Greg McVerry and I did a course last summer that leveraged Webmention so that students could own and control their own identities and data.

From a broader perspective, the Domain of One's Own and the IndieWeb movements are set up to help empower not just students and teachers, but all people to be able to own their domains, own their data, and better interact and communicate online.

There's and upcoming Domains conference in early June in Durham, NC and the big IndieWeb Summit is in Portland in late June.

Tantek Celik does a good job encapsulating some of the history and problems in his talk "Why We Need the IndieWeb" at the Personal Democracy Forum. (Note this was in 2014 and things have generally gotten worse  for social media; simultaneously the indie web has gotten much stronger and bigger.)

You'll probably have noticed by now that I own my own data and online identity. Everything I post online originates from a site I own and control and then gets syndicated out to others.