📺 #EDU522 Daily Update IX: Adding and removing sidebar widgets | YouTube

Watched #EDU522 Daily Update IX: Adding and removing sidebar widgets from YouTube
Depending on where you’re syndicating to and why, one could consider leaving some of these default sidebar widgets in their installation. Some folks, Aaron Davis comes quickly to mind, add titles (sometimes with emoji) to their notes, replies, RSVPs, likes, favorites, etc., which often are defined as posts which technically don’t need titles. Doing this certainly takes some extra time and work (or coding skill if you’re automating it), but can have the benefit of populating not only those widgets, but also adding a somewhat logical title to RSS feed readers and other tools which have been trained over 20 years to want titles on everything.

Recent Posts and Comments widget displays on Aaron Davis’ website

If you have the courage, certainly go title-less as it’s a whole lot easier, but there are other options if you like those sorts of touches.

📺 #EDU522 Daily Update VIII: Using #IndieWeb Post Kinds | YouTube

Watched #EDU522 Daily Update VIII: Using #IndieWeb Post Kinds by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry from YouTube
Keep in mind that you can click on the “Details” and the “Author” tabs in Post Kinds to add all sorts of additional data to flesh out the reply context for your posts. In particular many posts don’t include metadata for the Author details, but when you’re doing a quote post, it can add some additional richness to your context.

As an example, I modified the Author data for this particular post so that it shows Dr. McVerry created it and included both a photo avatar of him as well as a link to his website.

If you have some coding capabilities and want to go all-in on gaining more control over the reply contexts that Post Kinds allows, I’ve written up an outline for doing so. (I’d recommend waiting to play with it after class is over though!)

📺 EDU 522: Daily Update VI: Sending A Manual Webmention | YouTube

Watched EDU 522: Daily Update VI: Sending A Manual Webmention from YouTube

A short video on how to send a manual webmention to a WordPress site that's using the Webmention plugin.

WordPress sites also have a separate visual endpoint that can be used manually. They’re typically found at http://example.com/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint.

Other manual methods for both WordPress-based and non-WordPress sites include:
http://sendawebmention.com
http://mention-tech.appspot.com/

📺 Blogging Basics | YouTube

Watched Blogging Basics by Greg McVerry from YouTube

Learn in six easy steps how to become a master blogger (Caveat the only way is to read and write a lot)

I’m reminded here of my friend and Academy Award nominated screenwriter Millard Kaufman who once told me while standing in front of his immense library, “If you want to be a good writer, then practice writing; if you want to be a great writer, then read everything and then steal from the best.”

📺 No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences | YouTube

Watched No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences by Gardner Campbell, Jim Groom from YouTube
Interesting thoughts about identity (both offline and online) presented here.

The idea of decorating one’s locker as an example of presenting one’s identity in school is interesting. I also liked the idea that students continued using a forum long after the class was over–presumably because it represented their identity and connections and relationships from the class.

📺 Learner Identities | YouTube

Watched Learner Identities by Dr. Mary KalantzisDr. Mary Kalantzis from YouTube
Human Diversity and Learner Transformation
I really like this video quite a bit. It definitely has an air of Big History to it, or at least Big History on the human scale portion of the timeline. I recognize and have written a bit about one of the smaller infographics from the video, though here it’s far too small to see what it is or what she’s referring to.

Learner identities, Big History, and collective learning also generally remind me about shrinking numbers of languages, which I’ve mentioned before. In teaching and passing on knowledge, we will need to be even far more accomodating about culture and language, or eventually we’ll loose all of the diversity of languages we’ve got today.

In digging around a bit I note that Dr. Kalantzis has some interesting course content available on Coursera that might be worth delving into shortly as well.

📺 EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress | YouTube

Watched EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress from YouTube
I’ve recently learned that even searches on WordPress websites can have their own feeds. This way if the author doesn’t provide reliable tags or categories and they publish a lot (like I tend to), you can create custom RSS feed for any search term on their site using the format

http://example.com/?s=searchterm&feed=rss2

📺 RSS in Plain English | YouTube

Watched RSS in Plain English by Common Craft from YouTube

A short explanation of RSS and how it helps you save time reading the web.

This video introduces RSS as a way to subscribe to websites and save time on the Web. An "old vs. new" theme illustrates how RSS differs from visiting web sites independently, including:
• The new and old ways of reading news on the web
• An introduction to RSS Readers
• How to identify and subscribe to an RSS feed
• What to expect when using an RSS reader

A nice (visual) overview of RSS from a technical perspective but small parts of it are dated including some of the currently available feed readers. I might recommend Inoreader and Feedly now instead.

📺 Quote Post-Kind on SemPress #IndieWeb Theme | YouTube

Watched Quote Post-Kind on SemPress #IndieWeb Theme by Greg McVerry from YouTube
I might have gone the step further and put the Dewey portion in the Author tab and then put the source of the quote into the name field instead, but the output is still pretty solid, though some of the wrapped metadata that the plugin provides will be slightly off.