At the June 4 meeting of the Tackling a Wicked Problem instructors group, we were asked to develop an action plan to lay out things we need to learn about and/or do between now and our next meeting on July 30. Here is my action plan.
Summer is here and, with it, I again have the privilege of teaching a grad class with the (mouthful of) a title “Digital Citizenship, Intellectual Property, and Internet Legal Issues” AKA “Nousion” because…shorter titles FTW. It’s a small class (12-weeks, a half-dozen students) about big ideas. Any one of the clauses in the title could be a semester-long class, a PhD dissertation, or a book!
But we start with digital citizenship because, as problematic as the concept is, I think it works to have everything else in the course be part, or a function of, it. And the questions there are perennial:
What does the word “digital” mean and do here?
What is citizenship?
How do we live and work online, individually and together?
Where does digital literacy fit?
What about identity?
What about privacy?
Whose data?
You get the idea. I love exploring this topic every summer with a cohort of engaged students even if by the end of each term the most important lesson I’ve learned is just how much more I don’t know and if the only answers to those questions are more questions.
The following document is an in-progress draft of a statement that might be included with a syllabus to help raise student awareness about controversial data collection practices carried out in many of the technologies they use for learning. Though we cannot always change, fully understand, or opt out of these practices, we feel that ignoring their presence contributes to the broader helplessness in confronting the mass exploitation of personal data at large. This is meant to be a template statement that a professor could revise for inclusion in the syllabus, regardless of the subject matter of the course. We recognize that some power dynamics may not allow for such a statement and that each person should decide for themselves if such a statement in their syllabus is possibile considering their context. If anything we feel the idea of such a statement makes for an excellent thought experiment to address questions of the use of problematic collection and use of student data and to develop conversation around these issues. This draft was started by Autumm Caines and Erin Rose Glass and then opened to group comments during their "Architecture of Student Privacy" workshop during the Domains 2019 conference. We are now soliciting further comments in order to create a template for circulation and plan to write up the process for publication.
Hat tip:
are you concerned about student data collection practices but don't know what to do about it? @autumm & i workshopped a student privacy statement to include w/ syllabus as a means to raise student awareness at #domains19
Hypothes.is doesn’t have a social media-like follow functionality baked into the system, but there are a few methods to follow interesting people. My favorite, and possibly the simplest, is to add https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=abcxyz as a feed into my feed reader where abcxyz is the username of the person I’d like to follow.
Of course, the catch then is to find/discover interesting people to follow this way. Besides some of the usual interesting subjects like Jon Udell, Jeremy Dean, Remi Kalir, et al. Who else should I be following?
Ideally by following interesting readers, you’ll find not only good things to read for yourself, but you’ll also have a good idea which are the best parts as well as what your friends think of those parts. The fact that someone is bothering to highlight or annotate something is a very strong indicator that they’ve got some skin in the game and the article is likely worth reading.
There's a long history of using tech and rhetoric around tech as a way out of Malthusian limits on resources. Tech as salvation has been a dominant way of thinking, but needs to be challenged/critiqued. #Domains19
I bookmarked a great post by Jim Luke (@econproph) a few weeks ago on scale and scope. I suspect that tech’s effect on education is heavily (if not permanently) scale-limited, but scope may be a better avenue going forward.
I also suspect that Cesar Hidalgo’s text Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies may provide a strong clue with some details. To some extent I think we’ve generally reached the Shannon limit for how much information we can pour into a single brain. We now need to rely on distributed and parallel networking among people to proceed forward.
I’ve also got a regularly updated OPML file for many of the same people if you prefer to subscribe to/follow their websites directly (this method is more Domains-friendly right!?!). If you use Inoreader or other services that support OPML subscription technology, this feed will auto-update for you as new people are added to the list, preventing you from needing to regularly refresh the OPML file manually. I’ll try to update this OPML file this evening for today’s/tomorrow’s attendees based on their websites in their Twitter profiles.
Don’t hesitate to ping me if you’d like to be added to the lists, or if I’m missing anyone. Be sure to include your most relevant RSS feed(s) for the OPML portion of that list. Feel free to copy/modify either of the lists to your heart’s content.
Online conversations about your community could contain insights about its safety and well-being. Social Sentinel knows where to look so you don’t have to.
Creepy…
Hat tip:
"Online conversations about your community could contain insights about its safety and well-being. Social Sentinel knows where to look so you don’t have to." https://t.co/AeR8tn49It#Domains19
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Spring 2019 Membership Meeting
April 8-9, 2019
St. Louis, MO cni.org/mm/spring-2019/
Joseph explores the extent to which discourses about community suggest an antidote to or escape from capitalism’s depredations, while distracting us from the supplementary role that community actually serves with respect to capital, filling its gaps and smoothing over its rifts in ways that permit it to function untrammeled. The alternative presented by community allows the specter of socialism, or genuine state support for the needs of the public, to be dismissed. This relationship becomes particularly clear in Joseph’s discussion of the role of non-profit organizations — entities highly likely to participate in and benefit from the idealized discourse of community — which often fill needs left behind by a retreating state, allowing that retreat to go unchallenged.
…raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community?
As Miranda Joseph argues in Against the Romance of Community, the concept is often invoked as a place holder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. A set of estensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical pre-modern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another without the mediating forces of capitalism.
Now community is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson’s sense, an imagined relationship, and even an imaginary one. As its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It’s a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline.
A claim of unity that smoothes over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And as Joseph points out, the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life.
But this suggestion, serves to distract us, she says, from the supplementary role that community, in fact, actually serves with respect to capitalism. Sort of filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network-based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education.
So community becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.
Some interesting thought here with respect to economics, community, the commons, and education. While a large piece of the talk is about higher education, there are definitely some things that can be learned and used with respect to social media, and particularly the IndieWeb movement. I’d recommend everyone take a peek at it and think about how we can better deploy and give credit to some of our shared resources.
Before one even starts learning how to manage an internet domain of their own, they face the step of choosing a name for what will be their street address on the internet. What should be on the left some of “something” dot “something” as one’s own internet address?
Some people stick with something close to or based on their name, so it clearly identifies”all their web sites?
Others have chosen a name that is more thematic, a play on words, a reference to interests or just a playful attitude.
There is no “correct” answer (but plenty of search result suggestions)- it’s a matter of what fits better for your personality, and as long as you are creating and sharing at that address.
What was the thinking behind your domain name?
This Activity was created by Alan Levine (@cogdog)
Difficulty: 1 (rated by author; 1=easy <--> 5=difficult)
Module: Domain Camp
Category: Domain Camp Week 1
My current domain name (boffosocko.com) came from a crazy brainstorm several years ago when I was registering a handful of domain names related to ideas in the entertainment industry. I was surprised that there were a handful of well-known and commonly used industry phrases that were freely available, so I scooped them all up. While I was doing that I noticed that the Variety-speak words related to boffo and socko were also available. In particular, I thought boffosocko.com was pretty cool and one day I’d come up with a use for it.
After a few years I decided that since I hadn’t been able to register my own name as a URL (there was a web designer who had beat me to it), I would co-opt boffosocko.com into use, and really, what could be a better name for a personal website?
“Boffo” and “socko” are neologisms in the family of Variety-speak after the well known business trade journal covering Tinseltown (often better known as Hollywood aka the Coast, aka H’w’d.)
boff (also boffo, boffola) — outstanding (usually refers to box office performance); ” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ has been boffo at the B.O.” (See also, socko, whammo)
sock (also socko) — very good (usually refers to box office performance); ” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ has done socko B.O.” (See also, boff, whammo)
Incidentally, one of the first movies I saw on cable via HBO when our family first got it when I was a youth (and easily saw over 100 times that summer) was THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN. Within it, there’s a great scene where Kermit schmoozes a big Broadway producer (played by John Landis) that I’m sure must have had a profound effect on me.
The move comes after Hugh Culverhouse Jr. urged students and businesses to boycott Alabama over its restrictive new abortion law. The school says its rejection of the money isn't related to that law.
I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience recently.
Not as the ability to spring back up when knocked down (though that can be a good thing).
But as the ability to adapt, to look at a new situation and think about how one can apply one’s existing skills.
Desire paths are “the trails that are instinctively chosen and created over time” in spite of constructed pathways.
In a recent post on The Open Faculty Patchbook, Maureen Glynn reflected on her experience with desire paths, both literal and the figurative ones we see in our courses.
“students will always find unanticipated and wonderful ways to enter, exit, and navigate through the learning events and environments that we design…”
For this Daily Extend, we ask you to either find and take a photo of a real desire path near you, or describe a “desire path” in the navigation of a course that you either took yourself or witnessed students taking. Bonus points for taking some kind of desire path route to completing this Daily, or the June Daily Extend Challenge as a whole!
I mentioned it yesterday, but my “desire path” for the June Daily Extend Challenge is to accomplish the entire trip using only my personal website and just a few feeds in my feed reader rather than using Twitter directly.
smeuse n. \ ˈsmyüz, -üs\ plural -s dialectal, England
: a hole in a hedge or wall, often created by the regular passage of animals
I always knew that it was more valuable and powerful to have my own domain and post my content there. Sadly, like many, around 2006 I started taking the well-paved roads provided by social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. But in 2010 a few people began a “desire path” of travelling back through a more open and free internet. They created a proverbial smeuse called the IndieWeb through which many have now passed and which, over the passage of time, is becoming larger, better worn, and even comfortably paved with sidewalks and custom lanes for bicycles and other modes of transportation in many places. Best of all, they’ve created a system which doesn’t require travelling down the roads of others, but provides a lot more freedom and self-determination. They’re slowly, but surely, making it easier for everyone to choose their own desire path on the internet.
I consciously re-started down my old desire path in 2014 and have found a variety of students, teachers, and even friends have not only benefited from it, but that it opens up the ability for them to pick and choose their own paths.
John Stewart (Twitter)
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities Professor of English Michigan State University from Coalition for Networked Information | Vimeo
Alan Levine (Extend Activity Bank)
Bryan ✻llendyke (Twitter)
