The term independently-hosted is used here to describe online publishing practices that utilise the World Wide Web (hereafter the Web) as a decentralised socio-technical system, where individuals and communities operate as the owners or controllers of the online infrastructures they use in order to share content. Such practices may be adopted as an alternative of, or as a complement to, the use of centralised content-sharing systems that belong to and are entirely operated by third parties. The term “publishing” is used here in a rather inclusive way and refers to the act of making content available online, rather than being restricted to the editorial processes that characterise, for instance, academic publishing. DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1665
Great to see IndieWeb.org cited in the academic literature.
Is anyone in the #EdTech or #DoOO space using @tinysubversions‘ Hometown fork of #Mastodon to create small “local only” posting spaces for their classes? Are there any inexpensive hosts that have one click installs/setups for this?
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
This fantastic essay touches on so many things related to IndieWeb and A Domain of One’s Own. We often talk about the “why” of these movements, but Alan Jacobs provides some underlying ethics as well.
It's a stellar week of conferences and workshops for all things digital in higher ed, including #IAnno21, the #DoOO Roadshow, #LACOL2021, and vCLAC2021 all happening. Buckle up!
Many worlds theory of twitter: There's another corner of tweetspace, unconnected from ours, where people are talking about the web as topography, personal wikis, learning in public, & platform interoperability. They use completely different buzzwords and metaphors. Plausible?
Define “ours“. “Tweetspace” is only Twitter? Perhaps not all of those at once…
The education space definitely. Many are still in the “old” blogosphere. They use phrases/hashtags like “Domain of One’s Own” (#DoOO), personal learning networks (#pln), #EdTech, #EthicalEdTech, etc.
It looks like we also set up IndieWeb plugins to see who was mentioning us. We also used The Events Calendar, Search Everything (better searches), Really Simple SSL, Easy Fancybox, Google Forms, and Page Links To (as a form of link shortener for external links).
— Matt (Next Level Proctoring CEO Nightmare Fuel)™ (@grandeped) June 7, 2021
I’m happy to help you try to put together an IndieWeb-friendly version with Webmentions which work with multiple platforms including WordPress, Known, Grav, etc.
You might find some interesting examples and pieces on IndieWeb wiki, particularly their Education page. I’d love to see Matt add his example(s) to that page for others’ future reference.
If you go the older route one of the best planet-like sites I’ve seen was http://connectedcourses.net/, which if I recall correctly was built by Alan Levine. If you poke around a bit or ask @cogdog on Twitter, I think there are some details or a recipe somewhere of how he put it together.
Chances are reasonably good that people in the #DS106 or #DoOO space have some ideas as well.
I mentioned it as an anecdotal observation in my talk, so I went back and counted the appearances of online identifiers on the 159 re-mixable badges for the OERxDomains 21 Conference. I counted 91 twitter handles, 15 domain names, and 1 Instagram handle.
There were a couple people who used email addresses. A few people listed multiple twitter handles, and one enterprising person (not me!) listed three domain names.
Because the badges were customizable, people (or their animals and a few organizations) had the individual choice of what text to put on their personal badges.
Hopefully we’ll do better on using domain names at the next domains-related conference. 😜
Due to scheduling issues beyond my control just before the conference, I had to shorten my hour-long workshop down to a 20 minute talk. I intend to do a couple of separate hands-on workshops at upcoming Domain of Our Own meetups so that people can implement the moving pieces I demonstrate into their own websites. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll let you know when they’re scheduled.
I’m hoping that when the next conference rolls around at least some of us can participate using our own domains and not need to rely on Twitter’s infrastructure.
I posted a link to the slides last week if you’d like to follow along that way and have links to some of the resources. (You should also have access to some of my notes/rough transcript as well as alt-text for some of the images included.) The slides still have some context and links to portions of the original version that got cut out.
For those unaware of the conference or topics, it was two days of great presentations about the topics of Open Education Resources (OER) and A Domain of One’s Own which is focused on giving teachers and students to websites and underlying technology of their own for daily personal and professional use. Those interested in the IndieWeb may particularly find the Domains track enlightening. Others interested in teaching, pedagogy, and publishing will get a lot out of the OER tracks.
New and just wading in here I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department
Our medium sized college has always offered our students and faculty a choice in terms of the platform they choose to use: Wordpress, tumblr, weebly, medium, etc., mostly because we didn’t have anything else to offer them other than the LMS that was supported by the institution.
This past September our communication courses for first year have been using wordpress.com (mostly) as they were encouraged by the teaching faculty who were also using wordpress.com sites for their own writing. The redesigned communication courses have the students learning to write, give and receive feedback, and loop through this cycle several times for an authentic audience. First semester focuses on personal writing, the second focuses on professional writing.
(just wanted to provide some context for my reply - they had to go with wordpress.com as there was no plan or budget to do a local install or have it hosted for the college)
Feedback from the faculty teaching team after teaching for almost 8 weeks is how to template and simplify space for students to use, here is a direct quote: “could we create dedicated blog page for students that would be a pre-made, fool-proof template? When a student’s WordPress blog does not work and we can’t fix the problem, it is very frustrating to be helpless beside an exasperated student.”
I am inclined to suggest freeing up the expectation that the student’s use wordpress and that they instead use a platform that they may already be familiar with (like tumblr etc.,) and create a space AND use categories/titles that are consistent so that the faculty can go in and review, comment, provide feedback etc., easily.
Many students may choose to use wordpress either way but…
One thing that we do here that may help the conversation is that our library holds workshops to assist students in creating their online presence, creative commons, attribution etc.,
I’m interested in any thoughts or feedback on how to approach the our communication faculty request… am I heading in the right direction??
Thanks!!
Alana
There may be a bit of a path forward here that some might consider using that has some fantastic flexibility.
There is a WordPress plugin called Micropub (which needs to be used in conjunction with the IndieAuth plugin for authentication to their CMS account) that will allow students to log into various writing/posting applications.
These are usually slimmed down interfaces that don’t provide the panoply of editing options that the Gutenberg interface or Classic editor metabox interfaces do. Quill is a good example of this and has a Medium.com like interface. iA Writer is a solid markdown editor that has this functionality as well (though I think it only works on iOS presently).
Students can write and then post from these, but still have the option to revisit within the built in editors to add any additional bells and whistles they might like if they’re so inclined.
This system is a bit like SPLOTs, but has a broader surface area and flexibility. I’ll also mention that many of the Micropub clients are open source, so if one were inclined they could build their own custom posting interface specific to their exact needs. Even further, other CMSes like Known, Drupal, etc. either support this web specification out of the box or with plugins, so if you built a custom interface it could work just as well with other platforms that aren’t just WordPress. This means that in a class where different students have chosen a variety of ways to set up their Domains, they can be exposed to a broader variety of editing tools or if the teacher chooses, they could be given a single editing interface that is exactly the same for everyone despite using different platforms.
***UPDATE*** On Sunday April 18 Ian Linkletter [announced](https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1383896567279538177) that his legal fees have extended beyond the amount raised in his fundraising campaign from a few months ago. We had always intended to discuss online proctoring and academic surveillance during this session and now with this new development we are dedicating the event to Ian’s defense fund. If you are unfamiliar with this case the [Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good overview of what is at stake](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic) and we ask that you:
We are having a Virtually Connecting Missed Conversation following the #OER21xDomains conference on Friday, April 23rd, 8pm UK time.
Our guests include #OER21xDomains keynote speakers Jasmine Roberts, Rajiv Jhangiani, Laura Gibbs, Tutaleni Asino, and our participant discussants include Maya Hey, Georgia Yee, Sarah Silverman, and Errkie Haipinge . Your Virtually Connecting buddies/hosts are Autumm Caines, Maha Bali, and Brenna Clarke-Gray.
We will focus on reflecting on the conference in general, and specifically would like to address the topic of online proctoring and surveillance in education. To keep the conversation intimate we will not be sharing a Zoom registration, but you are welcome to watch live and post comments/questions on the YouTube livestream, which we will be monitoring.
April 23, 2021 at 12:00PM - April 23, 2021 at 01:00PM
My only issue with the scintillating #OERxDomains21 conference is that I now have 100 open browser tabs full of awesome articles, resources, and materials that I’m going to have to read through and process. Worse, I’ve only touched on 1/4 of the content at the conference and it’s going to take a few months to watch and think about the balance.
Daniel Villar-Onrubia & Victoria I. Marín (Internet Policy Review Volume 11, Issue 2 DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1665)
Alan Jacobs
Maggie Appleton
Whitney Trettien
I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department
Associaltion for Learning Technology