Sandy Kendell @SandyKendell@qoto.org

Hello #edutooters! With Thanksgiving approaching for educators in the USA this Thursday, I’m curious to know if your institution will be giving you Wednesday off as well? #education #EduTooter #thanksgiving

Welcome to the new folks joining Mastodon. Here’s a few things to make sure you do first on Mastodon:

-Profile picture, bio, and instruction posts are awesome, even if you’re not sure who/what to tag in them yet.

-Consider pinning an introduction post that tells us what you do and what you might be posting or sharing. This helps others know if they should follow you back.

-Use the search bar to search for hash tags of things you are interested in, for example #History. This helps find some folks to start following.

-Once you start following people and finding some interesting (for you) content, boost those posts. This also helps others know what you are interested in sharing or doing on Mastodon.

-Consider checking out https://a.gup.pe/ and seeing what groups interest you. These work as listservs, in a way—when you tag the @group you follow, it shares it with everyone in that group (like reply all).

-Keep at it! It will feel confusing for a few days, but there are numerous welcoming folks sharing tips on the feed all the time. Give it a little time and you will be a pro in no time.

#Newbies #NewbiesWelcome #Welcome #GettingStarted #HowTo #Hacks

Hello fellow Mastodonians 😜

Exploring due to the Great #TwitterMigration! It is giving me #discord vibes and I am loving it!!

I am a Teacher Librarian in NY who is interested in connecting with #education #edtech #EduMastodon #tlchat

🫙 Steve Wyborney publishes new 3-Container Estimation Routines on Mondays. Students think, discuss, and revise their estimates as more information is revealed.

Download the slides as PPT. (Upload to Google Drive and you can open in Google Slides.)

https://stevewyborney.com/2022/10/the-3-container-estimation-routine/

@edutooters #mathed #edtech #edchat #teaching

We were engaged in a discussion this morning on whether, as a new account here, all our new followers are members of the #TwitterMigration.

So curious... what best describes you?

And feel free to tell us a bit more in a reply.

Pretty soon @TheConversationUS will have more followers on #mastodon after 9 days than we have accumulated on TikTok in 18 months.

Could you help us get to 1159 by boosting this toot and telling your friends about the work we do?

(We're a nonprofit news organization dedicated to sharing the knowledge of academic experts with the public)

https://theconversation.com/us/10-ways-we-are-different

Researchers at ProofPoint are seeing a noticeable increase in phishing campaigns targeting the credentials of Twitter users following Elon Musk’s takeover of the company.
- https://www-therecord.recfut.com/threat-actors-exploiting-twitter-changes-after-musk-takeover-research-shows/ #cybersecurity #TwitterMigration #EdTech

Mistakes were made

I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon in 24 hours than I have in Twitter in a couple of years. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.
As a blind person, this means a lot to me. If you read this and you describe your images, thank you so, so, so much on behalf of all of us. If you don't, now you know you'll be helping random Internet strangers make sense of your posts by typing in a few more words than usual.

Here’s a bonus toot. I’ll give a free virtual author visit to any school/library who wants one if you can work out how to follow me and ask. (Fairly confident in my lack of followers that this won’t be a problem) #schools #education #literacy #childrensbook #edutoot #kidslit Can you retoot? Be my guest!

Hey all, I'm looking for people who do #Computinghistory to follow.

(#computerhistory #historyofcomputers #techhistory #historyoftech ; I don't really know what are the established hashtags yet)

If you are, or you know some, could you please let me know? Thanks!

#edpolicy folks, people of #education #academia, etc: consider signing up to sub in your local school district. If you lead an education services organization, give your people a few days off to sub. You will:

1. Get valuable professional development
2. Meet a critical need in our field
3. Get humbled in a good way

I’ve been subbing this Fall and I’m learning so much. If you normally work in the realm of frameworks and theory, it will add valuable perspective and complexity to your practice.

So someone messaged me privately and asked how absolute this is.. like would we block an instance calling for genocide. I feel my response is import to reiterate here, so here it is:

Its not just about the authorities, it is about the people whose lives are at risk by that call to genocide having the right to see those posts and use that information to look out for their own safety... If someone is doxed, they should know, if someone is threatened, they should know, and they should be able to take action.

Someone saying violent things online doesnt guarantee some police officer will meander by and take them down. The law only tends to get involved once someone is reported, and sometimes not even then. No one will be reporting a site if no one can see or know it is there.

The question is, if someone is being physically threatened and having their life in jeopardy how are you helping them by blocking the privileges of the **victim** and disallowing the victim the right to see the threat placed against them?

In short, I refuse to take away rights from the victim simply because there is a violent bad actor out there. If the victim doesn't want to see it they simply need to import the block list and the problem is solved for them, so why not keep the power in the victims hands?

I mentioned this in a private message to someone recently about why a small handful of servers block qoto. I wanted to reiterate it here for the new comers on QOTO who dont know the history:

So there are some servers out there that demand every server int he network block every instance they do, and if a server doesnt block an instance they block then they block you in rettatliation.

Their reason for this is quite flawed but it goes like this.. If we federate with a bad actor instance and we boost one of their posts then their users will see it and defeat the purpose of the block. The problem is, this isnt how it actually works. If they block a server and we boost it, they wont see the boost, thats how blocks work.

The issue becomes even more complicated when you consider the fact that these servers, by virtue of their policy, have huge block lists where they block tons of major servers. So in order to satisfy them we too would have to block a huge number of servers.

This means you have a choice, you either join a server that isnt blocked, but has a huge block list themselves, or, you join a server that doesnt block and be blocked by a small handful of servers. Obviously that means on QOTO you will have bigger view of the world than you would on any of these others servers. In fact QOTO has onne of the largest federation footprints of any server in the network.

I want to also explain why we choose the decision we did. Years ago when this controversy started and servers across the fediverse started blocking there was a divide of people taking sides. WOTO was one of the few servers that didnt take sides and allowed people read content from any server (but with strict hate speech rules). This caused a huge influx of people,s pecifically from the LGBTQ community, onto our server. It turns out many people relied on us not-blocking for their physical safety. There were big name biggots (like milo yanappolus) who were on the network. They used their accounts here to watch his account for doxing so they could warn themselves and their community and protect themselves accordingly. In fact we added a feature just for them called subscriptions which allowed them to monitor accounts without following them so they could do so anonymously.

In tthe end for the safety of the LGBTQ community here we refused to engage in mass server blocking and instead encouraged our users to block servers on an individual basis and provided access to block lists for them to do so. But some really misguided servers blocked us anyway.

Thankfully the servers blocking us are few and far between and are limited to only the most excessive and aggressive block lists. As I said, QOTO has one of the largest federation footprints on the fediverse,

#mastoadmin

So many people are having a bad first experience with Mastodon because they're using the official app which is lacking features, doesn't allow image uploads randomly, has random slowness, and doesn't give you easy access to the two most active feeds where you can find people (Local and Federated).

Please switch to Metatext, Tusky, or Tooot for a better mobile experience (or even use a browser).

Out of the >15k users that joined this week, over 11k are on the official apps.

If you’re wanting to boost your ed tech knowledge but don’t know where to start, take a look at three key sources to explore. #Education #edtech #EduTooter #tcea https://blog.tcea.org/ed-tech-pro/ @edutooters @dougholton #edchat

So I’ve been here a week & it looks like this place is my new favourite way to waste time! Here goes my #introduction I’m a reader who’s blind & often uses a wheelchair. I teach Braille & firmly believe whatever format you read in, do what’s right for you. Always looking for book recs, especially 20th century literature & contemporary reads with good disability rep. When not reading I can be found absorbed in a podcast or making the tea ☕️ Top hashtags… #blind #ChronicPain #Disability #Braille #audiobooks #podcast #a11y #Books #bookstodon #Literature #Libraries #CatsOfMastodon