reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Agenda for Nov. 22nd Meeting by

Todd Conaway (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

We should make some agreements about our focus.

Are we continuting with various tools and sharing them on this site?

Should we focus more on building out our own domains and share that process?

Both? Other?

Where shall we go?

Todd, I’ve randomly come across this post today and thought I’d toss out some additional ideas to consider if you haven’t already made up your minds.

If you’re thinking about doing something like WithKnown (aka Known, the CMS your post is on), and interested in the WordPress portion, you might consider doing a full/partial Domain of One’s Own program through Reclaim Hosting or even rolling your own. Even if you go small with just a few classes, you might consider adapting the Homebrew Website Club model at your site where you invite students to tinker around, help each other out, and then show off or demonstrate their work. The related IndieWeb wiki and online chat are free to join and can provide a wealth of information and help for students (and educators!) working at owning their own domains.

Incidentally, if you’re unaware, WordPress now has a suite of plugins that will allow it to have a lot of the site-to-site communication capabilities that Known does. I’ve not done it before, but I’m fairly certain you could run it on a multiuser installation of WordPress much the same way you’re using http://janevangalen.com/cms/.

Another interesting option would be to have students try out accounts on micro.blog which are relatively inexpensive, though I suspect if you touched base with Manton Reece and explained what you were doing, he might offer free or significantly reduced hosting for a reasonable period of time. I know he’s given away a year of free hosting to attendees of IndieWebCamps who are starting out with their own domains. If he did then you might be able to use some institutional funds to purchase domains for students to get them started.

I’m happy to spitball ideas in these areas if you’re interested. I’m glad to see others experimenting around with the ideas around DoOO and IndieWeb for Education!

By the way, good on you for opening up your planning process for teaching and learning on the open web. It certainly sets a useful example for others who are exploring and following in your footsteps.

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Replied to Networking as Time Saving by

Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and "open" assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.

I talked briefly about the "innovation" part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.

A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed. I have a column set up in Tweetdeck where I'm following the # Domains19 conference. With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I'm doing, to see if anything looks interesting. People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we've talked about. Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.

One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting. I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn. I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they're doing. If I don't find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.

And inevitably, over months and years, I'll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they're doing, about why they're doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.

This is the open web I hope we're teaching our students about -- place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn.

Thanks for the shout out! Making those kinds of lists can certainly be repetitive, time consuming, and thankless. The only thing worse is that hundreds or thousands should try to reinvent the same wheel.

If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.

Here’s the sub-list of relevant people: IndieWeb and Education
The OPML file, which you can import into many readers, for the same: IndieWeb and Education (OPML)

Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested.

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Replied to a post by

Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

We've talked about and experimented with various video projects in our Learning Community. Reading this piece by sociologist Jess Calarco this week reminded me that we haven't talked as much about audio production and editing as a means having students show what they know and to share what they've learned on the open web.

I recall seeing a lot of resources for audio media creation and podcasting via KQED Teach, which was geared toward a broad level of students and technical abilities.

These types of literacies are really important to explore.

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Replied to a tweet by

Dr. Ryan Straight (Twitter)

Has anyone gathered a collection of interesting and/or unexpected ways of using @hypothes_is beyond its standard use case? @xolotl #SquadGoalsNetwork
— Dr. Ryan "Rebel Without a Clause" Straight (@RyanStraight) December 7, 2019

What a great prompt! Here are a few interesting off-label use cases I’ve used, imagined, or seen in the wild:

Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.

I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:

Writing posts with a reasonably full-featured text editor and the ability to edit and delete posts later;
HTML and markdown support;
Public and private posting as well as sharing content with other private groups;
The ability to reply to other websites;
The ability for others to comment on your posts natively;
A robust tagging functionality;
The ability to socially bookmark web pages (blank page notes);
An RSS feed;
The ability to share posts to other social platforms including meta data for Twitter cards;
Naturally, it’s very easy to use for writing short notes, creating highlights and annotations, and keeping track of what you’ve read;
It has a pseudo-social media functionality in that your public posts appear on a global timeline where people can read and interact with them.
It’s also opensource, so you can self-host, modify it, or add new features.

I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.

And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.

And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?

If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.

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Replied to a tweet by

Jon Udell (Twitter)

This might be my all-time favorite use of @hypothes_is. The examples that show up in my wordnik-friends feed always bring a smile to my face.
Wordnik is using @hypothes_is to collect citations for new words or interesting usages! It's still in early stages but you can check out our instructions (or sign up) here: https://t.co/8PMWN2ZAT5
— wordnik (@wordnik) December 8, 2019
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 8, 2019

Does this cast you as Dr. W. C. Minor in the story, albeit not in the same sort of mad man way to wordnik’s Sir James Murray? Seriously though, this is an awesome use case.

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Replied to a tweet by

Allie Nimmons (your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass) (Twitter)

As a personal project, I want to build my own application that will help me plan my wedding. Basically an online wedding binder. I know there are sites and apps out there but I want to build my own. What all could/should it do?
— your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass (@allie_nimmons) December 4, 2019

This was an inspiring question to me, so I thought I’d spitball a few ideas for doing this in an IndieWeb way. Personal events like this are an excellent use case with respect to personal websites!

I had thought of doing some of this ages ago to own this sort of great nostalgic data on my own website. Sadly I couldn’t get it up due to other work commitments. I now really wish I had.

At the moment, the only direct wedding-related page on the IndieWeb wiki is a snarky definition for engagement. When I’m done, I’ll create a stub for wedding with the following brainstorm.

Of course if you’re looking for general inspiration, the prior artwork of Pinterest, various registries, and other wedding sites will naturally be useful. But I think there are a number of IndieWeb building blocks that can be leveraged to accomplish a lot of what these sites do.

I think if I were doing it today, I’d meld some of the work from bookmarks and photos to create a Pinterest-esqe post type (probably by extending the Post Kinds Plugin, maybe with a custom wedding type with a custom display).

There is lots of prior art on the registries front on the wiki under wish or wish lists. To goose things a bit, I’d definitely add referral links from places like Amazon.com, etc. and use the money either to make a donation to a charity in honor of the event or to defray honeymoon costs. If you want to encourage direct donations or funding mechanisms, there’s also some interesting prior art at the payment wiki page.

Now that the IndieWeb has some very solid support for events and RSVPs, I might even try doing an online wedding invitation and collecting RSVPs. I’ve recently seen Jacky Alcine’s website leveraging CommentPara.de to connect to Quill for comments/replies, and it would be cool to get Quill to also add RSVP functionality to allow those without their own websites to RSVP using the non-anonymous functionality in CommentPara.de. I suspect that since many people have trouble getting RSVP functionality into their sites, that Aaron Parecki might be Tom Sawyered into providing that functionality as a quick and easy win for the broader community. (I’m not immediately aware of any other Micropub tools that do RSVPs though I may be wrong.) Of course potentially expanding it with meal options would be a lovely bonus so people can choose meat/vegetarian/other options. I’ll also mention that gRegor Morill has been tinkering with RSVPs using Webmention on Twitter. As a minimal fallback, you can also allow people to respond directly in the built-in commenting system in WordPress, but if you’re going to do it…)

The biggest piece that would be fun to figure out would be to see how to get things set up to receive social media related wedding photos of the pre-, during, and post-event stuff back to my website from friends and family. Using Brid.gy with Twitter to pull back photos that tag your twitter user name is fairly straightforward, but I’m not sure that services like Flickr or Instagram may work as easily. This may require some thought and programming, but being able to backfeed social photos to your site or even providing friends and family a serviceable photo upload functionality to your site so you can document and keep photos from the event in real-time would be a cool win and could likely be a great feature for any event-related website to have built in or widgetized. It’s usually weeks or months for paid wedding photos to show up and it’s generally a big hassle finding all the online social photos, much less keeping copies of them, so having this could be both fun and useful, particularly for looking back on the event years later.

Naturally, being a WordPress person, I’m sure there may be some interesting prior art in the plugin repository, but I think it would be far cooler to IndieWebify this sort of data and functionality for the broader world.

Depending on the wedding date, this general topic (even for other non-wedding related events) would be an awesome one to look at and explore during an upcoming IndieWebCamp. Perhaps someone is up for it at San Francisco this weekend? (I suspect they’ll have some good live-streaming options for those who aren’t local.)

Given her weddings/events background and web-based work, perhaps Liz Coopersmith (t) might be someone interesting to collaborate with on something like this?

Similarly, I recall a great presentation by Brianna Privett at WordCamp US 2017 called The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse. She may have some useful tidbits and advice in there as well.

Featured photo: Wedding cake. flickr photo by THEMACGIRL* shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

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Replied to Group Chat Rules by Randall Munroe (xkcd)

2. SHOW YOU CARE BY TRIMMING THE TRACKING JUNK OFF LINKS YOU PASTE. ❧

There’s a tool for that by the way.

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Replied to Stories in Unexpected Places by Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

While the tech choruses croon on about scale and AI and datadatadata, I prefer the long tail. Looking in the corners of digital stuff I marvel when you find small signs of quirky human presence. Li…

Looks like he went on to build some other nice little web tools like ProjectNaptha!

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