Category: Education

Bookmarked Open Apereo 2019 (Apereo)
Open Apereo 2019 is an international, inclusive event offered by the Apereo Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and sustaining innovative open-source software solutions for education. Learn how higher education is using open-source software to help deliver the academic mission, control costs, and retain the capacity to innovate.
Replied to #oext355 #oextend The June Daily Challenge Survival Pack | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

What are you packing in your Daily Extend Challenge survival pack? Phone/Laptop? First aid kit? Kool-aid?  Share a photo or description of your suggested addition. The more ideas for things to help us meet the challenge, the more of us will survive. Let’s do this together!

Photo by Ron Hansen on Unsplash

@ontarioextend I’m going to try to do it without opening Twitter. I’m packing:
1. My IndieWeb-enabled website from which all my replies will be composed and originate.
2. My feed reader tuned into the challenge feed and this Twitter #​​​​oextend feed.

#​​​​oext355 #​​​​​oextend

👓 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires and will free up science search engine Meta | TechCrunch

Read Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires and will free up science search engine Meta (TechCrunch)
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered r…
Following up on the fate of Sciencescape.

👓 The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper | The Atlantic | Dan Cohen

Read The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper by Dan Cohen (The Atlantic)
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.

👓 EdTech Companies with the Most Student Data | LISTedTECH

Read EdTech Companies with the Most Student Data (LISTedTECH)
Not surprisingly, Google and Microsoft have the most data largely due to their email systems. Google also has a significant amount of K12 LMS data because of the popular Classroom system.

🎧 Jonathan Haidt on Why We’re So Divided and What to Do About It | Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Listened to Jonathan Haidt on Why We're So Divided and What to Do About It by Alan Alda from Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

How do we get beyond Right versus Left, "Us" versus "Them," and even "Me" versus "You"? Jonathan Haidt has a few theories about this all too-familiar tribalism and the seemingly endless culture wars of our time. As someone who studies morality and emotion, Jonathan has deep insight into the moral foundation of our politics and his research in moral psychology has revealed new ways for us to engage in more civil forms of politics, which can help make us all more cooperative and decent. In this conversation, Alan Alda talks with Jonathan about what makes us happy and how we can overcome our natural tendency toward self-righteousness, in order to respect and learn from those whose morality (and politics) differs from our own.

Awesome episode. Definitely worth a second listen.

👓 Open Invitation for Domain Camp 2019 | Domains of Our Own

Read Open Invitation for Domain Camp 2019 (Domains of Our Own)

It takes a bit more work to learn all of the tools and what is available when you can install many kinds of web sites and web-based apps and manage access to them. But as owner of your own domain, you get to fully control your footprint on the web.

If this has a ring of interest to you, this summer we revive last year’s summer Domain Camp, a set of activities and support areas to help you learn what you can do inside the big cpanel of possibilities (that’s your domain dashboard).

Each week we will include an intro video, a set of activities to do inside your domain, open office hours, and community spaces to ask and answer questions.

We are setting up camp again to start the week of June 11, 2019. Are you interested? If so, please sign up and let us know (or see form at bottom).

Sick and tired of corporate social media silos owning your online identity and content? Domain Camp is back again this year to help people learn in small, easy chunks how to take back their online lives. There’s lots of online help and interaction to get you on your way.

If participants would like to use it, I’d welcome them to the wealth of additional resources on the IndieWeb wiki as well as an open and friendly online chat where one can find lots of help and advice as you work to make your domain your own.

👓 Scale and Scope | Jim Luke

Read Scale and Scope by Jim LukeJim Luke (EconProph)
I’ve been saying for awhile now in discussions of the commons, OER, and higher education that a “commons doesn’t scale, it scopes”. Before I explain why I think a commons doesn’t scale very well, I probably need to briefly clarify what’s meant by scale and scope. Like many terms in economics, they’re both commonly used terms in both business and everyday life, but in economics they may carry a subtly different, more precise, or richer meaning. Both terms refer to the production of an increasing volume of output of some kind. Enthusiasts of particular good(s), be they an entrepreneur producing the a product they hope will make them rich or an open educator advocating for more open licensed textbooks because it will improve education, generally want to see their ideas scale. And by scale, they generally mean “be produced in larger and larger volumes”. Larger volume of output, of course, brings a larger volume of benefits to more users. More output –> more users –> more benefits. But it’s the behavior of costs that really intrigues us when we think of “scaling” as a way to increase output. More benefits is nice, but if more benefits also means an equal increase in costs, then it’s not so attractive.
I can see a relation to the economies of scope that Jim Luke is talking about here in relation to the IndieWeb principle of plurality. For a long time the IndieWeb community has put economies of scope first and foremost over that of scale. Scale may not necessarily solve some of the problems we’re all looking at. In fact, scale may be directly responsible for many of the problems that social has caused in our lives and society.

I’m also reminded of a post I annotated the other day:

Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career (Nature)

Crowther offered everyone who shared at least a certain volume of data with his forest initiative the chance to be a co-author of a study that he and a colleague led. Published in Science in 2016, the paper used more than 770,000 data points from 44 countries to determine that forests with more tree species are more productive.

I suspect a similar hypothesis holds for shared specs, code, and the broader idea of plurality within the IndieWeb. More interoperable systems makes the IndieWeb more productive.

I also can’t help but think about a reply to a tweet by Chris Messina in relation to the IndieWeb related article in this week’s The New Yorker:

Boris is asking a problematic question not remembering early issues with the Model T, which Jim Luke reminds us of in his article:

Remember Henry Ford’s famous quote about “the customer can get [the Model T] in any color they want as long as it’s black”?

We’ve already got the Model Ts of social media–it’s called Facebook. It’s Twitter. It’s Instagram. And they’re all standardized–black– but they all require their own custom (toxic and limited) roads to be able to drive them! I can’t drive my Model Twitter in Facebookville.  My Instagramobile has long since broken down in Twittertown. Wouldn’t you rather “See The U.S.A. In Your [IndieWeb] Chevrolet“?!

The answer to Boris is that the IndieWeb has been working on the scope problem first knowing that once the interoperable kinks between systems can be worked out to a reasonable level that scale will be the easy part of the problem. Obviously micro.blog has been able to productize IndieWeb principles (with several thousands of users) and still work relatively flawlessly with a huge number of other platforms.  There have been tremendous strides towards shoehorning IndieWeb principles into major CMSes like WordPress (~500+ active users currently) and Drupal (~50+ active users) not to mention several dozens of others including Known, Perch, Craft CMS, Hugo, Kirby, etc., etc.

I haven’t heard aggregate numbers recently, but I would guess that the current active IndieWeb user base is somewhere north of 10,000 people and individual websites.  Once the UI/UX issues have all been ironed out even a single platform like WordPress, which could easily add the individual pieces into its core product in just a few hours, would create a sea-change overnight by making more than 30% of the web which runs on it IndieWeb friendly or IndieWeb compatible.

Yes, friends, scale is the easy part. Plurality and scope are the the far more difficult problems. Just ask Zuck or Jack. Or their users products.

👓 Morehouse College Graduates’ Student Loans to Be Paid Off by Billionaire | New York Times

Read Morehouse College Graduates’ Student Loans to Be Paid Off by Billionaire (New York Times)
Robert F. Smith, who founded Vista Equity Partners and became the richest black man in America, said that he and his family would pay the Class of 2019’s debt.
Of course amid this interesting news which could serve as an interesting study group for students who will have had much of their debt wiped away:

Replied to a tweet by Jessica ChretienJessica Chretien (Twitter)
It’s threads/comments like these that make me think that using Micropub clients like Quill that allow quick and easy posting on one’s own website are so powerful. Sadly, even in a domains-centric world in which people do have their own “thought spaces“, the ease-of-use of tools like Twitter are still winning out. I suspect it’s the result of people not knowing about alternate means of quickly writing out these ideas and syndicating them to services like Twitter for additional distribution while still owning them on spaces they own and control.

I know that Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and I (among others) often use our websites/commonplace books for quick posts (and sometimes syndicate them to Twitter for others’ sake). We then later come back to them (and the resultant comments) and turn them into more fully fleshed out thoughts and create longer essays, articles, or blogposts like Jessica Chretien eventually did on her own website.

I wonder if it wasn’t for the nearness of time and the interaction she got from Twitter if Jessica would have otherwise eventually searched her Twitter feed and then later compiled the post she ultimately did? It’s examples like this and the prompts I have from my own website and notifications via Webmention from Twitter through Brid.gy that make me thing even more strongly that scholars really need to own even their “less formal” ideas. It’s oftentimes the small little ideas that later become linked into larger ideas that end up making bigger impacts. Sometimes the problem becomes having easy access to these little ideas.

All this is even more interesting within the frame of Jessica’s discussion of students being actively involved in their own learning. If one can collect/aggregate all their references, reading, bookmarks, comments, replies, less formal ideas, etc. on their own site where they’re easily accessed and searched, then the synthesis of them into something larger makes the learning more directly apparent.

Liked a tweet by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (Twitter)