2008 (for which no site remains). I was more vested in the digital storytelling community of DS106, which not only still is online, but the web sites still work, and I still do the DS106 Daily Create.
Still, for the most part, academics and scholars and such hardly gave any respect to DS106.
But the heart that still pulses and beats there is the magic of the Feed WordPress plugin (still works) to run what came to be known as a “Connected Course” where participants did their work, reflections on a blog/web site they controlled/managed, but their posts could be syndicated to the main site using Feed WordPress.
Can I say again that this old technology still works? I know Ken Bauer might still be using it and Maha Bali as well, and of course the mother ship DS106 still syndicates as “the flow” where it has collected some 92,000 syndicated posts (some intrepid scholar might consider that as a research topic, but no one likely will).
Anyhow,,this significance for ETMOOC to me was it being the first site I created a FeedWordPress syndication hub after learning how to do it for DS106. I cannot recall how it happened, but I guess Alec asked me.
I built for ETMOOC a 3 part site via WordPress multisite including:
. I noticed a while ago, it was pretty broken! I’d helped Alec a few times with his WordPress sites as it seemed like his htaccess file kept getting deleted. Tonight, I went in to fix, and it took a while to locate the proper one to fix it, and I added an SSL plugin to make sure all links went to https. Something was still funky on the two subsites, no images appeared in the media library… it ended up taking a custom pair of rewrite rules to resolve the old way WordPress created URLs to images.
Anyhow, the ETMOOC site is back for the party and some historical purposes (it likely is broken elsewhere).
Getting this working made a path for me to refine the syndicated blog approach for a few other sites, and organizing my approach as a guide:
A lot of this was a result for applying the DS106 system to ETMOOC.
But there was more to it than just web sites… it was in the days when educators were openly sharing and building those network connections, many of which are alive for me today, 10 years later, when Twitter is a simmering pile of poop, and most folks have given up on their blogs.
The thing I did not have for ETMOOC was the gravity forms($) plugin that enabled the automatic adding of a new feed to the syndication hub. I did ETMOOCs old school manual thing with a Google Form, and I ended up first checking the feeds for 500+blogs and adding them directly to Feed WordPress (it seemed 30%+ got things not quite right finding the RSS feed for a tag/category). But the upside was — I got a glance at every participants blog!
I have a few lingering posts tagged ETMOOC a few of them the nerdy WordPress details of building the site, but it was fun to discover the 2013 version of a Mastodon #introduction as a video
It was such a rich time for networked learning and oh oh oh so innocent. I think if you described the net culture of 2023 to us 10 years ago we’d be shocked (or disbelieving).
So thanks ETMOOC for what it was, and Susan for keeping the spirit alive.
I’ll see your 10 and raise you another 10. See you in 2033.
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These aren't the Little Tikes from your childhood. These are Dark Little Tykes, scaled-down 3d-modeled and printed sculptures that put a humorously grim twist on the Little Tikes from your childhood. They're the brilliant creation of Brooklyn artist Andy Sahlstrom and are intended to be collectible art pieces for adults. — Read the rest
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