An interesting article (based on research) aimed at #museum #educators regarding what #teachers want from museums & how best to contact them: https://gem.org.uk/gem-conference-2022-how-do-we-contact-teachers-five-lessons-learnt-from-the-art-fund-teacher-art-pass-research-development-year-2021-2022/

I have some comments (🧵):

"94% of our TAP teachers believe museums are places of inspiration and learning, contributing to the wellbeing of themselves and their pupils."

This finding seems iffy to me. Whilst certainly true, the cohort studied were those who either already had a Teacher Art Pass (TAP) or found the offer of one enticing enough to get them to take part in the study. Of *course* most of them think #museums are useful. It's the 6% that I'm surprised by.

That's my one criticism, though. The findings summarised in the article generally ring true with those from my MA project, which focused exclusively on #maths. I don't know whether the ArtFund project included any maths teachers (I need to check the report to see if this is answered) but the article does state that "science teachers talked about how a museum has to be able to deliver the curriculum better than they can do it in their classroom for them to consider a visit." The maths teachers in my project said something similar, but more that museums _can't_ deliver the maths curriculum better than they can in their classrooms, so they don't want them to. Instead, they want museums to provide opportunities for students to experience maths in context (historical, careers, etc) & to enjoy "doing" (in some sense) maths. A core agreement between the ArtFund research & mine is "most importantly, [...] build a community or network first with teachers and then communicate with them." Longer term relationships, rather than firing off one way mailings, is key.

#MuseumEd

LOL this is not how you deal with "data scraping," this is how you deal with a catastrophic loss of system capacity.

You limit data scraping by blocking things a human user couldn't do, like access a thousand posts a minute. This is aimed directly at reducing normal activity across the whole system.

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

eughhh... it looks like someone has worked out how to create spam accounts en masse on mastodon.social and they've started spamming people here, so I'm getting a stream of reports.

I don't know what to do other then individually blocking them and forwarding the reports to mastodon.social. Defederating from mastodon.social would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

mathstodon.xyz people: please report spammers as soon as you see them

When you write hashtags that contain multiple words, make the first letter of each word a capital letter, for example #DogsOfMastodon. This will make the tag readable to blind people.

Blind people use the internet through screen reader apps, which read text out aloud. By putting a capital at the start of each word in a hashtag, you are telling the screen reader how to say the tag correctly.

In the non-techy world this is generally known as "CamelCase".

(Techy people may call it PascalCase)