The disappearance of the Secret Service’s text messages from January 6, 2021 is a data preservation issue, so I’m briefly reviving this blog from its long sleep to analyze it the best I can.
What we know
“Text messages” sent between Secret Service phones on January 6, 2021, during the unrest in Washington, DC, became unavailable within the bureau. News reporting has gotten so bad that it’s hard to find out just what this means; this CNN article contains more detail than most of the reports I’ve found.
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Helping a nation of homeschoolers: Digital preservation
We’ve abruptly become a nation of homeschoolers. People are figuring out how to do it with no preparation. They have to face a lot of issues, most of which I’m not helpful with. One of them is finding good material on the Internet. There’s no lack of well-written, informative pages; the hard part is sorting them out from all the garbage. Many of us can help in our fields of expertise by providing pointers to the best material.
On Twitter I saw a call for “expert sniffers,” people who can find the experts. We can do that where we’re specialists if not experts. We need to find articles that are good from an educational standpoint. Presenting all the knowledge isn’t enough; the hard part is presenting it in a way that learners can understand.
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Tagged Files that Last, homeschooling, preservation