What Is This Stuff Good For?

I ran across this interesting lit course in a blog post:  100 MUST READS OF MAGICAL REALISM by LEAH RACHEL VON ESSEN10-17-17

I think what they are trying to do is generate Amazon affiliate revenue.  Considering how much work went into producing this I don’t blame them a bit.

I was just messing around to see where the exploration might lead, a random feldgang.

First, I pulled all the links off of the page using Linkgrabber.

Second, I pasted the links into Dropbox Papers because it is handy as a collaborative space.  It also has added two elements that are handy if you wanted to do group work: each bulleted item can be given a due date as well as assigned to someone via email or name (if they are dropbox paper users). There is also a comment function as well that allows for threaded discussion and ‘resolution’ of issues.

Third, I edited out the links that were irrelevant and then added ‘to-so’ checkboxes to each book.

Fourth, since Papers doesn’t create an embed, I had to go Google Drive to create a doc where I could copy and past the Papers document content into a Google Doc.  I did that just so I could create an embed.

Fifth, I created a post here in WordPress and copied the Google Doc embed code here
to share.

So…why did I just lay down this list of breadcrumbs?  I like to practice using tools just in case something new breaks loose.  For example, I didn’t realize that Papers had those two new tools.  Nor did I realize that it had not carried over Hackpad’s embed feature when they created Papers.

Here is a version I put on Cryptpad just because I wanted to explore a bit.  And it allows for blockchain encryption, too.

Here is a version I put on etherpad clone, Board.net.

So…what for?

1. Exploring. Isn’t that intrinsically valuable for me?  The question is whether it has value for you as well.
2. Perhaps I could create a collaborative page with only ten of these novels and I could invite folks once a week to come talk about the book they were given to read.
3. Perhaps doing the previous activity might lead to other collaborative ‘stuff and things’ including Google Hangout/Facebook Live ad hoc-ity.
4. Crowdsourcing without a wiki.
5. Other feldgangs and emergences as yet to be ascertained.

Number five sounds coolest to me.  OK, if you got this far maybe you can suggest other possibilities or perhaps tell me to stop with the hundred ways.