John Eckman blogs here about Open Source, the Next Generation Internet, the Assembled Web, and Web Application Strategy, Design, and Development. He also works at Optaros.
I’m the CEO of 10up, a digital agency focused on designing and building compelling, content-centric experiences on open source platforms, especially WordPress.
Why is this blog called Open Parenthesis?
It’s meant to bring together two key concepts that have dominated my professional career – writing and coding:
1. Parentheses in writing are often used to insert explanatory text not directly related to the main point (see the wikipedia entry). (I did a PhD in literature & culture, and spent years teaching in a university English environment).
2. Parentheses in software development are used for a variety of reasons in different languages, but often they’re used to pass parameters to functions (or to indicate the parameters a function receives). (I’ve spent the last decade working in software development, specifically on the web).
The site’s called “Open Parenthesis” (the singular of parentheses) because the idea is that the conversation is open ended.
It starts an explanatory insertion (like this one), but it can’t yet be closed.
It resembles a function taking parameters, but we can’t yet close the parentheses because we don’t know yet what the possibilities are.
Finally, there’s also the notion of “Open” because I’m focused on open source software, as well as open-ness and transparency of conversation in general.
Category: Technology
👓 Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound | Maryanne Wolf | The Guardian
When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age writes Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home
👓 Put your multiple personalities in Firefox Multi-Account Containers | The Firefox Frontier
Our new Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox means you can finally wrangle multiple email/social accounts. Maybe you’ve got two Gmail or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook a...
Following David Wiley
Dr. David Wiley is Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, an organization dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education through the adoption of open educational resources by schools, community and state colleges, and universities. He is also currently the Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, and adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University's graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where he leads the Open Education Group (and was previously a tenured Associate Professor).
As an academic, Dr. Wiley has received numerous recognitions for his work, including an National Science Foundation CAREER grant and appointments as a Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a Peery Social Entrepreneurship Research Fellow in the BYU Marriott School of Business, and a Shuttleworth Fellow. As a social entrepreneur, Dr. Wiley has founded or co-founded numerous entities including Lumen Learning, Degreed, and Mountain Heights Academy. In 2009, Fast Company named Dr. Wiley one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.
David was born and grew up in West Virginia. He is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). He served a two-year mission for the church in Fukuoka, Japan, and now serves as bishop of a student congregation at Brigham Young University. David lives in Utah with his wife and five children and enjoys hiking, running, playing basketball, listening to and making music, and reading.
Primary blog at https://opencontent.org/blog/
I suppose it should cease to amaze me that educators are so far ahead of the curve on owning so much of their identities and content online. Many seem to be OG IndieWeb. I like the way his primary page sets up his identity and he’s owning at least all of his bigger article output. And then there’s a lovely blogroll on his blog page, with so many names I recognize and several more I’m going to have to add to my own.
As I look at his bio and see Degreed, it reminds me while shadowing Greg McVerry’s EDU 522 course, that I’ve been wanting to own more of my learning online. I’ll have to take a look again at how Degreed is set up from a UI perspective and see what I can glean from it, particularly as it takes data from multiple other platforms and pulls it into it’s own platform in a very PESOS sort of workflow. I wonder if Degreed might take personal websites as a source of content and then be able to add certifications? This might also fit in with using Webmention as infrastructure for doing badges and credentialing.
Reply to Mariko Kosaka on RSS, blogging, and linkbacks
Mariko Kosaka (Twitter)I see some of you here are moving to RSS and blogs. I never understood trackbacks in Web2.0 days, are we still gonna use it and can someone explain it to me?
— Mariko Kosaka (@kosamari) August 10, 2018
Webmention is the more modern specification now as some have mentioned. I wrote a piece on it in @alistapart recently which includes some background, UI examples, and links to more technical resources:
https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet
https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet
It is a small part of an #IndieWeb suite of open protocols including Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub for allowing site to site communication and interaction which goes to the broader scope of your question about RSS feeds and blogs. See also: Lost Infrastructure
I keep meaning to provide a better overview of it all, but this recent pencast overview captures a chunk of it. Aaron Parecki’s article Building an IndieWeb Reader captures some of the rest of the microsub/reader portion.
❤️ actualham tweet
Robin DeRosa (Twitter)A Provocation for the #OpenPedagogy Community, from @holden. On self- and institutional hosting, and where we should be building our stuff on the web. #digped #indieweb #OpenPed https://t.co/x98BVJyHtc
— Robin DeRosa (@actualham) August 10, 2018
👓 The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code | Joel Spolsky
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
Some good solid advice. It’s difficult to imagine a time when a lot of this wasn’t commonplace. Note the publication date of 08/09/2000! This was almost exactly 18 years to the day from today.
👓 “The Audrey Test”: Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education? | Hack Education
Audrey Watters (Hack Education)I want us to set the bar really high when it comes to education technology -- both in its development and its implementation. I don't think it's too much to ask. I mean, we're talking about teaching and learning here, and while I believe strongly we should all be lifelong learners, most often when we talk about ed-tech, we're talking about kids. As the Macarthur Foundation's Connie Yowell said at the recent DML conference (and I'm paraphrasing), there's value in risk-taking and failing fast and often, but not in "high stakes environments with other people's children."
For those interested in misinformation, journalism, authority, trust, verification, fact checking, etc., the MisInfoCon is going on this week in Washington. Some interesting things in the Twitter feed for #misinfocon.
It’s a Hacks/Hackers project.
Some of the details might be useful for digital pedagogy settings as well. May make an interesting project for those in EDU522 especially if you’re considering the hoax website assignment?
Greg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)For today’s #edu522 #dailyponderance you need to highlight some cool #edtech tools. Give us 3-5 apps or websites we should try in class.
Some of my favorite and often used edtech tools:
Hypothesis – a service that allows me to quickly highlight and annotate content on almost any web page or .pdf file
IFTTT.com – a service which I use in combination with other services, most often to get data from those sites back to my own. For example:
- Recipe to get Hypothesis annotations from Hypothesis to my site
- Recipe to syndicate Goodreads posts of books I’m reading to my website
Huffduffer.com – a service I with audio related content I find online. I use its bookmarklet to save audio from web pages. Huffduffer then creates a custom RSS feed that I can subscribe to in any podcatcher for catching up on podcasts while I’m on the go.
Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress – since many in the class are also using it, I’ll mention that I love using its bookmarklet functionality to quickly bookmark, favorite, or reply to other posts on the web.
URL Forwarder – This is an Android-based app that I’ve configured to dovetail with the Post Kinds Plugin and my website for posting to my site more quickly via mobile.
Jon Udell’s media clipper – I use this audio/video tool for finding and tagging the start and stop points of media so that I can highlight specific portions for others
👓 Exspiravit ex machina | Imani Mosley
Getting this started has proved more difficult than initially envisioned, who knows why. I say this because I have been completely overtaken by this work and the questions that have arisen from it so, naturally, writing about it should be easy, right? Right. Let's start with a little background...
Congratulations on the new website! Glad to see you’ve got a bigger presence for longer form thoughts that I can follow.
I’d sent you a separate note on your metadata problem, but while I’m thinking about the broader issues, one interesting person who does immediately come to mind (thought not a specialist in microformats) is Kris Shaffer, who is a digital humanist, data scientist, and a digital media specialist. Recently he was a scholar with the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington before heading into the private sector. I suspect he may have some interest as well as relevant experience for problems like this and could point you in some interesting directions.
👓 Learning to Love the Stable Link | Uncommon Sense
Karen Wulf (Uncommon Sense — The Blog | Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)When you’re striving to make your students’ lives just a click easier by embedding an article in your syllabus or posting it to Blackboard (or another online learning environment), however, it’s important to embed the link to the article rather than the PDF of the article itself. It’s easy to do; you simply paste the link from JSTOR or MUSE into the same field you would paste a document or PDF. It’s no more difficult for the students, and it makes a big difference to the journals whose articles you’re teaching.
I can’t help but read this and think that there’s a good use case for the Webmention spec here. Similar to my thinking in IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing, it seems relatively obvious that professors could be referencing the DOIs or other permalink URLs for journals and articles they’re assigning and sending webmentions so that the journal itself could receive webmentions of those facts. This in turn would help those journals have a better understanding of the number of incoming links as well as referrer traffic and potential readers they’ve got.
I’ve outlined a bit of how read posts on the web can send notifications to journal articles to allow them to better track traffic. Similar to use cases I’ve outlined for podcasts which have some large aggregate download data, but absolutely no actual “I listened to this particular episode” data, explicit read webmentions for journal articles could be a boon to these journals as well as to the greater research enterprise.
Separately but similarly, it would be nice if journals could take advantage of annotation platforms like Hypothes.is (especially if they sent webmentions to the canonical links or DOIs for .pdfs) to get a better idea of how closely, or not, academics are reading and annotating their works.
IndieWeb technology for online pedagogy
Very slick! Greg McVerry, a professor, can post all of the readings, assignments, etc. for his EDU522 online course on his own website, and I can indicate that I’ve read the pieces, watched the videos, or post my responses to assignments and other classwork (as well as to fellow classmates’ work and questions) on my own website while sending notifications via Webmention of all of the above to the original posts on their sites.
When I’m done with the course I’ll have my own archive of everything I did for the entire course (as well as copies on the Internet Archive, since I ping it as I go). His class website and my responses there could be used for the purposes of grading.
I can subscribe to his feed of posts for the class (or an aggregated one he’s made–sometimes known as a planet) and use the feed reader of choice to consume the content (and that of my peers’) at my own pace to work my way through the course.
This is a lot closer to what I think online pedagogy or even the use of a Domain of One’s Own in an educational setting could and should be. I hope other educators might follow suit based on our examples. As an added bonus, if you’d like to try it out, Greg’s three week course is, in fact, an open course for using IndieWeb and DoOO technologies for teaching. It’s just started, so I hope more will join us.
He’s focusing primarily on using WordPress as the platform of choice in the course, but one could just as easily use other Webmention enabled CMSes like WithKnown, Grav, Perch, Drupal, et al. to participate.
The IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing
A microcast with an outline for disrupting academic publishing
A microcast with an outline for disrupting academic publishing
#openscience #edtech #phdchat #DoOO #scholcomm #scicomm #libchat #acwri #samizdat #higherED
https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/28/the-indieweb-and-academic-research-and-publishing/
👓 The death of a TLD | blog.benjojo.co.uk
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out. In the last week, ICANN removed the documentation for .xperia a TLD owned by Sony for their smartphone brand.