I hardly know where to begin. This newsletter’s already a day late — partially because of travel, partially because I have no idea how to address some of the things that have occurred in and around the ed-tech industry (and ed-tech punditry) this week.
Category: Education
There are always lessons to be learned.
I’m committed to playing the long game of learning, rather than the short game of schooling. ❧
–December 10, 2019 at 06:55AM
Herein, against my better judgement, I wade into the Great Instructure social media wars of 2019. Last week, Instructure Inc., the publicly traded (NYSE: INST) company announced it had agreed to go private and sell itself to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. For people who teach in higher education this is big news. Instructure, is the current name for the company founded in 2008 that created and sells the Canvas LMS. Canvas in the last decade has toppled the previous king-of-the-LMS’s, Blackboard. Canvas is now widely reported to have largest market share of higher ed LMS market at least in North America. Moodle, the open source system, appears to dominate outside North America.
Capitalists and market-thinkers inevitably seek to enclose the commons, privatizing benefits and externalizing costs onto society.❧
It’s nice to see this reminder every now and then.
–highlighted December 09, 2019 at 09:00PM
Some pragmatic and solid analysis here. Better than some of the FUD I’ve seen bandied about.
One of the greatest assets of the internet is that it leads to great content discoveries that readers might not otherwise be able to find. One of the biggest liabilities is that content is frequently repackaged without crediting its creators or where it was found. Brooke talks to Maria Popova, editor of the website Brain Pickings and one of the creators of the Curator's Code, which seeks to honor the way people discover content online.
Originally bookmarked to listen to on November 23, 2019 at 10:38AM
If you’re thinking about doing something like WithKnown (aka Known, the CMS your post is on), and interested in the WordPress portion, you might consider doing a full/partial Domain of One’s Own program through Reclaim Hosting or even rolling your own. Even if you go small with just a few classes, you might consider adapting the Homebrew Website Club model at your site where you invite students to tinker around, help each other out, and then show off or demonstrate their work. The related IndieWeb wiki and online chat are free to join and can provide a wealth of information and help for students (and educators!) working at owning their own domains.
Incidentally, if you’re unaware, WordPress now has a suite of plugins that will allow it to have a lot of the site-to-site communication capabilities that Known does. I’ve not done it before, but I’m fairly certain you could run it on a multiuser installation of WordPress much the same way you’re using http://janevangalen.com/cms/.
Another interesting option would be to have students try out accounts on micro.blog which are relatively inexpensive, though I suspect if you touched base with Manton Reece and explained what you were doing, he might offer free or significantly reduced hosting for a reasonable period of time. I know he’s given away a year of free hosting to attendees of IndieWebCamps who are starting out with their own domains. If he did then you might be able to use some institutional funds to purchase domains for students to get them started.
I’m happy to spitball ideas in these areas if you’re interested. I’m glad to see others experimenting around with the ideas around DoOO and IndieWeb for Education!
By the way, good on you for opening up your planning process for teaching and learning on the open web. It certainly sets a useful example for others who are exploring and following in your footsteps.
These types of literacies are really important to explore.
Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.
I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:
- Writing posts with a reasonably full-featured text editor and the ability to edit and delete posts later;
- HTML and markdown support;
- Public and private posting as well as sharing content with other private groups;
- The ability to reply to other websites;
- The ability for others to comment on your posts natively;
- A robust tagging functionality;
- The ability to socially bookmark web pages (blank page notes);
- An RSS feed;
- The ability to share posts to other social platforms including meta data for Twitter cards;
- Naturally, it’s very easy to use for writing short notes, creating highlights and annotations, and keeping track of what you’ve read;
- It has a pseudo-social media functionality in that your public posts appear on a global timeline where people can read and interact with them.
- It’s also opensource, so you can self-host, modify it, or add new features.
I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.
And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.
And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?
If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.
Jim Groom, director of teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington, describes the university’s new effort to offer every student and professor an online domain name to use as a lifelong Web presence. And he explains why the plan teaches an important lesson in digital citizenship.
The Broad Center, and its sometimes controversial effort to train school district leaders, moves from L.A. to Yale with $100 million gift.
JSTOR Daily offers scholarly context for the news, tapping into JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals.
Tomorrow at 12 PM Eastern/ 9 AM Pacific I’ll be be hosting a Connected Courses discussion that will explore the IndieWeb movement as a people-centered response to the corporate web. How do core IndieWeb principles such as owning your content, remaining better connected, and redefining control online intersect with the values of connected learning? Take a bit of time tomorrow and join myself, Mikhail Gershovich, Ben Werdmuller, Erin Jo Richey, and Simon Thomson to find out more.
[Withknown is] the posterchild of the IndieWeb.
— Jim Groom
I’ll agree that it is pretty darn awesome!
Some slight rephrasings from Ben in the video that I thought were spot on:
IndieWeb: allowing people to connect online without caring about what platforms or services they’re using.
IndieWeb puts the learner first. The LMS, which primarily serves an administrative function, should not be the center of the process.
The internet is an amazing place for learning. But recent high-profile forays into online learning for higher education seem to replicate a traditional lecture-based, course-based model of campus instruction, instead of embracing the peer-to-peer connected nature of the web. The networked and digital world offers an unprecedented wealth of resources for engaged, interest-driven, lifelong learning. Reclaim Open Learning intervenes in this debate by supporting and showcasing innovation that brings together the best of truly open, online and networked learning in the wilds of the Internet, with the expertise represented by institutions of higher education.
Reclaim Open Learning is a collaboration between the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at UC Irvine and the MIT Media Lab. The thematic initiative is supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:
- open education, open pedagogy and design
- WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
- examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
- plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other
Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.