Category: Education

An Invitation to IndieWeb Summit 2019

Fellow educators, teachers, specialists, instructional designers, web designers, Domains proponents, programmers, developers, students, web tinkerers, etc.,

  • Want to expand the capabilities of what your own domain is capable of?
  • Interested in improving the tools available on the open web?
  • Want to help make simpler, ethical digital pedagogy a reality in a way that students and teachers can implement themselves without relying on predatory third-party platforms?
  • Are you looking to use your online commonplace book as an active hub for your research, writing, and scholarship?

Bring your ideas and passions to help us all brainstorm, ruminate, and then with help actually design and build the version of the web we all want and need–one that reflects our values and desires for the future.

I’d like to invite you all to the 9th Annual IndieWeb Summit in Portland, Oregon, USA on June 29-30, 2019. It follows a traditional BarCamp style format, so the conference is only as good as the attendees and the ideas they bring with them, and since everyone is encouraged to actively participate, it also means that everyone is sure to get something interesting and valuable out of the experience.

We need more educators, thinkers, and tinkerers to begin designing and building the ethical , , and interactive pedagogy systems we all want.

Come and propose a session on a topic you’re interested in exploring and building toward with a group of like-minded people.

While on-site attendance can be exciting and invigorating for those who can come in person, streaming video and online tools should be available to make useful and worthwhile virtual attendance of all the talks, sessions, and even collaborative build time a real possibility as well. I’ll also note that travel assistance is also available for the Summit if you’d like to apply for it, or you’re able to donate funds to help others.

I hope you can all attend, and I encourage you to invite along friends, students, and colleagues.  

I heartily encourage those who don’t yet have a domain of their own to join in the fun. You’ll find lots of help and encouragement at camp and within the IndieWeb community so that even if you currently think you don’t have any skills, you can put together the resources to get something up and working before the Summit’s weekend is over. We’re also around nearly 24/7 in online chat to continue that support and encouragement both before and after the event so you can continue iterating on things you’d like to have working on your personal website.

Never been to an IndieWebCamp? Click through for some details about what to expect. Still not sure? feel free to touch base in any way that feels comfortable for you. 

Register today: https://2019.indieweb.org/summit#register

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👓 Introducing SIFT, a Four Moves Acronym | Hapgood

Read Introducing SIFT, a Four Moves Acronym by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

The Four Moves have undergone some tweaking since I first introduced them in early 2017. The language has shifted, been refined. We’ve come to see that lateral reading is more of a principle underlying at least two of the moves (maybe three). We’ve removed a reference to “go upstream” which was a bit geeky. All in all, though, the moves have remained constant, partially because so many people have found them useful.

Today, we’re introducing an acronym that can be used to remember the moves: SIFT.

  • (S)TOP
  • (I)nvestigate the Source
  • (F)ind better coverage
  • (T)race claims, quotes, and media back to the original context

Idea for a spaced repetition user interface for Hypothes.is

While I’m thinking about younger students, I thought I’d sketch out a bit of an add-on product that I wish Hypothes.is had.

Background/Set up

I was looking at tools to pull annotations out of Kindle the other day and ran across Readwise again. Part of its functionality pulls highlights and annotations out of Kindle and then it has some UI that uses the idea of spaced repetition to have you regularly review what you’ve previously read and highlighted and presumably wanted to remember or use in the future.

Of course this is very similar to other spaced repetition/flash card applications like Mnemosyne, Anki, or language apps like Memrise and Duolingo among many others. I also seem to recall that Amazon once had some UI like this built into their Kindle Notebook, but I’m not finding it at the moment, but I know they’ve changed that UI sometime in the last two years–perhaps it’s gone?

The Pitch

Given the number of learners who are using Hypothes.is, wouldn’t it be a fantastic bit of functionality if Hypothes.is had a spaced repetition UI that would allow students to easily go back and review over their prior highlights and annotations?! Presumably this could be targeted for quizzes and tests, but honestly as a lifelong learner I very frequently love using tools like Timehop or even my website’s built-in “On this day” functionality to look back over bits and pieces of things I’ve done in the past, which also includes my annotations, since I’m keeping copies of them on my website as well.

Naturally such a UI should be able to search or sort by tag, date range, or even by source(s) so that a student could more easily wrangle a particular number of sources over which they wanted to review their material–particularly as over months, years, or decades one could build up a huge library of annotations. If, as a student, I was tagging my material by class course number subject area or something similar (like edu522, for example) I could then easily dump that into such a UI and be able to do spaced repetition studying for that subject area. Masters, Ph.D. students, and even the professoriate might appreciate it for occasional spaced repetition to be nudged or reminded of ideas they’d had in the past, but which may need rekindling to put into a thesis or potential future papers.

The more I think about this, the more I’d love to see it in Hypothes.is. If it’s not something the main team takes on, perhaps it could be an add-on for a group like Remi Kalir’s who have done some interesting work with the API to create Crowdlaaers. 

I’m planning to use import/export manually with tools like Anki to do some testing this coming weekend… I wonder what open sourced code may already exist that I could simply plug my Hypothes.is data into? Hmm…

👓 Pop Up Ed Tech, Trust, and Ephemerality | ammienoot.com

Read Pop Up Ed Tech, Trust, and Ephemerality (ammienoot.com)
This post captures a back and forth text conversation that Tannis Morgan and I had about an idea that piqued her interest from my NGDLE rant in 2017. I really enjoyed the way we worked this up between us. I wrote a lot of it fast and off the cuff and I’m sure with editing it would be more coherent, but hey ho, it can stand. As an aside we used the excellent Etherpad setup courtesy of the B.C. OpenETC. Etherpad remains one of my favourite tools for super-simple collaborative writing.

🎧 Episode 009 – Mike Caulfield: Engaging Students in Media Literacy | Media and the End of the World Podcast

Listened to Episode 009 – Mike Caulfield: Engaging Students in Media Literacy by Adam Croom and Ralph Beliveau from Media and the End of the World Podcast

Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative at the American Democracy Project and director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, joins us today to talk about engaging students in media literacy. He recently published the open Creative Commons licensed textbook “Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.”

Show Notes

Hapgood is such a fantastic blog that while scrolling through the back catalog of Media and the End of the World episodes to see what might be interesting, I naturally put this one at the top of the list. I’m definitely not sorry. Caulfield’s work always gives me some hope that we can fix things in a broken world.
Watched A Pandora's Box for Teaching, Scholarship & Identity by Jim Groom from Muhlenberg College
Jim Groom is a co-founder of Reclaim Hosting, and an early architect of the Domain of One's Own Initiative at University of Mary Washington.
A very solid hour-long talk about A Domain of One’s Own, some of what it entails, and how it can be used to empower teaching, learning, and reflecting on learning.

📺 Crafting Your Digital Scholarly Presence | YouTube

Watched Crafting Your Digital Scholarly Presence from YouTube
In today’s fast-paced world where the Internet is the go-to research tool and information on any topic is just a click or tap away, one’s own digital presence is more important than ever. The College of Arts & Letters recognizes this, and starting August 2106, will offer all its graduate students and faculty a new kind of web hosting support. Read more http://www.cal.msu.edu/news/webhostingservice
This is a great short advertisement why academics and researchers should be a part of the IndieWeb as a means of owning and controlling their digital scholarly presence. This is obviously done from a bit of a DoOO perspective, but Christopher Long does a fantastic job here.
Replied to Dumb Twitter by Adam CroomAdam Croom (Adam Croom)
Here’s my pitch for a Dumb Twitter app: The app forces you to tweet at the original 140 character tweet length. You can reply. You can’t like or retweet. You most certainly can’t quote tweet. There is no private DMing. Linear tweet stream only.
Adam, as you describe “dumb Twitter”, I can’t help but think about many of the design decisions that Manton Reece has made while more consciously designing and building micro.blog which specifically leaves out reposting, likes, and quote tweets as you’ve indicated. Admittedly micro.blog is still relatively small in scale compared to Twitter, and perhaps that size also helps guard against some of the toxic behaviors seen in Twitter. However, I might also suggest that since people are paying for a product and/or using one that has their personal identity built right into it with their own custom domain name, they are far less likely to proverbially “shout from their front porch” at passerby.

I notice you have a micro site which you were using with a micro.blog account, though I suspect you may have given up experimenting with them? Admittedly there is a bit of a technical hurdle in dovetailing either a WordPress or WithKnown site into the platform, but even tying RSS feeds from these platforms into the system isn’t too difficult.

I suspect that as a proponent of DoOO, you may find it fruitful to take another crack at micro.blog which, to a great extent, is really just a DoOO platform for the broader public. For a small monthly fee it allows users to bring their own domain name and get inexpensive hosting to own their own content including articles, status updates, photos, and podcasts. Otherwise, for free, you can use your own site (as you started to) and interact with the community by syndicating your content into it via RSS instead of crossposting via other means they way you’ve done with Twitter in the past.

I might suggest you try using your WithKnown site with micro.blog instead of WordPress, particularly as Known supports webmention out of the box. As a result, anything you syndicate into the system will automatically provide you notifications of any replies. You could then have just the “dumb Twitter” you wanted along with a solid DoOO solution at the same time. Ultimately you’d be using the micro.blog interface as a feed reader to scroll through content while posting your content from your own site.

If it helps to join the community there I’ve got a post that lists several micro.blog users who are in the education space, many of whom are tinkering around in areas like DoOO and IndieWeb, and a few of whom you may recognize.

I’m happy to help if you need any getting set up or experimenting. There’s a lot more power and value in the hybrid set up that micro.blog provides than it gets credit for.

As I’m thinking about bookclubs and Hypothes.is, I sort of wish that Ruined by Design was either online or in .pdf format so that I could use a Hypothes.is group to highlight/annotate my copy with their tool for my bookclub. I’m curious if there are any non-academic bookclubs using it in the wild?

Obviously it’s great for reading native digital content, material in the public domain, or Creative Commons content, but how could one work on participatory annotations for more restricted copyright material? Is there a Hypothes.is plugin for the Kindle, Kindle apps, or other e-readers that may work with copyright material?

👓 What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like? | ACRLog

Read What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like? by Jennifer JarsonJennifer Jarson (acrlog.org)
We’re launching Domain of One’s Own at my institution this year. If you haven’t heard of Domains, it’s a program that helps institutions offer students, faculty, and staff online spaces that they control. Domains grew out of a project at the University of Mary Washington (UMW). Co-founders J...

WPCampus 2019 Draft Proposal: Dramatically extending a Domain of One’s Own with IndieWeb technology

Below is a draft proposal which I’m submitting for a possible upcoming talk at WPCampus from July 25-27, 2019 in Portland, OR. If you don’t have the patience and can’t wait for the details, feel free to reach out and touch base. I’m happy to walk people through it all before then. If you’re looking for other upcoming events or need help, check out any of the upcoming Homebrew Website Clubs, IndieWebCamps, the IndieWeb Summit 2019, or even Domains2019.

Session Title

Dramatically extending a Domain of One’s Own with IndieWeb technology: How to improve your online research notebooks, commonplace books, and digital pedagogy

Session description

(This description will be edited and used on the website. Please include 1-2 paragraphs and a list of key takeaways for the audience.)

Having a Domain of One’s Own and using it as a “thought space” to own your online identity and work is just the tip of the iceberg. Can you imagine how useful it would be if you could use your Twitter account to reply to someone on Facebook (without needing a Facebook account) or vice versa? Open web technology from the IndieWeb movement that utilizes simple plugins, modules, or even built-in functionality now exists so that people can now use WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Grav and many other content management systems on any domain name to have rich site-to-site communications in a simple and intuitive way. Third party (and often unethical) corporate platforms are no longer needed to have rich interactions between scholars on the web.

It is now easily possible to have a teacher write a post on their own website and their students to easily reply/react to that post on their own websites (along with a useful reply context) and send that reply to the teacher’s website for possible display. Each participant can now own a copy of both sides of the conversation.

  • Teachers and students will learn how to (individually or together) collect, analyze, write, collaborate, and interact easily online while doing so in a space they own and control without giving away their data to third party platforms.
  • Researchers can now easily bookmark, highlight, or annotate portions of the web and keep this data (public/private) on their own website (aka digital commonplace book or notebook) for future reference or use.
  • We’ll show how courseware can be decentralized so that the instructor and the students each own their own pieces of the learning processes and can keep them for as long as they wish.
  • We will demonstrate how one can use their WordPress-based website with a few simple plugins to own all of the traditional social media types (bookmarks, items read, highlights, annotations, comments/replies, photos, status updates, audio, checkins, etc.) on their own site while still allowing interacting (if desired) with other websites as well as in social spaces like Twitter, Instagram, Swarm, etc.
  • We will demonstrate a new generation of free feed readers that allow composing in-line responses and reactions that post them directly to one’s own website as well as send notification to the site being read and interacted with.

You can now have the joy of a Domain of Your Own and still easily interact just as if your site were a (better-than) first class social media platform.

More Information About Your Session

(Please describe your session in greater detail for the organizers. You may be more casual in this description as it will not be posted on the website.)

In some sense, this session will be a crash course on using IndieWeb technologies and building-blocks with WordPress in the Education space. I’ll aim to remove a lot of technical jargon and keep coding examples to a bare minimum (if using any at all) so that those with the technical ceiling of downloading and installing a plugin can immediately benefit from the talk. I will also provide enough pointers and describe the broad outlines that developers will have a broad overview of the IndieWeb space to find and extend these plugins and functionality if they wish.

I’ll be covering the basics of new W3C recommendations like Webmention, Micropub, and WebSub along with forthcoming specs like Microsub in combination with IndieAuth (a version of OAuth2 for login). I’ll show how they can be applied to personal websites in research, teaching, collaboration, and other educational domains like creating Open Educational Resources. Many of these can be easily implemented in WordPress with just a handful of simple plugins that allow the web to become the social media platform we all wish it would be.

I’ll use examples from my own personal website and several others (which use Drupal, WithKnown, Grav, etc.) to show how these plugins can be used in educational settings and will walk through a case study of a course built using DoOO and IndieWeb philosophies and technologies (EDU 522: Digital Teaching and Learning at Southern Connecticut State University) on which I collaborated with Dr. Gregory McVerry.