A two-day event filled with sessions, networking, and social events covering a variety of topics, all dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The second annual WPCampus conference will take place July 14-15, 2017 at Canisius College in lovely Buffalo, New York.
The books introduce subjects like rocket science, quantum physics and general relativity — with bright colors, simple shapes and thick board pages perfect for teething toddlers. The books make up the Baby University series — and each one begins with the same sentence and picture — This is a ball — and then expands on the titular concept.
Jon Udell (Jon Udell)Back in April, Audrey Watters’ decided to block annotation on her website. I understand why. When we project our identities online, our personal sites become extensions of our homes. To some online writers, annotation overlays can feel like graffiti. How can we respect their wishes while enabling ...
We are beginning to see a few universities taking concrete steps to show that they value viewpoint diversity and the free and open exchange of ideas. An article over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal describes some of these steps and discusses them in the context of HxA’s newly revised Guide to Colleges. (See Colleges Pledge Tolerance for Diverse Opinions, But Skeptics Remain, by Douglas Belkin.)
The article opens with a discussion of an extraordinary step at Johns Hopkins (for which we just raised its HxA score and its rank):
A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it. Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”… The new initiative at Johns Hopkins, an institute funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, hopes to “examine the dynamics of societal, cultural and political polarization and develop ways to improve decision-making and civic discourse,”
The article contrasts Hopkins with Harvard (as well as Berkeley and Yale):
Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking. Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015.
The article closed by discussing our top-ranked school:
The top-ranked school is the University of Chicago. Provost Daniel Diermeier said the ideal of viewpoint diversity is central to the university’s mission. “We believe that the best education we can provide students to prepare them for the world is to hear diverse points of view even if they feel uncomfortable,” Dr. Diermeier said. “We want to provide them with the tools to find counterarguments.
Indie EdTech and Other Curiosities, June 5-6, 2017 at University of Oklahoma
Keynote: Neither Locked out nor locked in by Martha Burtis
Live-streamed videos from Virtually Connecting
DoOO Curriculum on Github
JBJ blogpost: Looking back at #Domains17
The ideas of being independent and signed are inherently contradictory, and this contradiction is what makes indie hard to define. Its ephemerality gives it both a mystique and a resistance to criticism ― after all, you can’t critique what you can’t define. And thus, using the term indie is often a great marketing move. But it’s a problematic critical move.
But the ability to work on indie projects is not available to all. The time and resources required to work indie are a sign of privilege, as is encouraging (and certainly expecting) all to work indie. As Anne Pasek writes, “all materials and practices … have a cost and thus a tollgate for participation.” (And there are many, often intersecting, forms of privilege that contribute to that “toll” ― race, gender, orientation, cultural background, economic background, able-bodiedness, etc.) So while indie work is great, and I’ve done a lot of it myself, we need to be careful about the ways in which we encourage and characterize indie work, noting in particular what it costs and who may be left behind or left out.
However, as someone who knows he’s certainly privileged, I view my definition of indie as something that is also open for others to come behind me and use for free or have the ability to reuse and remix in a way that corporate interests or non-indie work wouldn’t. In a large sense, to me this means that while I may be privileged (whether that be socio-economically or even the time-encumbered), I’m helping to lower the cost and the burden for the less privileged who may come behind me to be able to do more, go further, or go faster.
In some sense too, as described, indie has such a nebulous definition. Often when I see it in a technology related space I really read it as “Open Sourced”.
Teachers, educators, researchers, technologists using open technologies in education #openEd, #edTech, #DoOO, #IndieWeb
Feel free to either subscribe to the list (useful when adding streams to things like Tweetdeck), or for quickly scanning down the list and following people on a particular topic en-masse. Hopefully it will help people to remain connected following the conference. I’ve written about some other ideas about staying in touch here.
If you or someone you know is conspicuously missing, please let me know and I’m happy to add them. Hopefully this list will free others from spending the inordinate amount of time to create similar bulk lists from the week.
For more information see the blog post for the event at http://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2017/05/31/domains17/
There’s some interesting discussion of Indieweb-related principles in this live-streamed (and recorded) conversation (below) from the Domains 2017 conference for educators and technologists which covers a lot of what I’d consider to be Indieweb for Education applications.
In particular, some asked about alternate projects for basing education projects around which aren’t WordPress. Some suggested using WithKnown which is spectacular for its interaction model and flexibility. I suspect that many in the conversation haven’t heard of or added webmentions (for cross-site/cross-platform conversations or notifications) or micropub to their WordPress (or other) sites to add those pieces of functionality that Known comes with out of the box.
Another section of the conversation mentioned looking for ways to take disparate comments from students on their web presences and aggregating them in a more unified manner for easier consumption by the teacher and other students (as opposed to subscribing to each and every student’s RSS feed, a task which can be onerous in classrooms larger than 20 people). To me this sounded like the general concept of a planet, and there are a few simple ways of accomplishing this already, specifically using RSS.
I was also thrilled to hear the ideas of POSSE and PESOS mentioned in such a setting!
I’d invite those in attendance at the Domains 17 conference to visit not only the Indieweb wiki, but to feel free to actively participate in the on-going daily discussions (via IRC/Slack/Matrix/Web). I suspect that if there’s enough need/desire that the community would create a dedicated #education channel to help spur the effort to continue to push the idea of owning one’s own domain and using it for educational purposes out into the mainstream. The wiki pages and the always-on chat could be useful tools to help keep many of the educators and technologists who attended Domains17 not only connected after the event, but allow them to continue to push the envelope and document their progress for the benefit of others.
I’ll admit that one of my favorite parts of the Indieweb wiki is that it aggregates the work of hundreds of others in an intuitive way so that if I’m interested in a particular subject I can usually see the attempts that others have made (or at least links to them), determine what worked and didn’t for them, and potentially find the best solution for my particular use case. (I suspect that this is some of what’s missing in the “Domains” community at the moment based on several conversations I heard over the past several days.)
If you’d like, please add yourself to the growing list of Indieweb related educators and technologists. If you need help connecting to any of the community resources and/or chat/IRC/Slack, etc. I’m more than happy to help. Just call, email, or contact me via your favorite channel.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=INB-h9eEcpY
dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.
dokieli envisions research results, analysis and data all being produced interactively on the Web and seamlessly linked to and from articles. Through annotations and notifications, the academic process of peer-review can be open, transparent and decentralised for researchers.
For more information see the blog post for the event at http://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2017/05/31/domains17/
Enabling Decentralised Scholarly Communication co-located with the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2017)
These remarks were given at Coventry University as part of my visiting fellowship at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab
How the humanities survive on exploitation.
