Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes

I’ve been to a number of WordCamps over the past year, and invariably, in the registration process I’m asked for my Twitter handle and the majority of the time that Twitter handle is printed on my name tag.

Why are we doing this?! It’s not TwitterCamp. It’s a W-O-R-D-C-A-M-P!! Why can’t we ask for and put our own domain names (running WordPress, natch…) in our registration and on our name tags?! Let’s get with the program people… Twitter is nice, but obviously WordPress on a domain name we own and control is far better.

A common sticker-type name tag that is preprinted with the large text "Hello My URL is" with smaller text underneath that reads <a href=" "> and a blank space in the middle where someone has handwritten in pen "photomatt.net"
This is the sort of name tag I’d much rather support!

As I’m thinking about bookclubs and Hypothes.is, I sort of wish that Ruined by Design was either online or in .pdf format so that I could use a Hypothes.is group to highlight/annotate my copy with their tool for my bookclub. I’m curious if there are any non-academic bookclubs using it in the wild?

Obviously it’s great for reading native digital content, material in the public domain, or Creative Commons content, but how could one work on participatory annotations for more restricted copyright material? Is there a Hypothes.is plugin for the Kindle, Kindle apps, or other e-readers that may work with copyright material?

📖 15% done with Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro

📖 15% into reading Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro

Read Chapters: The Ethics of Design, How Designers Destroyed the World, and Moving Fast and Breaking Things

I was very reticent about this book at first, but it is way more essential than I initially thought! I knew I was going to know almost all of the examples, and I’ve generally been right on that account so far, but he’s going beyond the problems with potential solutions. I was worried it was going to be something that I would appreciate and heartily recommend to others without getting much out of it myself, but it reads quickly and easily and there’s a lot here that I want to come back and ponder about further.

Despite the fact that I don’t feel like a professional web designer by trade, what he’s talking about here are standards of human care and interaction that anyone who makes anything should be thinking about on a daily basis. Whether you’re building or creating things for others or even making your own daily life, at heart, you’re designing something.

If Chuck Chugumlung hasn’t come across this book yet with respect to his Design X Pasadena group, I’ll recommend it heartily to him.

I also find myself thinking a lot about how people are building and designing technologies in the edtech space. May of the researchers, professors, and instructional designers I know are immersed in some of the ethics and morals behind using these technologies. Generally I hear them talking about what they “wish” they had as tools, but often they seem to be stuck with things they don’t really want and are then attempting to figure out ways around these technologies after-the-fact so that they can use them in an ethical manner. They really need to stand up, refuse to use what they’re given, and demand better design from the start. Even if they’re incapable of building their own tools, they’re slowly, but surely going to loose the war if they don’t move upstream to where the actual decisions are being made. Fortunately some of the work I see in the OER space is being done at the grass roots where people have more choice and say in the design, but I worry that if they’re not careful, those tools will be siloed off with bad design choices by for-profit companies as well.

Title and author on a white background at the top with a red filtered view of an atomic mushroom cloud explosion on the Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean

📗 Started reading Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro

📗 Started reading Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro

I had a great time at WordCamp Orange County this weekend. Apparently it was so much fun and I got so wrapped up that I did a less than stellar job of documenting as much of it as I would have liked in my digital commonplace book. I do wish I had thought to take way more pictures. Fortunately there are enough snippets and photos from others that I’ll remember the highlights. Hopefully the sessions I missed will pop up on WordPress.tv soon.

I’ve already begun digging into some follow up and what comes next. One of my favorite ideas is doing a future WordCamp for Kids in the Los Angeles area. I’ve also begun thinking of some future volunteering-related projects at larger scale, but more on that later.

Thanks again to all the volunteers, sponsors, and attendees who helped to make it such a great camp!

I’m pretty sure I caught the right people in person, but I’ll say it again that this was one of my favorite camp themes of all time.

Cartoon logo for the camp featuring progressively darker waves going down the page with a brighter periscope view of a yellow submarine in the center

Reminder: What about the idea of creating a stand-alone version of a page builder plugin like Beaver Builder with a layer of IndieAuth and Micropub on top that would make it a potential Micropub client? I’ve pitched the idea that Medium.com could quickly be turned into a micropub client, why not these? Create a page and it’s general layout in a page building client and then send the payload to your website without the need to have the code running directly on your website!

I briefly spitballed the general idea of this with Robby McCullough today.

There’s also the potential that an IndieAuth/Micropub set up could be created to give advertising platforms the ability to access smaller portions of a website to essentially inject advertising into a site’s sidebars, footers, or content directly, maybe on a pay-per-pixel basis. I’d really have to implicitly trust an advertisement server to allow this however.