Greg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)For today’s #edu522 #dailyponderance you need to highlight some cool #edtech tools. Give us 3-5 apps or websites we should try in class.
Hypothesis – a service that allows me to quickly highlight and annotate content on almost any web page or .pdf file
IFTTT.com – a service which I use in combination with other services, most often to get data from those sites back to my own. For example:
- Recipe to get Hypothesis annotations from Hypothesis to my site
- Recipe to syndicate Goodreads posts of books I’m reading to my website
Huffduffer.com – a service I with audio related content I find online. I use its bookmarklet to save audio from web pages. Huffduffer then creates a custom RSS feed that I can subscribe to in any podcatcher for catching up on podcasts while I’m on the go.
Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress – since many in the class are also using it, I’ll mention that I love using its bookmarklet functionality to quickly bookmark, favorite, or reply to other posts on the web.
URL Forwarder – This is an Android-based app that I’ve configured to dovetail with the Post Kinds Plugin and my website for posting to my site more quickly via mobile.
Jon Udell’s media clipper – I use this audio/video tool for finding and tagging the start and stop points of media so that I can highlight specific portions for others
Today’s #dailyponderance comes from us via Cheri Who read about @hypothesis in @chrisaldrich’s last #dailyponderance post. Your point to ponder what does public reading mean? Does performative nature come into play?
Join the private group Cheri created, annotate @zephoria’s first two chapters as you read, then post a reflection about the reading
Syndicated copies:
Chapters 1 and 2 of It’s Complicated: The Social Network Lives of Teens, by Danah Boyd (2014) outline virtual identities of teenagers, and views of privacy in relation to social networking. Our assignment was to read these chapters, and take notes/annotate and reflect on our own experience. In an effort to figure out how I might best present these notes, I stumbled upon Hypothesis, a resource for highlighting and annotating content shared with our class by Chris Aldrich. As it turned out you can create a private group and invite multiple people to annotate within the same document, so I decided to create one for this class and invite others to join in.
The irony is not lost on me that this reading was about virtual identity/public vs privacy and we were asked to discuss what public reading meant, and if performative nature comes into play for our #dailyponderance. While reading and annotating with others, you are essentially creating your identity as a learner among the group participants. Performative nature definitely comes into play. Suddenly you are exposing yourself as the type of learner you are, and your literacy capabilities. Other’s will be viewing what your highlighting and annotating. Some may even create their version of your identity based on what you highlight and share, which may not necessarily align with the identity you intended to portray.
In this particular case, I was not uncomfortable to put myself out there. In EDU522 we’ve been learning new things at an accelerated rate. I don’t feel self-conscious among my peers in this course because everything is new. I can, however relate to a particularly terrible experience I had in 8th grade History. That class structure was the same every day (with the exception of test days). We would take turns reading the text book out loud, and discuss the material. The teacher would depend on us to volunteer to read, but he would often call on you if you tried to avoid it. I was awful at reading out loud, and the anxiety I experienced every day for fear of being called on was at times unbearable. The days I did get called on rarely went well. I would lose my place, and stumble over words (even easy ones). I know that some of my peers viewed me as an incompetent classmate which was certainly not the identity I wanted, or even believed about myself.
At the end of the day, how you hope to present yourself (virtually or otherwise), and how others interrupt you may not always align. I think it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse there.
Feel free to check out the hypothes.is group I made here.
https://hypothes.is/groups/e2261vda/edu522
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Example assignment: https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/5570-2/
Notice the replies underneath which came from other sites including my response which is mirrored on my site at https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/04/highlighting-some-of-my-favorite-edtech-tools/
Example podcast post for a class: https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/2toponder-episode-one/
Notice the listen webmention in the comments which links to my listen response at: https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/06/2toponder-episode-one-intertextrevolution/ where I own a copy of the context and my own response. As a student, even if the originals disappear, I’ve got the majority of the important content from the course.
Syndicated copies:
Abstract: With growing support for the W3C Webmention spec, teachers can post assignments on their own websites & students can use their sites to respond and interact. Entire classes can have open discussions from site-to-site owning all their data and eschewing corporate surveillance capitalism.
Missed my presentation for PressEdConf20 on Twitter earlier and want to read it all bundled up instead? The “article” version appears blow. You can also enjoy the Twitter moment version if you like.
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Chris Aldrich
Hello everyone! My name is Chris Aldrich. I’m an independent researcher in a variety of areas including the overlap the internet and education. You can find more about me on my website https://boffosocko.com
Today I’ll be talking about Webmentions for open pedagogy.
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For a variety of reasons (including lack of budget, time, support, and other resources) many educators have been using corporate tools from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others for their ease-of-use as well as for a range of functionality that hadn’t previously existed in the blogosphere or open source software that many educators use or prefer.
This leaves us and our students open to the vagaries and abuses that those platforms continually allow including an unhealthy dose of surveillance capitalism.
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
THREE
In the intervening years since the blogosphere and the rise of corporate social media, enthusiasts, technologists and open source advocates have continued iterating on web standards and open protocols, so that now there are a handful of web standards that work across a variety of domains, servers, platforms, allowing educators to use smaller building blocks to build and enable the functionalities we need for building, maintaining, and most importantly owning our online courseware.
FOUR
Some of these new W3C specs include Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, IndieAuth, and Microsub. Today I’ll talk abut Webmentions which are simply site-to-site @mentions or notifications which don’t involve corporate social media silos.
For those who’d like more information about Webmentions and how they could be used, I’ve written a primer for A List Apart entitled Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
Illustration by Dougal MacPherson
Image courtesy of A List Apart
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Many common content management systems support Webmention either out of the box or with plugins including: our friend WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Grav, and many others.
Webmention rocks
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WordPress can use this new standard with the Webmention plugin. (Surprise!) I also highly recommend the Semantic Linkbacks plugin which upgrades the presentation of these notifications (like Trackback, Pingback, or Webmention) to more user-friendly display so they appear in comments sections much like they do in corporate social media as comments, reposts, likes, and favorites, detected using microformats2 markup from the source of the linkback.
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Another plugin I love is Post Kinds Plugin (Classic editor only at present) which automatically parses URLs I want to reply to, like, bookmark, etc. and saves the reply context to my website which helps prevent context collapse. My commentary and notes then appear below it.
(I also use a plugin that saves the content of URLs on my site to the Internet Archive, so I can reference them there later if necessary.)
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These plugins with WordPress allow teachers to post course content and students can then post their responses on their own sites and send notifications that they’ve read, listened to, or watched that content along with their ideas and commentary.
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Examples of webmentions in a course setting: Greg McVerry and I ran an experiment with Webmentions in a class in 2018.
Example assignment: https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/5570-2/
Notice the replies underneath which came from other sites including my response which is mirrored on my site at https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/04/highlighting-some-of-my-favorite-edtech-tools/
Example podcast post for a class: https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/2toponder-episode-one/
Notice the listen webmention in the comments which links to my listen response at: https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/06/2toponder-episode-one-intertextrevolution/ where I own a copy of the context and my own response. As a student, even if the originals disappear, I’ve got the majority of the important content from the course.
TEN
When the course is over, the student has an archive of their readings, work, and participation (portfolio anyone?) on a site they own. They can choose to leave it public or unpublish it and keep private copies.
[Copies for Facebook, Google+ or Big EdTech Giants? They can ask for them nicely if they want them so desperately instead of taking them surreptitiously.]
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As a concrete example, I now have tagged archives for all the work I’ve done for EDU522 with Greg McVerry who also has his related posts in addition to a variety that he subsequently archived.
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By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.
[No more content farming? What will the corporate social media silos do?]
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Imagine Webmentions being used for referencing journal articles, academic samizdat, or even OER? Suggestions and improvement could accumulate on the original content itself rather than being spread across dozens of social silos on the web.
[Webmentions + creativity: How might you take their flexibility and use it in your online teaching practices?]
FOURTEEN
There’s current research, coding work, and thinking going on within the IndieWeb community to extend ideas like private webmentions and limiting audience so that this sort of interaction can happen in more secluded online spaces.
I’d welcome everyone who’s interested to join in the effort. Feel free to inquire at an upcoming IndieWebCamp, Homebrew Website Club, event, or in online chat right now.
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I’ve also been able to use my WordPress website to collect posts relating to my participation in conferences like PressEdConf20 or Domains 2019 which included syndicated content to Twitter and the responses from there that have come back to my site using Brid.gy which bootstraps Twitter’s API to send Webmentions back to my website.
If Twitter were to go away, they may take some of my connections, but the content and the conversations will live on in a place under my own control.
Thanks for your time and attention! I’m around on Twitter–or better: my own website!–if you have any questions.
Syndicated copies: