Month: October 2020

RSVPed Attending IndieWebCamp East 2020 pre-camp preparation

November 10, 2020 at 05:00PM - November 10, 2020 at 06:00PM

  • Are you new to the IndieWeb? (Hello and welcome if you are!)
  • Are you planning on attending IndieWebCamp East 2020 and aren't sure what to expect?
  • Not sure how to access, set up, or use any of the common community tools like chat, the IndieWeb Wiki, or Etherpad?
  • Do you have questions about brainstorming a potential session and how to facilitate it?

We'll do a quick overview of how camp works and what to expect. We'll provide a walk through of all the common technologies and some of the community cultural norms around using them so that when camp starts on Saturday morning, you'll feel more comfortable and be prepared and ready to go to have two fun and productive days of improving your website.

Users of all levels of ability are encouraged to attend this session. Bring all your camp-related questions and we'll do our best to answer them.

There's no need to RSVP for this session. It's completely acceptable to just show up at the appointed time.

I’ll be hosting this, so I’ll definitely be there!
Read - Want to Read: Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work by Michael P. Farrell (University of Chicago Press)
Many artists, writers, and other creative people do their best work when collaborating within a circle of like-minded friends. In a unique study, Michael P. Farrell looks at the group dynamics in six collaborative circles, and gives vivid narrative accounts of each: the French Impressionists; Sigmund Freud and his friends; C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings; social reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; the Fugitive poets; and the writers Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford.
This looks like an interesting read. Came to my attention by way of http://weiweihsu.com/2020-05-28/weeknotes-42.

A Session Proposal for IndieWebCamp East: A Domain of One’s Own LMS

IndieWebCamp East (Online) is coming up on the weekend of November 14-15, 2020, so I’ve tentatively proposed a session on creating an IndieWeb/Domain of One’s Own Learning Management System.

Proposal:

A Domain of One’s Own LMS

The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly forced educators to flee online where there is a wealth of predatory, amoral, and questionable platforms for managing online pedagogy. Starting closer to first principles, how might we design and build an LMS (Learning Management System) based on IndieWeb principles or using the related ideas behind A Domain of One’s Own where the teacher and students own their own content, learning content, and personal learning network.

Can we dovetails ideas and principles from the Open Educational Resources (OER) space with this at the same time?

Let’s get together to look at some common patterns in our online coursework to leverage existing technologies that privilege ownership, agency, control, and privacy to see how we might build and use our own infrastructure rather than relying on unethical corporations.

Session hashtag:

Naturally anyone with a website is welcome to join us for the BarCamp-style IndieWebCamp that weekend, but I would specifically like to invite all the educators, teachers, course designers, and students who are using their own domains or who are in a Domain of One’s Own program to join us.

It would be great to see others either share their knowledge or experiences or even lead brainstorming sessions so we can all work at improving our websites and adding additional useful functionality to make them do the things we’d like them to. I’d love nothing more than to get enough people show up on Saturday to create an entire “Education” focused track to appear and then have everyone return on Sunday to help each other get our hands dirty in building or improving our sites to create something together.

You can RSVP for the weekend for free here: https://2020.indieweb.org/east.

If you have any questions about proposing sessions, either in advance or preparing to propose them the morning of camp, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Bookmarked Dynamic Content for Elementor (Dynamic Content for Elementor)
The Most Unique Toolkit for Elementor to Create Powerful Websites and Professional Contents. Get It Now. 30 Day Risk-Free Guarantee.
Alex Vasquez gave this Elementor add-on a positive review tonight at the WordPress Meetup.

It’s also the first time I’ve seen/noticed a .ooo TLD.

On customer service (and how SCE is dreadful at it)

Just the same way that VC-backed rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft offload corporate cost centers and burdens onto their employees (which they’d otherwise like to call independent contractors), most customer service phone trees are meant to save time for their paid employees while offloading that same burden onto their customers all while wrongly calling it “customer service”.

I’ve just had such a painful experience with Southern California Edison (SCE) Power Company that kept me on hold for 31 minutes (a dreadful dark pattern in its own right) to offload the dreadful work of their call center costs onto me. The reason for my call? A simple request to literally flip one bit in their database–something that, if they really cared about customer service, should have taken two minutes from start to finish via phone or even under one minute online. Yet here I am bearing their miserable burden. 

I found a phone number that should have taken me directly to a point in their phone tree that should have asked at most one question, given me a representative and taken less than a minute. Instead I get dumped into the beginning of a larger tree that gives me options for the 5 other phone numbers and options I’d seen online. Why?!

Naturally they ask me to input my account number, which I do, but what’s the first question the representative wastes our time asking? My account number!

But guess what, that customer service representative can’t help me with the lowest level request to flip one bit from a yes to a no. They send me to a special department and make me sit on hold for another 20 minutes. I’m sure it wasn’t because they were so busy, but more to discourage me–otherwise the first customer service person would have been able to help. The design of their system not only isn’t set up to help them lower costs, it’s designed to actively make things worse for me. 

Screw you Southern California Edison! Your system should be designed just to minimize your direct cost for supplying customer service, it should be designed to minimize the cost on both sides.

It’s been eating at me for ages and I just never bothered to puzzle it out, but when typing Japanese, to get the smaller characters like small tsu that indicate a doubling of a consonant (like tt, pp, kk, etc.) just type your Japanese word in Romaji with the repeated consonant sound twice followed by the vowel and (hopefully) one’s IME  should show the small tsu with the correct follow up character.

So for “pretty” as kekkou, type ke-k-ko-u which transforms to けっこうautomatically.

Liked a tweet (Twitter)