How Children Learn by John Holt

Marked to-read 04/28/18.

If you got me one of these, it would arrive just in time for my birthday in mid-July! I like the teal one. $12

I’ve been on the Internet for a quarter of a century. I think I want to write a big, full memoir on the subject, but for now I’m just going to make some notes.

I got my first email address in 1993. I was in seventh grade. My dad set it up on a public access server at the university where he worked. I don’t know why I was so excited to have it, because nobody else I knew had an email address. But I was sure that email would mitigate the loneliness I felt. I had a loving family and excellent friends. I had basically the best middle school experience a person could hope for. But I still felt this need for more connection, and I thought this tool would get the job done.

I signed my crush’s yearbook with my email address. We went to different schools for eighth grade, because of redistricting, or because I moved. (They both happened at the same time.) He never emailed me.

I don’t think I got much out of that email address until I signed up for listservs.

But that’s a story about 1995.

I love this so much.

Here’s a complete list of everything I’ve got going on right now. And by “going on,” I mean a level of intensity ranging from “thinking about maybe doing it” to “seriously working on it.” (Categories come from the Integrative Nutrition Circle of Life exercise.)

Spirituality

• Daily tarot card pull as a means of connecting with my intuition

Creativity

• Things of Bronze podcast
• Compiling a YouTube playlist of comedy sketches that epitomize my comedic sensibility
• Developing a concept for a geeky variety show
• A memoir about adolescence/early adulthood in the early days of the World Wide Web
• Something for the 10th anniversary of Doctor Horrible
• Daily blogging
• Indiewebifying kimberlyhirsh.com

Finances

• Reducing grocery spending via using my Soda Stream, freezing leftovers, and eating out of the pantry/fridge/freezer

Career

• Writing culturally sustaining pedagogy online curriculum module for Project READY.
• Steeping myself in the world of YA librarianship

Education

• Working on the Makerspaces section of my comprehensive literature review

Health, Home Cooking

• Eagerly awaiting Healing PCOS

Physical Activity

• Resuming walks with my family
• Swimming with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance self-coaching course

Home Environment

• Putting together a list of tasks for the handyman
• Cleaning out the upstairs linen closet as part of packing and purging in anticipation of putting our house on the market

Relationships

• Treating Will to a birthday surprise
• All the parenting: deciding how and when to potty train, buying springtime clothes, selecting toddler tableware

Social Life

• Figuring out when to schedule game nights
• Planning Google Hangouts

Joy

• Continuing to have a super cute kid with an excellent giggle

What, you DON’T have a bunch of Harry Potter role-playing names just lying around?

This has me thinking about the dangers of algorithms and the role of social media silos in the blogging economy. I have been watching hobby blogs become businesses for about 15 years. Affiliate links have always been one of the top ways to monetize a blog or website, but I think social media has changed how that traffic moves. (I haven’t paid as close attention to this sphere in the past 5 years or so but I’m sort of always a little bit aware of it.)

I’m thinking about the relationship between this phenomenon and the IndieWeb, of course. The thing is that all of the bloggers quoted in the article have their own domain names and seem to run their own independent blogs, but clearly get a lot of traffic from Instagram. Publishing on your own site and syndicating on Instagram wouldn’t protect you from this kind of content scraping. The way this affiliate economy seems to work, telling these creators to just wean themselves off Instagram seems like telling them to stop having their primary source of income.

If I were in a position to give them advice (as, say, a librarian whose job it is to advise young people on smart practices for information creation and dissemination), I’m not sure what advice I’d give them.

This has illuminated for me several issues I want to research/revisit, though:

• The current state of affiliate marketing
• The difference between a blogger and an influencer
• The relationship between an influencer's blog and social media presence (Is their content being syndicated or do they publish different things in each venue?)

My friend who is a fifth grade teacher told me that all her students are already YouTubers and expect to monetize their content and support themselves full-time. Once of the bloggers quoted in this Racked article, Nita of Next with Nita, finished law school and then moved to LA “to pursue [her] dream as an influencer.” (She has over 210,000 Instagram followers. I can’t imagine telling her to just quit Instagram would be good advice.)

Those jobs that didn’t exist yet that those of us who were teaching 10 or 15 years ago were preparing kids for? Influencer is one of them. YouTuber is one of them. Educators and technologists need to think about how to talk to youth about their creations, how they are monetized, and who gets to monetize them.

When my mind is sharp, I work on my comprehensive exams. When it’s fuzzy but not dull, I work on IndieWeb stuff. When it’s dull, I work on my podcast. When my body has energy, I tidy. When I’m ready to trade outputs for inputs, I listen to podcasts. In any given moment, I check in with myself and let how I feel guide my next action.

Was watching Silicon Valley S5E3 and Richard started waxing poetic about redecentralizing the internet and users owning their data and I got all ?.

I’ve always enjoyed The Bloggess when she came across my radar (And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles is a particular favorite). For some reason, though, I’ve always resisted becoming fully obsessed with her. Maybe because she’s popular and I’m inappropriately contrarian? Well, no more. After listening to her episode of THWoD I’ve decided we should be BFFs, and you obviously can’t befriend someone without reading their books and blog, so off I go…