Reply to Kat about daily ponderance

Replied to Daily Ponderance: July 30, 2018 by Kat DiClementeKat DiClemente (kasem-beg.com)
Images then & now, that represents how I feel about this class…
I like the ideas of some of these images. Even more interesting to me than the ponderance itself is that Kat has gotten the start of an h-card up on her website! I can see her name and photo now! She’s got a bit more human understandable identity.

This also means that when we use Post Kinds to reply to her, the built-in parser will find her name and photo automatically.

I do notice that it’s missing picking up her website URL properly. I suspect it’s because she left her user profile’s Website field (located at http://kasem-beg.com/wp-admin/profile.php#url) empty.

Sketches of my Home and About page designs

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)

For today’s #dailyponderance I want you to put the computer away, grab some paper and pencil and map out what you think your homepage and about me page should contain.

You don’t need to be an artist, boxes and stuick figures will do.

You don’t have to be writer. Copy can come later. Think layout.

If you already have an about me and a home page sketch it out for others to see what your “prototype” looks like.

I’ve actually been doing some small revamping of both my Home and my About pages on the site recently, so this is actually a nice little exercise that’s reminding me about some of the small changes I’d like to effect. It also reminds me of some of the changes I want to make with regard to some of my menu structures too.

Lately I’ve added a bunch of different ways to slice and dice the content on my site so that readers can hopefully more easily find or discover the content they may be most interested in reading.  I’ve also been trying to pare down on the amount of information and detail which I present.

So without additional ado, here they are:

Home and About Page layouts

Reply to dailyponderance on public reading

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)

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

I suspect that my definition of public reading is quite different than most because I’ve been actively doing it for over a year or so now. I post nearly everything I read onto my personal website, and quite often with my notes, highlights, annotations, and some brief analysis. Rarely, if ever, do people react or interact with it, though on occasion it will spark a nice, albiet short discussion. In some part, I post all of it for my own personal consumption and later search, though perhaps one day someone will come across something and it will light a bigger fire. Who knows?

It all reminds me of something my friend P.M. Forni once told me about his own writing as a scholar of the early Italian Renaissance. He said he thought it was sad that only about eleven people would ever read any of his academic writing at a very deep level, but he was far more gratified to be able to write prescriptive books on the area of civility and living a better life that were featured on Oprah and had readers in the millions. I’m happy to write on these topics and have no readers–besides myself–whatsoever.

Of course all of this to say, that as educators we still ought to provide relatively safe spaces for students to try on ideas, make arguments, and see what comes of it without damaging them in the long run.

I’ve read many online documents that have been annotated by many others, most of them in the early days of Genius.com when it was known as Rap Genius. It has been a while, however, since I’ve read something like boyd’s It’s Complicated with so many annotations by others. It is quite refreshing to see a relatively high level of work and commentary on a piece (compared to the typical dreck that one can find in most online newspapers’ comments sections.)  I suspect that for some performative nature may come into play, but I find this less of a factor on more scholarly facing platforms like Hypothesis (compared to Genius.com or Twitter). Certainly one can get caught up in the idea of becoming famous or popular for their commentary.

As boyd points out in the introduction to her book, this sort of thing seems to be common human nature:

None of the videos they made were of especially high quality, and while they shared them publicly on YouTube, only their friends watched them. Still, whenever they got an additional view—even if only because they forced a friend to watch the video—they got excited.

In the end, some of it may come down to audience. For whom are you writing, annotating, or working?  The vast majority of the time, I’m writing and documenting for myself. Anyone else that stumbles upon the conversation may hopefully only make it more interesting, but as often as not, except for an occasional class no one notices–and even then they may not publicly comment.

As for boyd’s book, I’m somewhat less than impressed. I’m aware of much of her work and appreciate the role she plays in the broader public conversation, but I’ve been far too close to the topic she’s writing about for far too long. I view it in a somewhat more historical framework and slightly different viewpoint than she. As a result, she’s not telling me much I didn’t already know or haven’t thought about for quite  a while. I suspect that my commentary in my annotations may make this a bit more clear.

Reply to Greg McVerry on Memes as Lazy Metaphors

Replied to Memes as Lazy Metaphors by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
You could choose any picture in the world to represent you and you chose a meme… Day One We started off our #dailyponderances in #EDU522 thinking visually. Each person was asked to post a picture that represented how you felt. The funny memes flooded in I laughed, but I also grasped how frustrated...
As I’ve been reflecting on this further, it does dawn on me that on day one or two of the course many of us had probably just read the Schedule of Assignments/Workflow page of the course site, which also carries the title How The Sausage is Made.

Perhaps we all went to meme-speak because you had subtly primed us to go there? You could try a nice experiment when you teach this course again…

 

 

👓 #EDU522 Week Two Update | Greg McVerry

Replied to #EDU522 Week Two Update #literacies #doo #edtechchat by Greg Mcverry (jgregorymcverry.com)
You are right Miguel!

This is awesome. What might otherwise be a relatively dull update is suddenly awesome and entertaining to watch. I may lose the month to playing around with Plotagon now.

I do wish they had a way to do embeds directly though. The iframe isn’t the best and I suspect is doing wonky things for the page, though at least it’s viewable. Perhaps using the page’s .mp4 with <video> tags?

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg 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.
Some of my favorite and often used edtech tools:

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:

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

👓 Learning to Love the Stable Link | Uncommon Sense

Replied to Learning to Love the Stable Link by Karen WulfKaren Wulf (Uncommon Sense — The Blog | Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)
When you’re striving to make your students’ lives just a click easier by embedding an article in your syllabus or posting it to Blackboard (or another online learning environment), however, it’s important to embed the link to the article rather than the PDF of the article itself. It’s easy to do; you simply paste the link from JSTOR or MUSE into the same field you would paste a document or PDF. It’s no more difficult for the students, and it makes a big difference to the journals whose articles you’re teaching.
I can’t help but read this and think that there’s a good use case for the Webmention spec here. Similar to my thinking in IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing, it seems relatively obvious that professors could be referencing the DOIs or other permalink URLs for journals and articles they’re assigning and sending webmentions so that the journal itself could receive webmentions of those facts. This in turn would help those journals have a better understanding of the number of incoming links as well as referrer traffic and potential readers they’ve got.

I’ve outlined a bit of how read posts on the web can send notifications to journal articles to allow them to better track traffic. Similar to use cases I’ve outlined for podcasts which have some large aggregate download data, but absolutely no actual “I listened to this particular episode” data, explicit read webmentions for journal articles could be a boon to these journals as well as to the greater research enterprise.

Separately but similarly, it would be nice if journals could take advantage of annotation platforms like Hypothes.is (especially if they sent webmentions to the canonical links or DOIs for .pdfs) to get a better idea of how closely, or not, academics are reading and annotating their works.

👓 Making changes | Colin Walker

Replied to Making changes by Colin WalkerColin Walker (colinwalker.blog)

I've been doing some thinking - I know, always dangerous.

Returning to pen and paper on the way to work this morning I started making a few notes in response to James' post and extrapolated somewhat to the point where I set some things in motion internally. I think they're continuations of how I've been thinking and feeling for a while but have coalesced into something more solid.

Being largely offline for a number of days felt right, it felt like how I need to be at the moment. So I'm going to be stepping back.

Since reading James’ post I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and how to best respond myself. I haven’t figured it all out yet. I’ve been considering taking a bit of a break, particularly as Facebook and other platforms are making drastic changes to how they operate on the web.

I’ve also been thinking about it in light of the Greg McVerry’s EDU522 course which has a bit of a social media purge built into it.

That said, I’m not sure what I’ll ultimately be doing, but I find it refreshing that Colin’s made this decision for himself. It sounds like it’s coming from a genuine place and I know he probably needs the break as much as many of us do.

Colin, I know many of your friends stretched across the world will miss your regular presence, even if we don’t say it on a regular basis, but good luck, and know that we’re always here for you if you need anything!

I miss him already…

👓 #EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress | Greg McVerry

Replied to #EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
Hello in today’s first daily update I wanted to share about RSS if you wanted a little background here you go:
My feeds for the class would be:

I don’t have everyone in it yet, but I’ve started an OPML file for the class that one could use to subscribe to in Inoreader. Otherwise you can save the file (typically with the extension .xml) and upload it into the reader of your choice, however you’ll need to come back and get updates as I add new feeds. If you’d like me to add you to the list, drop your details into the comments as you’d like them to appear on my Following Page or send my original post a webmention from your site.

An image to represent how I feel

Replied to a post by Greg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)

Here is today’s 7/31 #edu522 #dailyponderance yesterday folks were asked to share an image to describe how you felt. Most of you chose a meme. Today we repeat the task but I ask you think metaphorically.

Watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJUYSdEdWBg and install the Flickr Creative Commons attribution tool. Then find an image to represent how you feel.

X2 MacBuck multiplier if you share your image with correct attribution

Headshot of a pig with a muddy snout sitting in a mud pond
Pig in shit(happy as) flickr photo by Liquid emulsion shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

I tried to find a photo of a pig without the ear tags, as I suspect it would have been happier to know it’s not being tracked. I suspect it’s difficult not to be tracked, so we’ll have to live with it at least temporarily…

How I feel about the start of #edu522, a class about pedagogy, the web, and IndieWeb

Replied to a post by Greg Mcverry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)
Today’s #EDU522 rings of such simplicity it could not be more complex. Find an image that represents how you feel about this class. Share from your blog. X2 MacBuck multiplier if you provide attribution.

How I feel about the start of , a class about pedagogy, the web, and IndieWeb

Image courtesy of imgflip.com meme generator