👓 Update on Badging with Webmentions | Greg McVerry

Read Update on Badging with Webmentions by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
As #EDU522 Digital Teaching and Learning Too wraps up I find myself reflecting on my goals for the class…I mean “my goals” in the class not the hopes on the instructional design. Much more on that later. All summer, well before EDU 522 began, I set off to create a remixable template others cou...
I suspect that Dr. McVerry could have gotten further a bit faster had he built the course on WordPress directly instead of on a remixable platform. This would have made it easier to send webmention-based badges which could have been done by creating a badge page on which he could have added simple links to all of the student pages that had earned them. This would have made things a bit less manual on his part.

But at the same time, he’s now also got a remixable platform that others can borrow and use for similar courses!

👓 ‘Inclusive access’ takes off as model for college textbook sales | Inside HigherEd

Read 'Inclusive access' takes off as model for college textbook sales (insidehighered.com)
Hundreds of colleges are signing on to publishers’ programs, with apparent savings to students. Some applaud the movement, while others are skeptical.
Inclusive Access is a great marketing term. It sounds nice, but has some insidious implications. It would be interesting to do some additonal in-depth reporting on the economics of these models. The article could have done at least a back of the envelop calculation and been far more skeptical of what was going on here.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

The “inclusive” aspect of the model means that every student has the same materials on the first day of class, with the charge included as part of their tuition.  

It almost sounds to me like they know they’re not getting a cut of the money from poorer students who are finding the material for free online anyway, so they’re trying to up the stakes of the piece of pie that they’re getting from a different angle.

This other model of subscription at the level of the college or university is also one that they’re well aware of based on involvement with subscription fees for journal access.
August 21, 2018 at 10:17PM

She said that her institution, which has inclusive-access agreements with more than 25 publishers, had saved students more than $2 million this semester alone. Morrone said this figure was calculated by taking the retail price of a textbook, subtracting the cost that students paid for the equivalent etextbook and then dividing the cost saving in half to account for the fact that many students would not have bought the book new.  

$ 2million compared to what? To everyone having purchased the textbooks at going rates before? This is a false comparison because not everyone bought new in the first place. Many bought used, and many more still probably either pirated, borrowed from a friend, from the library, or simply went without.
August 21, 2018 at 10:21PM

Students like the convenience of the system, said Anderson, and all have access to the most up-to-date content, instead of some students having different editions of the same textbook.  

They’re also touting the most up-to-date content here, when it’s an open secret that for the majority of textbooks don’t really change that much from edition to edition.
August 21, 2018 at 10:24PM

A key difference between inclusive access and buying print textbooks is that students effectively lease the content for the duration of their course, rather than owning the material. If students want to download the content to access it beyond the duration of their course, there is often an additional fee.  

So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.

Seriously?! It’s now a “rental price”?
August 21, 2018 at 10:26PM

Campus stores are often the ones driving inclusive-access initiatives, as they receive a cut of the sales. While the profit margins are smaller than for print, inclusive access means that the stores receive revenue from a larger number of customers. Donovan Garcia, course materials manager at the University of Mary Washington, said that lower margins were also mitigated by lower overheads. “We’re not purchasing books, we’re not paying shipping, we’re not having to put any time or effort into returning unused books or paying restocking fees,” said Garcia.  

I suspect the publisher is also saving on sales commissions to their sales staff as well.
August 21, 2018 at 10:27PM

👓 Why a professor buys his books from the bookstore | Chuck Pearson

Read Why a professor buys his books from the bookstore by Chuck Pearson (Another fine mess)
Friday, I made a visit to my campus bookstore, and I bought my books. The guy who runs Tusculum’s bookstore, Cliff Hoy, is a great guy, and the work that Tusculum’s bookstore does is fi…

👓 Hypothes.is Collector | John Stewart

Bookmarked Hypothes.is Collector by John Stewart (John Stewart)
In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms. It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user.
This seems like it could be an interesting tool for annotations in a classroom setting and is related to some of the broader Hypothes.is API tools.

cc: Greg McVerry, W. Ian O’Bryne

🔖 Write, Right? Write! – TRU Writer

Bookmarked Tru Writer by Alan Levine (https://splot.ca/writer/write)

Welcome to a new experiment in simple but elegant web publishing. This site let’s you quickly publish full formatted and media rich articles, essays, papers — without requiring any logins or tracking of personal information. Don’t take our word for it, explore one piece published here, chosen at random.

A published work includes a header image which you can upload to the TRU Writer. Choose how you wish to credit yourself as an author, or choose to by anonymous.

You should be able to copy the contents of anything you have written in a Word Processor, or already published on a web page, paste it into the TRU Writer editor. Most standard formatting (headers, bold, italic, underline, lists, blockquotes, hypertext links) will be preserved.

You can then edit/augment your work using a rich text editor, including embedding content from social media sites, and you can upload new images to be included within the text of your writing.

So find an essay or article and see what you can do with it by publishing online with the TRU Writer.

Give it a try now!

This is implemented as a WordPress theme, so it can be created for many different sites. Learn more about TRU Writer and where to find the theme.

👓 Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 | John A. Stewart

Replied to Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 by John StewartJohn Stewart (John Stewart)
This is the first post in a three part series on using Google Sheets as the database for a blogging CMS. In this post, I’ll explain the motivations for building the system. In the second post, I’ll walk you through the Google Sheet itself and the Google scripts (their version of js) that drive it. In the third post, I’ll share the website that displays the blog, and the code behind it. My guess is that interest in the three pieces will vary for different audiences, so I wanted to encapsulate the descriptions.
I generally like where John is taking this idea and the fact that he’s actively experimenting and documenting what he’s coming up with as potential solutions. While I do like some of the low-tech angle that he’s taking, I’m not sure, based on what he’s written, how some of it will come out within the broader spectrum of DoOO or IndieWeb-related technologies.

For example:

  • How easy/hard will it be for students to own/export their data after the class?
  • How might they interact if they’re already within the DoOO cohort or already self-hosting  their own space?
  • What are the implications for students of maintaining multiple spaces with a variety of technologies and therefor overhead?
  • I’ve never had a lot of luck with Disqus, which I find to be heavy and often has problems with auto-marking all of my content as spam. I’ve definitely found it to be an issue with using for POSSE workflows. Worse, with the introduction of specifications like Webmention to the DoOO space, students could be writing their responses to classmates and teachers on their own sites and thereby owning all of that content too, but with Disqus, this just isn’t possible.

I’ll reserve judgement for once I’ve seen some of the code and further ideas in parts II and III as I suspect he’s likely taken some of these issues into account.

We’ve played with this concept of front-end blogging for a while now. Alan Levine has built an open sourced tool called TRU Writer that even provides this type of front end interface on a WordPress site.  

I’m curious if John, Alan Levine, or others have yet come across the concept of Micropub? It generalizes the idea of a posting client and interface so that it could work with almost any CMS-related back end. I could see people building custom micropub clients for the education space, or even using some of the pre-existing ones like Quill, InkStone, or Micropublish.net. Many of them also use JSON or form encoded data that they could also be using with platforms like the one John describes here. The other nice part about them is that they’re flexible and relatively open in more ways than one, so they don’t necessarily need to be rebuilt from scratch for each new CMS out there.

👓 Maryland’s Goucher College eliminating several majors, including math | Baltimore Sun

Read Maryland's Goucher College eliminating several majors, including math (Baltimore Sun)
Math majors at Goucher College will soon be a thing of the past.

👓 Putting Stickers On Your Laptop Is Probably a Bad Security Idea | Motherboard / Vice

Read Putting Stickers On Your Laptop Is Probably a Bad Security Idea by Joseph Cox (Motherboard)
From border crossings to hacking conferences, that Bitcoin or political sticker may be worth leaving on a case at home.
I had a very short conversation at the IndieWeb Summit 2018 in Portland with Nate Angell about the stickers on his laptop. Who knew he was such a subject area expert that Motherboard/Vice was using his material?

Of course this also reminds me that if academics, journalists, and publications/outlets were using webmentions when they credited creative commons articles, photos, audio, or other content, then the originator would get a notification that it was being used. This could also tip the originator off that their licensed content is being properly used.

Reply to Stephen Downes on microsub readers

Replied to a post by Stephen DownesStephen Downes (downes.ca)
Building an IndieWeb Reader by Aaron Parecki
There's a lot to like in this description (I haven't tried out the actual product) of a reader that in many ways resembles what I'm trying to do with gRSShopper. This is a hard project: "there are a whole bunch of different parts to building a reader, many of which have no overlap in skillset: managing the subscription list, polling and fetching feeds, parsing feeds, data storage, rendering posts in a UI, providing inline action buttons to be able to reply and favorite posts, etc." There are some nice bits, especially the interoperability with Twitter and Github.
Also on Twitter
A WordPress plugin to help facilitate setting up these types of feed readers using Microsub was released yesterday: https://wordpress.org/plugins/aperture/

It’s obviously much more powerful if you’ve got Webmention and Micropub functionality set up too.

👓 The Right Time to Burn A Match | Spoke and Hub

Read The Right Time to Burn A Match by Alyson IndrunasAlyson Indrunas (Spoke & Hub)
There’s a saying in bike racing that I always find interesting. “You need to be strategic about where you’re willing to burn a match in a race.” In race reports, you might r…
It would seem that one of Greg McVerry’s quote posts, which I’m pretty sure he made to illustrate a process point about the Post Kinds plugin on his website and not necessarily to highlight the quote itself, sent me down the rabbit hole of discovery on some of the origins and history of open pedagogy today.

Saw some interesting examples on the way however, which have given me some intriguing ideas to begin trying out in the near future.

Following Remi Kalir

Followed Remi Kalir (Remi Kalir)

I research and design educator learning associated with everyday digital media practices

I am an Assistant Professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development. My research about educator learning and everyday digital media practices has been supported by a 2017-18 OER Research Fellowshipfrom the Open Education Group and a 2016 National Science Foundation Data Consortium Fellowship. I currently chair the American Educational Research Association’s Media, Culture, and Learning Special Interest Group (2017-19), serve as Co-PI of ThinqStudio, CU Denver’s digital pedagogy incubator, and am on the board of directors for InGlobal Learning Design.

Read about my featured research – how educators learn via open web annotation.

Watch a gallery of my videos – from conference presentations to webinars and more.

Learn about my keynotes – creative visual stories delivered before national and international digital media and learning conferences.

I earned my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Education, my M.A. with the University of Michigan-Flint’s Technology in Education: Global Program, and a B.A. with department honors from Earlham College. I am a co-founder of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Innovation in Education, and – with colleagues from UM’s Interactive Communications and Simulations Group – have designed and facilitated educational technology partnerships in support of educator and youth learning on four continents (in Canada, the Czech Republic, Jamaica, Oman, South Africa, and Switzerland). I am an avid runner, and enjoy classic film, cooking, and hiking Colorado’s mountains.

Remi Kalir

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Liked a tweet by Jon TennantJon Tennant (Twitter)