read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Delta, Bank of America End Sponsorship of New York’s Public Theater Over Trump-Like ‘Julius Caesar'” | Hollywood Reporter

Read Delta, Bank of America End Sponsorship of New York's Public Theater Over Trump-Like 'Julius Caesar' (The Hollywood Reporter)

“No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of 'Julius Caesar' at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values," the airline said in a statement.

Even satire can’t be treated respectfully anymore.

Where’s the possible angle on the story that these companies are doing this for potential Trump retribution? What about other sponsors? Are they experiencing customer fall-out over their support of the piece? This story stopped far too short.

👓 Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech – Hybrid Pedagogy | Digital Pedagogy Lab

Read Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech by Kris Shaffer (Hybrid Pedagogy)

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.

👓 Looking back at #Domains17 | Trinity College Educational Technology

Read Looking back at #Domains17 (commons.trincoll.edu)

This week, most of the educational technology group went to Oklahoma City for the Domains 2017 conference, jointly hosted by Reclaim Hosting and the University of Oklahoma.

We went because we are quite close to setting up a pilot instance of Trinity Domains, a Domain of One’s Own project (see also: A Domain of One’s Own in a Post-Ownership Society) that will give faculty, students, and staff the digital infrastructure to stake out their digital identity and develop new, exciting forms of scholarship. Since setup is imminent, the conference seemed like a good way to see what other schools were doing, and to make connections for when we inevitably need help.

We’re launching the project because we want to be able to support as much open, web-based teaching, learning, and scholarship as possible, in as many forms as possible, and we want to make it as easy as possible for people to experiment online.

I don’t think any of us at Trinity were well-positioned to do a proper “review” of #Domains17, as we don’t yet have access to the Domain of One’s Own setup, and so don’t have fingertip knowledge of what’s easy, what’s hard, or anything like that.

In lieu of that review, then, here’re a few thoughts:

#Domains17 was a great short-conference experience, at an interesting venue and with lots of very friendly, collaboration-minded people. Lauren Brumfield, Adam Croom, Jim Groom, and everyone associated with the conference deserve a lot of credit. 13/10, would attend another event.

Martha Burtis’s keynote, “Neither Locked Out Nor Locked In,” is a really great starting point for thinking tangibly about some of the reasons one might want to pursue a Domains project.

It also primed me with a thought that held up very well throughout the conference: Her entire section on “WordPress as Symbol and Choice” decries the fact that WordPress often becomes the default way to inhabit a domain of one’s own, which is . . . problematic. Students and faculty need to be free to have domains with different technology options, even if we all have to stretch a bit in terms of what we support, and what people have to support on their own a little bit.

Once you’d heard that talk from Martha, it was hard not to realize that the conference schedule was quite WordPress focused. There were more examples of “here’s how to do a cool thing in WordPress” than there were examples of “here’s a successful instructional use of Domains.” This is neither good nor bad as such, but it was just interesting to see the lay of the land. Since we have two multisite WordPress installations on campus, the temptation to default to WordPress will be something to both resist and work with.

Switching gears a little: On a personal note it was neat to see Jon Udell talk about annotation. It’s probably not the thing he’d pick to be known for, but I’ve shown his screencast on Wikipedia & the heavy metal umlaut to thousands of people over the years.

There will be more thoughts on this over the summer—and I’d certainly invite Amy and Dave and Sue to chime in with their impressions—as we get started. Certainly it’s the case that I jotted down a ton of things to look into as soon as we’re up and running, which I hope to be able to report on soon!

Photo with all four of us by Tom Woodward, shared under a Creative Commons-BY-SA-2.0 license

📺 Domains2017 Conference: Tuesday June 6, 3:00pm with the OU Crew | YouTube

Watched Tuesday June 6, 3:00pm with the OU Crew from YouTube

For more information see the blog post for the event at http://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2017/05/31/domains17/

Indieweb for Education: Some thoughts after the Domains 17 Conference

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!

An Invitation to Attendees

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

📺 Domains17 Conference: Tuesday June 6, 12:30pm with Lee Skallerup Bessette, Jesse Stommel, Jim Luke | YouTube

Watched Domains17: Tuesday June 6, 12:30pm with Lee Skallerup Bessette, Jesse Stommel, Jim Luke by Domains 17 from YouTube

For more information see the blog post for the event at http://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2017/05/31/domains17/

🎧 Containers Episode 7: The Lost Docks

Listened to Containers Episode 7: The Lost Docks from Containers

It’s 1979 and containerization is sweeping through the San Francisco waterfront, leaving the old docks in ruins. As global trade explodes, a group of longshoremen band together to try to preserve the culture of work that they knew. They take pictures, create a slide show, and make sound recordings. Those recordings languished in a basement for 40 years. In this episode, we hear those archival tapes as a way of exploring the human effects of automation.

A nice bit on the human side of shipping, and in particular how things have changed for longshoremen.

As I listen to this and some of the culture discussed in the episode, I can’t help but wonder about how things change for the modern-day versions of longshoremen. So for example, a lot of programmers have some of this type of culture. I’ll admit it’s early days right now, but what happens to the class of programmers now fifty years on? Could make an interesting plot for a sci-fi story?

https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg/episode-7-the-lost-docks