Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)Import–needs rock solid LiveJournal-clone and Tumblr support if your site is to serve as an archive. I don’t know if there even is a working Wordpress plugin to import from LJ or Dreamwidth. The best-supported Tumblr->Wordpress importer is actually better than most standalone Tumblr backup tools...
Marianne (privilege escalation)Recently I discovered the IndieWeb project, and I… think I am a lot more intrigued by it than by other Better Social Media Platform pipe dreams and decentralization projects I’ve seen? Because it’s...
I hope Marianne joins into the fray to not only make things better for herself, but for all of us. I know I and many others are happy to help on the WordPress front or otherwise. Here’s an overview video that may help some of the less technical.
It also raises some questions for me:
Do any wikis, bulletin boards/forum software send or receive webmentions yet? I receive refbacks from the IndieWeb wiki, but shouldn’t it handle sending webmentions? How about software for wikis and fora that allow for micropub or simple syndication?
It’s never dawned on me to look before, but I’ve just noticed that at least the IndieWeb wiki actually has an h-card!
Damian Yerrick (Twitter)I tried to recommend #IndieWeb technologies to those affected by a recent Tumblr policy change. But many I talked to claim that recommendation is the whole draw of silos, and IndieWeb's lack of a recommendation engine is a deal breaker.
"None currently."https://t.co/k9c7ehsoZb — Damian Yerrick (@PinoBatch) December 4, 2018
Of course going the direction of old school blogs and following those who comment on your own site has historically been a quick way to build a network. I’m also reminded of Colin Walker’s directory which creates a blogroll of sorts by making a list of websites that have webmentioned his own. Webrings are also an interesting possibility for topic-related community building.
Since Tumblr is unlikely to shut down immediately, those effected could easily add their personal websites to their bios to help transition their followerships to feed readers or other methods for following and reading.
Of course the important thing in the near term is to spend a moment downloading and backing up one’s content just in case.
Dries Buytaert (Twitter)“It touches me that some people have been reading my blog for over a decade.” https://dri.es/forty I've been thinking about that since. It would be nice to know who is subscribed to your blog so you can build a relationship. #indieweb @davewiner
— Dries Buytaert (@Dries) November 22, 2018
With relation to your desire to know who’s subscribed and potentially reading your posts, I think there are a number of ways forward, and even better, ways that are within easy immediate reach using Drupal as well as many other CMSes using some simple web standards.
I suspect you’ve been following Kristof De Jaeger’s work with the Drupal IndieWeb module which is now a release candidate. It will allow you to send and receive Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) which are simple notifications much the way they work on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve written a bit about how they could be leveraged to accomplish several things in Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
Not mentioned in that article for brevity is the ability to send notifications via Webmention when one makes follow or subscription posts.
As an example, I’ve created a follow post for you for which my site would have sent a Webmention. Unfortunately at the time, your site didn’t support receiving it, so you would have missed out on it unless you support older legacy specs like pingback, trackback, or refback.
I also created a larger related Following page of people and sites I’m subscribed to which also lists you, so you would have received another notification from it if you supported Webmention.
I’m unaware of anyone actually displaying these notifications on their website (yet!), though I’ve got some infrastructure on my own site to create a “Followed by” page which will store and show these follows or subscriptions. At present, they’re simply stored in my back end.
Heh – that’s funny – @lizzjoy and I were just saying we need to find a way of knowing who is reading the Drupal community and association blogrolls…
— Rachel Lawson 🇪🇺 (@rachel_norfolk) November 22, 2018
As for Rachel’s request, this too is also possible with “read” webmentions. I maintain a specific linkblog feed (RSS) with all of the online material I read. All of those posts send notifications to the linked sites. While it’s not widely supported by other platforms yet, there are a few which do, so that online publications can better delineate and display the difference between likes, bookmarks, reads, etc. There’s at least one online newspaper among 800+WordPress websites which support this functionality. I suspect that with swentel’s Drupal module and some code for supporting the proper microformats, this is a quick reality in the Drupal space as well. Because the functionality is built on basic web standards, it’s possible for any CMS to support them. All that’s left is to ramp up adoption.
Dave Winer in his reply to you linked to a post about showing likes on his site (presumably using the Twitter API) where he laments:
I know the Like icon doesn’t show up in your feed reader (maybe that can change)
Interestingly, swentel’s module also supports Microsub, so that reader clients will allow one to like (bookmark, or reply to) posts directly within readers which will then send Micropub requests to one’s website to post them as well as to potentially send Webmention notifications. These pieces help to close the circle of posting, reading, and easily interacting on the open web the way closed silos like Facebook, Twitter, et al. allow.
I'm sitting here hoping that confusion over pronunication of #NeurIPS turns into a wholesome meme where people pronounce it differently everytime they say it.
new-rups
nyr-ups
nurr-ips
Which did you settle on?
Doug Belshaw (MoodleNet project)Some more details about a proposed solution for MoodleNet that could solve some problems around decentralised identity.
It also sounds very much like Kevin Marks’ Distributed Verification scheme using the rel=”me” attribute on web pages for which he built a chrome browser extension to actually implement it. Kevin also recently reported that Mastodon now actually supports this verification scheme in one of their most recent updates which should be used by instances that are regularly updating. The benefit is that this scheme already exists, is relatively well supported, there are parsers available for it, and it’s actually working on the open web. It’s also truly distributed in that it doesn’t rely on any central provisioning authorities that require ongoing maintenance or which could provide a monopoly on such a service.
The schedule runs as follows:
November 19, 2018: Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public”.
November 26: Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless”.
December 3: Chapters 4: “Movement Cultures” and 5: “Technology and People”.
December 10: Chapters 6: “Platforms and Algorithms” and 7: “Names and Connections”.
December 17: Chapters 8: “Signaling Power and Signaling to Power” and 9: “Governments Strike Back”.
December 24: Epilogue, “The Uncertain Climb.”
As I’m looking at this, folks who want a quick and brief background (or who need to be sold on the importance of the topic) may appreciate Frontline’s recent two part documentary which I recently watched [1][2]. Tufekci appears and gives some excellent commentary in it. For additional overview/background, I’ll also recommend her three TED talks which I’ve watched in the recent past.[1][2][3] I suspect they cover some of the details in this book.
Tannis Morgan (Explorations in the EdTech World)Here’s the short of it. LMS’s do some things really well and are not going to go away. We still use an LMS at our institution, and while I would really like the vendor to invest some of our hard earned license fees into making it a more user friendly tool, we still need an LMS. However, I’ve tried really hard to make sure our online strategy does not start and finish with the LMS, and yes, it is an ongoing battle.
Much like the demise of the innovation on the web and within the blogosphere as the result of the commodification of social media by silo corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and others around 2006, the technology space in education has become too addicted to corporate products and services. Many of these services cover some broad functionality, but they have generally either slowed down or quit innovating, quit competing with each other, are often charging exorbitant prices, and frequently doing unethical things with the data they receive from their users. The major difference between the two spaces is that Big Social Media is doing it on a much bigger scale and making a lot more money and creating greater damage as a result.
Instead, let me make some recommendations to thought leaders in the space for more humanistic and holistic remedy. Follow the general philosophies and principles of the IndieWeb movement. Dump (or at least gradually move away from) your corporately built LMS and start building one of your own. Ideally, open source what you build so that others can improve it and build upon it. In the end, you, your classes, your departments, and your institutions will be all the stronger for it. You can have more direct control over your own data (and that of your students, which deserves to be treated more ethically). You can build smaller independent pieces that are interchangeable and inter-operable. The small pieces may also allow new unpredictable functionalities when put together. You can build to make better user interfaces, better functionality, and get what you’d like to have instead of just what you’re given.
Sure, doing this may be somewhat uncomfortable in the near term, but many hands over many institutions, building and crafting a variety of solutions will result in a much better and more robust product–and one that we all can “own” and benefit from. By open sourcing, many hands will make light work. Imagine what the state of online learning, Open Educational Resources (OER), and open pedagogy would look like if the hundreds of institutions had put all of their LMS related funding over the past decade into even a handful of open source programmers instead of corporately controlled interests?
Already within the article, there is a short list of potential solutions one could look to as LMS replacements. Those that are open source are literally crying out to not only be used, but to be improved upon so that everyone can benefit from those improvements. Other related options might include
For solid examples of what can be accomplished, we can also look toward individual developers like Stephen Downes and projects like gRSShopper or Alan Levine and his many open source repositories. There are also individuals like Greg McVerry, who is using free and opensource content management systems like WordPress and WithKnown to push the envelope of what is possible with classroom interactions using simple internet protocols like Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and bleeding edge readers using MicroSub, and Robin DeRosa, who is creating her own OER materials. These are just a few of thousands of individuals hacking away at small, but discrete problems and then helping out others.
At the higher end we can see broad movements like A Domain of One’s Own (DoOO), which empowers students students and faculty by giving them their own domain names and hosting as well as web-based tools to leverage these benefits. (I often look at the DoOO movement as IndieWeb for Education, but without as much emphasis on building for oneself.)
There are even ethical companies like Reclaim Hosting who are doing some excellent and tremendous work in the DoOO space. The benefit of the way these systems are built and maintained however, is that should Reclaim cease offering their excellent support, benefits, and add-ons, individuals or institutions could relatively easily take all of their data and applications and move them to another provider. This provides a massive incentive for service companies to continue iterating and improving on their work as well as the services they offer. Sadly, some of these mechanisms don’t exist this way within much of the corporate LMS space. But they certainly could and should.
For those who are interested, feel free to do some research into some of these areas and tools. Join the DoOO or IndieWeb.org communities. Build your own tools, give feedback to developers of opensource projects to help them improve. Give them some of your time and resources to make these communities and spaces better and stronger over time. Feel free to join the IndieWeb chat to meet folks virtually and discuss these ideas, or use the IndieWeb wiki (the IndieWeb for Education page is an excellent place to start) to not only read, but to contribute back ideas, tools, links, and resources for others. (The wiki has a CC0 license.)
I’m always happy to help people begin to find their way in some of these resources if they need it to get started.
Still coming to terms with the fact that my ears produce more hair than seems necessary.
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)Thinking about knowledge as a graph. #el30 In social analysis strength of connection represents authority? Is same true of knowledge? The more connections the truthier something is.
For a more on-topic comment, have you read Richard Dawkins‘ original conception of the neologism “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976)? He’s got some interesting early examples that touch on connections and spread of information.
I’ve also recently finished reading Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási which also has some interesting pieces and underlying theory (without all the heavy math) which are broadly applicable to some of these questions.
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)Then we also make a 12/31/2019 to have published first issue of a academic samizdat POSSE Journal about blogging research from any discipline. I wanna bring back some lightning talks like BlogCon 2003-2006., but first we do the journal.
I don’t recall though, are either of them open source, or do we need to re-build by hand?
I’ve been extending and improving my personal wiki for 1 year now and it has been one of the best things I’ve done. I found writing blog posts was too high friction and very often didn’t finish things because there is so much you can talk about in any given article. But a wiki is just a living document containing your notes and thoughts on things. I also use it as my public bookmark manager as I collect interesting to me links under each topic.
For my wiki, I render everything to the web first with GitBook. And I have a macro I run that automatically commits any changes I’ve made with Sublime Text on the mac and Ulysses on the phone so everything is super easy to edit and publish.
Does anyone else keep their own wiki here? Or you think a blog is enough for you?
Ultimately, I think that either way, having a solid search functionality becomes important regardless of which direction one chooses.
Lately I found myself posting a lot about IndieWeb, and thinking about how useful it could be for the next versions of the Log Lolla theme.
Since they don’t support webmention and don’t seem to have comments on their site open, I’ll say “Hello!” by syndicating to Twitter. I hope you haven’t given up on the idea of what the IndieWeb stands for and are still thinking of making your Log Lolla theme directly compatible with how the IndieWeb works with WordPress. There are a bunch of us out here who’d love to give you any help and support you need as we’d all love to see more IndieWeb friendly themes in the WordPress repo. Feel free to join us in the #IndieWeb chat or the #WordPress chat to say hello.
I like @chrisaldrich's take. He doesn't do likes, considers them to be digital vapor. #unboundeq #indieweb (https://t.co/fhxOk02qfk)
— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) November 8, 2018Good term .... pic.twitter.com/2IaM9pgt3U
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) November 8, 2018
Earlier this week I discussed microformats with Elmine. Microformats make your website machine readable, allowing other computers and applications to e.g. find out where my contact information is, and the metadata from my postings. It was a discussion that branched off a conversation on online repre...
Naturally, keep in mind that some themes may also have a few already implemented while others may have them implemented poorly (and sometimes even wrong).