Today’s #EDU522 rings of such simplicity it could not be more complex. Find an image that represents how you feel about this class. Share from your blog. X2 MacBuck multiplier if you provide attribution.
Image courtesy of imgflip.com meme generator
Cruce Saunders (Twitter)Instead of 'eliminating' divisions, or 'blowing up' silos....let's use metaphors about bridging, connecting, unifying, transcending, collaborating across borders.... connecting all of the groups within an organization in a coherent way so that they all work seemlessly together.
— Cruce Saunders (@mrcruce) July 31, 2018
As any kindergartner can tell you, “It’s difficult to play ball when the local bully owns the ball and wants to make up their own rules or leave in a huff.”
One of the things I love about IndieWeb is that we’re all trying to create a way for balls to be roughly standardized and mass manufactured so that everyone can play regardless of what the bully wants to do or what equipment people bring to the game.1
And as Nikhil Sonnad has reminded us very recently, we also need more than just connections, we need actual caring and thinking human interaction.2
Robin DeRosa (Twitter)What the hell is this? Really asking. https://t.co/Q1kCTs47J1
— Robin DeRosa (@actualham) July 30, 2018An old white man who's obscenely wealthy said some things.
— S Owocki (@swahkee) July 30, 2018
1 Freeze peach is good & will get lots of Koch $$
2 Fields should be merged bc *GALAXY BRAIN* --> HUMAN PROGRESS
3 Faculty members who want in on the Koch teat, pls do the prostration dance
4 AND IN CONCLUSION, Helpful!
— Robin DeRosa (@actualham) July 30, 2018
https://boffosocko.com/2018/05/01/episode-06-my-little-hundred-million-revisionist-history/
Greg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)Just updated @dshanske 2016-IndieWeb theme, didn’t use GitHub plugin, will be too hard for students, instead it was backup, switch themes, go into file manager>wpcontent>themes and delete, then reupload, activate. If you want autoupdates use SemPress but it wasn’t bad
/wp-admin/themes.php
delete in the bottom right corner of the pop-up/modalAdd New button at topUpload Theme buttonFortunately needing to update themes doesn’t happen often. If you’re using a GitHub theme then be sure to “watch” the repository on GitHub and enable email notifications for it so that you’ll see any future updates, issues, or ongoing work to know about needing to update in the future.
Hint: this workflow could also be used to upload the theme from an external source in the first place.
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs. The problem here is me: I’m running out of time. I’m duplicating a lot … Source: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop – Blog Snoop Weblog Directory We’ll see what happens. It...
If I recall, programming wasn’t necessarily your strong suit, but like many in the IndieWeb will say: “Manual until it hurts!” By doing things manually, you’ll more easily figure out what might work and what might not, and then when you’ve found the thing that does, then you spend some time programming it to automate the whole thing to make it easier. It’s quite similar to designing a college campus: let the students walk around naturally for a bit then pave the natural walkways that they’ve created. This means you won’t have both the nicely grided and unused sidewalks in addition to the ugly grass-less beaten paths. It’s also the broader generalization of paving the cow paths.
In addition to my Following page I’ve also been doing some experimenting with following posts using the Post Kinds Plugin. It is definitely a lot more manual than I’d like it to be. It does help to have made a bookmarklet to more quickly create follow posts, but until I’ve got it to a place that I really want it, it’s not (yet) worth automating taking the data from those follow posts to dump them into my Follow page for output there as well. Of course the fact that my follow posts have h-entry and h-feed mark up means that someone might also decide to build a parser that will extract my posts into a feed which could then be plugged into something else like a microsub-based reader so that I could make a follow post on my own site and the source is automatically added to my subscription list in my reader automatically.
In addition to Kicks Condor, I’me seeing others start to kick the tires of these things as well. David Shanske recently wrote Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following, and Blogrolls, but I think he’s got a lot more going on in his thinking than he’s indicated in his post which barely scratches the surface.
I also still often think back to a post from Dave Winer in 2016: Are you ready to share your OPML? This too has some experimental discovery features that only scratch the surface of the adjacent possible.
And of course just yesterday, Kevin Marks (previously of Technorati) reminded us about rel=”directory” which could have some interesting implications for discovery and following. Think for a bit of how one might build a decentralized Technorati or something along the lines of Ryan Barrett’s indie map.
As things continue to grow, I’m seeing some of all of our decisions and experiments begin to effect others as these are all functionality and discovery mechanisms that we’ll all need in the very near future. I hope you’ll continue to experiment and make cow paths that can eventually be paved.
Featured Image: Cows on the path flickr photo by Reading Tom shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Need to read more about webmentions. I like https://t.co/OZ8c3cSblj style annotations. Wonder if something like that but run by trusted journos would be interesting
— Jason Cartwright (@jasoncartwright) July 23, 2018There have been some experiments https://t.co/hwJqQwYB0A
— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) July 23, 2018
Interesting use of annotation (notably using open-source hypothes.is instead of a proprietary product) in journalism. https://t.co/yAWEWXfJLN
— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 23, 2017
@dwhly et al have started discussing adding webmentions as well:
Join the conversation with myself @ChrisAldrich, @wiobyrne, @kfitz and @heatherstaines about annotations and web mentions here https://t.co/TnPcFSzk6S and here https://t.co/xZ7c6CyzTd
— Dan Whaley (@dwhly) July 24, 2018
There’s also a lot of potential useful overlap of the broader area of IndieWeb technologies with journalism I think.
While I don't mind that this plugin offers its own avatar for unassigned gravatar photos, I wish it would present me the option to choose it on wp-admin/options-discussion.php under Default Avatar. With the latest update, all my default avatars are being overridden with user-secret.svg.
If I add my my email address within the comment editing interface, then the appropriate Gravatar is pulled and displayed as expected. This leads me to believe that somehow SL either isn’t finding/pulling the Gravatar URL that it’s storing, or the code is potentially skipping looking for it within its logic structure.
I’ve noticed this also seems to be the case for other WP sites which I have reason to suspect are running this same version as well.
Webmentions from other non-Gravatar related sites don’t seem to be affected by this and they’re displaying the proper avatar images as defined within their h-cards.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen (Twitter)I've long felt that webmentions would be a perfect fit for #WordPress core. This article makes me even more sure. Let's get to work! https://t.co/hBofSwJruR
— Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) July 23, 2018
Heather Staines (Hypothesis)Social media networks provided immediate solutions to a few problems with those early blogging networks: they relieved the moderately heavy lift in getting started and they created the possibility of connections that were immediate, dense, and growing. But as those networks expanded, they both pulled authors away from their own domains — so much quicker to tweet than to blog, and with a much speedier potential response — and they privatized and scattered conversations. ❧Exactly the use case that annotation is hoping to solve! Enabling the connection between different sites.
I say this because I know that her website now supports sending and receiving Webmentions (she notes as much and references a recent article I wrote on the topic within her text.) If Hypothes.is supported sending Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) for highlights and other annotations on the page they occurred on, then the author of the post would get a notification and could potentially show it on the site (as an inline annotation) or in their comment section, which might also in turn encourage others to open up the annotation layer to do the same. Hypothesis could then not only be an annotation system, but also serve as an ad hoc commenting/conversation tool as well.
You may notice in her comment section that there are 60+ reactions/comments on her site. One or two are done within her native comment interface, and one directly from my website, but the majority are comments, likes, reshares, and mentions which are coming from Twitter by webmention. Imagine if many of them were coming from Hypothesis instead… (try clicking on one of the “@ twitter.com” links following one of the commenter’s avatars and names. What if some of those links looked like:
instead?
Heather Staines (Hypothesis)Social media networks provided immediate solutions to a few problems with those early blogging networks: they relieved the moderately heavy lift in getting started and they created the possibility of connections that were immediate, dense, and growing. But as those networks expanded, they both pulled authors away from their own domains — so much quicker to tweet than to blog, and with a much speedier potential response — and they privatized and scattered conversations. ❧Exactly the use case that annotation is hoping to solve! Enabling the connection between different sites.
Taylor Jadin (Twitter)I'm tossing around the idea of starting a podcast network. Not some much for ad revenue but to make it easy and cheap for people who want to start a podcast to get hosting.
— Taylor Jadin (@TaylorJadin) July 22, 2018Basically I'd cover the hosting and standing up the site + RSS feed for people. Then I'd offer guides on equipment to buy and give editing tutorials for newbies.
— Taylor Jadin (@TaylorJadin) July 22, 2018Registered a domain: https://t.co/nDDlCSHopP
— Taylor Jadin (@TaylorJadin) July 22, 2018
Additionally Aaron Parecki had some thoughts a while back on his microcast (episode 9: Streamlining My Microcast Workflow) about improving his production workflow. Earlier today he also created a discovery website (with subtle hints of a webring) that acts as a discovery mechanism and network of sorts for microcasts which you might find interesting in light of your plans.
I might also submit that if you’re doing it for students, starting with small, short microcasts are always a quick way to get started.
All this to remind me that I just got a Yeti Blue for my birthday and I need to fire it up to continue on with both my microcast and my longer format podcast.
There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧
...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧
I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.
She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.
I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂
If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)
Ryan Boren (Twitter)@photomatt I recall the jokes made about crusty blogrolls when we deprecated the links manager. Now, folks are exhuming it for use as their canonical OPML source to feed OPML subscriptions. https://t.co/Lt6cpWwkuj
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018So... should I “update” the link manager? On one hand, it has a 2-year warning. On the other, do we want it to show prominently in search?
— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) July 17, 2018There’s a part of me that wants links to come back first class and be added to Calypso (with some Reader integration). That’d be a nice thing for IndieWeb and indie ed-tech movements. Also, an easier IndieWeb onboarding experience. Gimme an IndieWeb toggle on .com.
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018There's an open web and ownership moment happening right now. It's pretty cool. The flow is rough, though. One small but impactful example: title-less microblogging means an interface full of (no title) in Calypso.
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018
The Link Manager still seems relatively solid and much of the infrastructure still works well, despite the warnings and lack of updates over the past several years. It would be nice to see it make a comeback and I can personally see many ways it could come back as a means of allowing people to better own their personal social graph as well as dovetail with readers. (This could also be the cornerstone of helping to make WordPress it’s own decentralized social network so that those who want to leave Facebook, Twitter, et al. could more easily do so and maintain their own data and infrastructure.)
If it were being updated, here are a few things that I might suggest as being imminently useful:
As Ryan indicates, the planet-like features that OPML subscriptions provide are immensely valuable in general, but also solves a tough problem that some of the best minds in the educational tech space have found perennially problematic.3
As for the title-less post types that are proliferating by the independent microblogging community (including the recent micro.blog as well as post types in the vein of likes, favorites, reads, replies, etc. which mimic functionality within the broader social space), the so-called (no title) problem can be somewhat difficult since so many things are built to expect a title. Many feed readers don’t know how to react to them as a result. The Post Kinds Plugin faced a similar issue and recently pushed an update so that within the admin UI at /wp-admin/edit.php the title field would still indicate (no title) but it would also include a 28 character synopsis from the_body or the_excerpt to provide at least some indication of what the post was about. This also seems to be a potential issue in other areas of WordPress including widgets like “Recent Posts” which want to display a title where none exists. As the aside post format can attest, not all themes deal with this well, though there are other alternate methods for displaying some useful data.
I am adding in information associated with author and source, however this is not being displayed when published.
In the meanwhile, it may not be too tough to cut/paste bits of appropriate code from other templates to get these to display the way you want them when they exist. You can create a custom photo template named kind-photo.php and put it in a folder entitled kind_views in either your theme or (preferably) in your child theme so it isn’t overwritten on plugin update.
I do still wish there were a master template in the set (heavily commented and unused) that used every variation of data that could be displayed (or perhaps even calculated for display) so that non-programmers could attempt to more easily cut/paste templates to get them to do what they wanted.
Dean Shareski (Ideas and Thoughts)And I think it’s true. I don’t use RSS the way I did in 2004. That said, I remember reading that blogging was dead ten years ago. And while it’s maybe not trendy, many educators have seen its value and maintained a presence. Apparently, RSS has some valid uses as well but like most everyone, I tend to use social as a place to find new and emerging ideas. But I also think using Twitter and Facebook to haphazardly find content lacks intention and depth. I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional?
While many of us are also relying on RSS, there are a variety of new emerging technologies that are making consuming and replying to content online easier while also allowing people to own all of their associated data. In addition to my article about The Feed Reader Revolution which Aaron mentioned in his reply, Aaron Pareck has recently written about Building an IndieWeb Reader. I suspect that some of these ideas encapsulate a lot of what you’d like to see on the web.
Most of us are doing this work and experimentation under the banner known as the IndieWeb. Since you know some of the web’s prior history, you might appreciate this table that will give you some idea of what the group has been working on. In particular I suspect you may appreciate some of the resources we’re compiling for IndieWeb for Education. If it’s something you find interest in, I hope you might join in our experimentations. You can find many of us in the group’s online chat.
I would have replied in your comments section, but unfortunately through a variety of quirks Disqus marks everything I publish to it immediately as spam. Thus my commentary is invariably lost. Instead, I’m posting it to a location I do have stricter control over–my own website. I’ll send you a tweet to provide you the notification of the post. I will cross-post my reply to Disqus if you want to dig into your spam folder to unspam it for display. In the meanwhile, I’m following you and subscribing to your RSS feed.
