Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020 at 12:00 PM Eastern / 9:00 AM Pacific
https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-september-2020–908ut7UmA2T3
https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-september-2020–908ut7UmA2T3
We expect there will be students, teachers, designers, web developers, technologists, and people of all ages and ranges of ability from those just starting out with a domain to those running DoOO programs at colleges or even people running their own hosting companies.
We’ll meet via Zoom for audio/video and will use an Etherpad for real-time chat and note taking for the event.
We will
To RSVP to the meetup, please (optionally) do one of the following:
While the time frame for this meetup may work best for some in the Americas, everyone with interest is most welcome. If there are others in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, or other locales who are interested, do let us know what dates/times might work for you in the future and we can try to organize a time to maximize some attendance there. I’m happy to help anyone who’d like to take the leadership of other time zones or locales to leverage some of the resources of the IndieWeb community to assist in starting future meetings to cover other areas of the world.
Have a topic idea for discussion at the next session? Drop us a line by adding a comment to this post or one of the syndicated copies, ping me in chat, or track me down on your platform and means of communication of choice.
Know someone who would be interested in joining? Please forward this event, or one of the syndicated copies to them on your platform or modality of choice.
Featured image: Hard Drive Repair flickr photo by wwarby shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Within higher education, requests to build websites for individual faculty members sit at the absolute bottom of the work queue for most marketing/communications teams. If this type of product is offered at all, it typically uses a self-service model; the institution will provide the platform while the faculty member will provide the content. And while this is the most sustainable model for most small and mid-sized web teams, it tends to produce multiple websites that are ineffective at communicating even simple messages. Worse, they have a high tendency to become the poorest reflections of the institution with a high rate of abandonment or misuse.
Let's fix that tendency together. With a careful examination of what really matters to faculty members who are looking to create and maintain their own websites, we can begin to build better sites. With better sites (and a little luck), you can start to derive value from the project at the bottom of your work pile.
Together we'll talk about:
- A simple analysis of the types of content that you'll typically find within a faculty website.
- A "wish list" for the types of content that you (as a marketer) would really like to see from these types of sites.
- A working example of a theme that delivers on these key concepts and adds some "quick wins" which makes for a better experience.
- How to leverage the capabilities of WordPress multisite to produce more value from collections of these type of sites.
I totally want to start using something like this myself to not only test it out, but to build in the proper microformats v2 mark up so that it’s IndieWeb friendly. Perhaps a project at the planned IWC Pop-up Theme raising session?
Do you have an internet Domain of One’s Own? What is it? Why would you want one? Would you like to try one out? What can you do with it? How do you build it?
Do you have an internet Domain of One’s Own? What is it? Why would you want one? Would you like to try one out? What can you do with it? How do you build it?
We’ll use Zoom for this online meetup (here’s the link to the room which should be active about 15 minutes before we start). We’re planning on using an Etherpad for real-time chat and note taking for the event.
Attendees will be expected to have read and agree to the IndieWeb Code of Conduct which will apply to the meetup.
We will
To RSVP to the meetup, please do one of the following:
While the time frame for this inaugural meetup may work best for some in the Americas, everyone with interest is most welcome. If there are others in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, or other locales who are interested, do let us know what dates/times might work for you in the future and we can try to organize a time to maximize some attendance there. I’m happy to help anyone who’d like to take the leadership of other time zones or locales to leverage some of the resources of the IndieWeb community to assist in starting future meetings to cover other areas of the world.
Tim Owens, Aaron Davis, Cathie LeBlanc, Kartik Prabhu, Amber Case, Amy Guy, Greg McVerry, William Ian O’Byrne, Jim Groom, Kimberly Hirsh, John Johnston, Robin DeRosa, Audrey Watters, Ken Bauer, Will Monroe, Jeremy Dean, Nate Angell, Jon Udell, Adam Procter, Amy Guy, Kris Shaffer, Anelise H. Shrout, John Johnston, Mark Grabe, Rick Wysocki, Doug Holton, Jeffrey Keefer, Rayna M. Harris, Davey Moloney, Vicki Boykis, John Carlos Baez, Dan Scott, Taylor Jadin, Kathleen Fitzpatrick (mb), Blair MacIntyre (mb), Doug Belshaw, Adam Procter, Dan Cohen (mb), Dave Cormier, Scott Gruber, Kay Oddone, Kin Lane, Martha Burtis, Lee Skallerup Bessette, Adam Croom, Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, Cassie Nooyen, Stephen Downes, Ben Werdmüller, Erin Jo Richey, Jack Jamieson, Grant Potter, Ryan Boren (mb), Paul Hibbits, Maha Bali, Alan Levine, John Stewart, Teodora Petkova, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Clint Lalonde, Clint Lalonde, Sonja Burrows, Jonathan Poritz, Chris Long, Mo Pelzel, Michelle S. Hagerman, Anne-Marie Scott, Tim Clarke, Amy Collier, Laura Pasquini, Martin Hawksey, Zach Whalen, Daniel Lynds, Tom Woodward, Mark A. Matienzo, Laura Gibbs, Autumn Caines, Chris Lott, Jess Reingold, Terry Green, Erin Rose Glass, Trip Kirkpatrick, Meredith Fierro, Lauren Brumfield, Helen DeWaard, Keegan Long-Wheeler, Irene Stewart, Christina Hendricks, Bill Kronholm, Xinli Wang, Tineke D’Haeseleer, Martin Weller, Jeremy Felt, Jane Van Galen, Tanis Morgan, Library Carpentry
Know someone who would be interested in joining? Please forward this event, or one of the syndicated copies (linked below) to them on your platform or modality of choice.
Hashtags: #phdchat, #DoOO, #edtechchat, #literacies, #higherED, #dh, #ds106, #educolor, #WPCampus, #openscience, #clmooc, #digped, #altc
Featured image: Hard Drive Repair flickr photo by wwarby shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I’m thinking monthly to start, but I’m curious what days of the week and times might work best for people, especially across time zones?
Let me know if you’re interested in helping to organize or would like to join us to participate.
Featured image: Hard Drive Repair flickr photo by wwarby shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I think some of the POSSE (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) model may work to smooth some of this over. For example, I can write my response to everyone on my own WordPress site and fairly easily syndicate it to Twitter to have the best of both worlds.
If this weekend isn’t convenient, let’s host a pop-up session or mini-conference in a bit to discuss it and see what we can hack together.
The broad ideas behind DoOO dovetail quite well and the IndieWeb community has a welcoming, inclusive, and helpful atmosphere with a solid code of conduct.
The upcoming event is called IndieWebCamp 2020 West (based roughly on the Pacific time Zone). I’ve already started proposing a few DoOO-related sessions on their organizing Etherpad. I’d encourage others in the community who are interested to register for the free two day camp to talk about what we can do with our websites and how we can improve them. Students, faculty, staff, and even hobbyists of all levels of ability are welcome. If you’ve got ideas for things you’re interested in doing on or with your website, feel free to propose your own topics (either now or the morning of day one).
We’d love to see everyone there.
Day one is a brief introduction followed by various discussion-based sessions on topics of interest to those who attend. (First time attendees are given the first opportunity to schedule topics.) Day two is a creator day on which people write, create, build, code, or otherwise improve something on their website. If you don’t yet have a website, people will be on hand to help you set one up, or get around obstacles you may have for being able to use and manage your website.
Details and RSVP information can be found here: https://indieweb.org/2020/West
If anyone has questions or needs further details or help proposing potential sessions, don’t hesitate to ask.
#pcPopUp2020 is 6 hours old in the UK, but way older in other parts of the world, feel free to join in
— PressED Conf - A tweeting WordPress conference (@pressedconf) May 27, 2020
In the meanwhile, I’m curious what Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and others might whip up while I’m sleeping?
Do you want to know when someone annotates your webpages? Do you want to follow somebody's annotations? You have come to the right place.
One could easily wire up the output from this through a service like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc. to push the notifications to email, or other modalities as desired.
It doesn’t give anything over and above what a Hypothes.is addict with some programming skills could already produce, but for those who are code averse, or just too busy with building other pieces of the Domain of One’s Own this could allow some simpler outputs.
If you are a tinkerer, there is a GitHub repo for the project.
While you’re at it, why not throw in the usernames of some of your favorite annotators and subscribe away in your favorite feed reader? Some of the best things I discover online are through colleagues’ annotations, I think, in part, because it’s a much higher level of engagement with the material than the pablum found in many Twitter feeds.
It could also be a good means of following annotations on some of your favorite hashtags in the system as well. Want to learn some new words? Follow wordnik in your feed reader. Want to know the state of the art in Open Education Resources? There’s a tag serious people are annotating with that you could follow in your reader.
Because it is a single text file usually named index.html
written in HTML, CSS and some JavaScript, I thought it would make an ideal candidate for a simple-to-use personal website that can be hosted on one’s own domain. As a researcher who appreciates the IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own philosophies and uses my personal website as a commonplace book for both work and personal reasons, how could I resist?
TiddlyWiki is easy to use, highly flexible, modifiable, and can be easily copied, backed up, and shared. There’s an active community of users and developers for the platform which dates back to 2004. There are a variety of examples and documentation online and plugins are literally as simple as dragging and dropping some files from one source directly into your own Wiki. For those interested in the OER movement, individual Tiddlers (TiddlyWiki’s name for cards or discrete entries within the wiki) can be easily dragged and dropped from other TiddlyWikis to copy them!
There are some useful instructions for hosting it almost everywhere–except on one’s own domain name.
The few easy options I’ve found for hosting a TiddlyWiki publicly online as a website were rely on someone else’s service as a subdomain. As much as I like the idea of TiddlySpot I really wanted to use my own domain name (not to mention that it’s non-obvious how to host a newer TiddlyWiki version 5 (TW5) instance there). I’d also seen TiddlySpace shut down a few years ago and didn’t want to deal with that potentiality—though I will admit that exporting would be as simple as downloading and moving a single file!
So after a month or so at tinkering around at several complicated solutions that always seemed beyond my grasp, I went back to IndieWeb basics. What is their recommendation for the easiest way to get a website up and running? The fact that an empty TiddlyWiki file is named index.html
gave me my answer: set up a GitHub Pages-based website and simply connect it to my domain!
However, as simple as this pathway may seem to some, I thought I’d briefly document the process I took so others can do the same for themselves.
First I’ll presume you’ve got a domain name and a host that will allow you to change the CNAME for where your domain name is pointed. (If you don’t, check out https://indieweb.org/personal-domain for details.)
In short, you’re going to upload a single file to your GitHub account and then point your domain name at it.
The idea of GitHub may scare a lot of people, but you won’t need to use git, know any git commands, or even know how git works since I’ll describe steps that entirely use the graphical user interface and don’t come anywhere near using the command line or any complicated GitHub applications. It’ll be as easy as dragging and dropping.
Let’s start!
index.html
to a convenient place on your computer.username.github.io
, where username
is your username (or organization name if you’re doing it for your organization) on GitHub.index.html
file you saved on your computer or you can click “choose your files” to find and upload the file.index.html
file in it.example.com
into the field and click the “Save” button.Missed my presentation for PressEdConf20 on Twitter earlier and want to read it all bundled up instead? The “article” version appears blow. You can also enjoy the Twitter moment version if you like.
Hello everyone! My name is Chris Aldrich. I’m an independent researcher in a variety of areas including the overlap the internet and education. You can find more about me on my website https://boffosocko.com
Today I’ll be talking about Webmentions for open pedagogy.
For a variety of reasons (including lack of budget, time, support, and other resources) many educators have been using corporate tools from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others for their ease-of-use as well as for a range of functionality that hadn’t previously existed in the blogosphere or open source software that many educators use or prefer.
This leaves us and our students open to the vagaries and abuses that those platforms continually allow including an unhealthy dose of surveillance capitalism.
In the intervening years since the blogosphere and the rise of corporate social media, enthusiasts, technologists and open source advocates have continued iterating on web standards and open protocols, so that now there are a handful of web standards that work across a variety of domains, servers, platforms, allowing educators to use smaller building blocks to build and enable the functionalities we need for building, maintaining, and most importantly owning our online courseware.
Some of these new W3C specs include Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, IndieAuth, and Microsub. Today I’ll talk abut Webmentions which are simply site-to-site @mentions or notifications which don’t involve corporate social media silos.
For those who’d like more information about Webmentions and how they could be used, I’ve written a primer for A List Apart entitled Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
Many common content management systems support Webmention either out of the box or with plugins including: our friend WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Grav, and many others.
WordPress can use this new standard with the Webmention plugin. (Surprise!) I also highly recommend the Semantic Linkbacks plugin which upgrades the presentation of these notifications (like Trackback, Pingback, or Webmention) to more user-friendly display so they appear in comments sections much like they do in corporate social media as comments, reposts, likes, and favorites, detected using microformats2 markup from the source of the linkback.
Another plugin I love is Post Kinds Plugin (Classic editor only at present) which automatically parses URLs I want to reply to, like, bookmark, etc. and saves the reply context to my website which helps prevent context collapse. My commentary and notes then appear below it.
(I also use a plugin that saves the content of URLs on my site to the Internet Archive, so I can reference them there later if necessary.)
These plugins with WordPress allow teachers to post course content and students can then post their responses on their own sites and send notifications that they’ve read, listened to, or watched that content along with their ideas and commentary.
Examples of webmentions in a course setting: Greg McVerry and I ran an experiment with Webmentions in a class in 2018.
Example assignment: https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/5570-2/
Notice the replies underneath which came from other sites including my response which is mirrored on my site at https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/04/highlighting-some-of-my-favorite-edtech-tools/
Example podcast post for a class: https://archive.jgregorymcverry.com/2toponder-episode-one/
Notice the listen webmention in the comments which links to my listen response at: https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/06/2toponder-episode-one-intertextrevolution/ where I own a copy of the context and my own response. As a student, even if the originals disappear, I’ve got the majority of the important content from the course.
When the course is over, the student has an archive of their readings, work, and participation (portfolio anyone?) on a site they own. They can choose to leave it public or unpublish it and keep private copies.
[Copies for Facebook, Google+ or Big EdTech Giants? They can ask for them nicely if they want them so desperately instead of taking them surreptitiously.]
As a concrete example, I now have tagged archives for all the work I’ve done for EDU522 with Greg McVerry who also has his related posts in addition to a variety that he subsequently archived.
By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.
[No more content farming? What will the corporate social media silos do?]
Imagine Webmentions being used for referencing journal articles, academic samizdat, or even OER? Suggestions and improvement could accumulate on the original content itself rather than being spread across dozens of social silos on the web.
[Webmentions + creativity: How might you take their flexibility and use it in your online teaching practices?]
There’s current research, coding work, and thinking going on within the IndieWeb community to extend ideas like private webmentions and limiting audience so that this sort of interaction can happen in more secluded online spaces.
I’d welcome everyone who’s interested to join in the effort. Feel free to inquire at an upcoming IndieWebCamp, Homebrew Website Club, event, or in online chat right now.
I’ve also been able to use my WordPress website to collect posts relating to my participation in conferences like PressEdConf20 or Domains 2019 which included syndicated content to Twitter and the responses from there that have come back to my site using Brid.gy which bootstraps Twitter’s API to send Webmentions back to my website.
If Twitter were to go away, they may take some of my connections, but the content and the conversations will live on in a place under my own control.
Thanks for your time and attention! I’m around on Twitter–or better: my own website!–if you have any questions.