Want to try out Mastodon? Thinking about hosting your own? Or maybe you’re new to the experience and need some help or want tips for better connecting?  Our kind friends at Reclaim Hosting and ALT are doing a 90 day Mastodon experiment/class/seminar series where you can sign up for an account on a server that will self-destruct at the end of their trial run. They’re doing three sessions (live with recordings after), have a Discord for discussion and questions, and a Google doc with details and tips.

  • Session 1: Mission briefing: 19 January 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)
  • Session 2: Verifying your progress: 23 February 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)
  • Session 3: 30 days until self-destruct: 23 March 2023 at 16:00 GMT (Watch Live)

Sign up on their server today to try things out: https://thismastodonwillexplo.de/

@reclaimhosting@reclaim.rocks @jimgroom@social.ds106.us @marendeepwell@social.ds106.us

Some will think I’m in the pocket of , but I’m thinking it’s time to re-introduce to the scene. It will dramatically personalize learning while locking out the crowd.

Handwritten index card that reads: Some will think I'm in the pocket of #BigIndexCard, but I'm thinking it's time to re-introduce #IndexCards to the #EdTech scene. It will dramatically personalize learning while locking out the #SurveillanceCapitalism crowd.  #CriticalPedagogy #WissenschaftlichenArbeitens #zettelkasten

Is anyone in the or space using @tinysubversionsHometown fork of to create small “local only” posting spaces for their classes? Are there any inexpensive hosts that have one click installs/setups for this? Screen capture of paragraph that reads: "In August 2018, Kazemi created his own Mastodon server (an “instance”) called Friend Camp. But he didn’t want it to be a popular instance — he wanted to run a small social network, with under 100 users. The goal was to foster community-related discussion and attain a sense of “group cohesion.” The following year, based on his experience of running Friend Camp, Kazemi forked Mastodon into a new software package he called Hometown. One of its main features is “local only posting,” which gives users the option of not federating their posts." The last line is highlighted in yellow.
Replied to a tweet by Jared (Twitter)
@jrdprr @Mappletons @hyperlink_a Follow René Descartes’ lead and try placing memorable images/illustrations on them so that they could also leverage one’s associative memory (à la memory palaces) as well as for spaced repetition. 🃏 
I did some reading and annotation and learned something deplorable about Perusall. What grade does your AI give me?


https://hyp.is/A9EcXpR0Eey_JGdvKnxDPg/twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

I’m curious if anyone has created lists of graduate programs in education that are actively teaching/researching pedagogy described in @CathyNDavidson‘s ? I’m considering tying some of my interests into a potential new career path.
Read 25 Years of Ed Tech – Blogs by JR DingwallJR Dingwall (jrdingwall.ca)
This week I was able to catch up a bit on some podcasts I subscribe to. One of the casts I’ve been enjoying lately is 25 Years of Ed Tech, a serialized version of Martin Weller’s book by the same title. Now audio books are plenty good by themselves, but this particular podcast has an addition episode per chapter called “between the chapters” where a host interviews members of the ed tech community (those around Martin in some way) about the topic of the previous chapter. This week was all about blogs.
JR writes about some of his journey into blogging. I appreciate some of the last part about the 9x9x25 blogs. For JR it seems like some smaller prompts got him into more regular writing.

He mentions Stephen Downes‘ regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen’s. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it’s just so easy to do. I’ll bookmark things or post about what I’ve recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that—short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it’s a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.

Perhaps a snowball analogy will work? I take a tiny snowball of words and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.

Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we’re off to the races.

It’s just this sort of workflow that I was considering when I recently suggested that those using annotation as a classroom social annotation tool, might also consider using it to help students create commonplace books to help students spur their writing. The key is to create small/low initial stakes that have the potential to build up into something bigger. Something akin to the user interface of Twitter (and their tweetstorm functionality). Write a short sentence or two on which you can hit publish, but if the mood strikes, then write another, and another until you’ve eventually gotten to something that could be a blog post (or article). Of course if you do this, you should own it.

This is also the sort of perspective which Sönke Ahrens takes in his excellent book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers, though there he’s prescribing something for general note taking when I might suggest it’s a prescription for a pedagogy behind living and writing.

Replied to a tweet by Maggie AppletonMaggie Appleton (Twitter)
A great question to be sure.

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.

Maybe a dash of #OpenScience, along with maybe @LibCarpentry and @theCarpentries?

#​IndieWeb is platform interoperability, along with a smattering of the others but you already knew of that overlap.

RSVPed Attending Missed Conversation @VConnecting at

***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:

**Give to Ian’s GoFundMe in solidarity with this cause**

We are having a Virtually Connecting Missed Conversation following the conference on Friday, April 23rd, 8pm UK time.

Our guests include 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.

To know the time in your local time, see below:

Watch Live via YouTube

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April 23, 2021 at 12:00PM - April 23, 2021 at 01:00PM

Notes from the DoOO October Meetup

Chris Aldrich:

The October Domain of One’s Own meetup is starting in just about 45 minutes. Get your tea or coffee ready and join us for some conversation. @withknown https://boffosocko.com/2020/10/02/domain-of-ones-own-meetup-october-2020/
The conference room is open for the meetup for socializing prior to the meetup: https://events.indieweb.org/2020/10/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-october-2020–GvlqwJBN66xn
Had a good, but smaller meeting this week and talked with @jbj and others about uses of webmention.

Reminder: We’re hosting A Domain of One’s Own Meetup: “Domains and the Cloud” in about 2 hours. Hope you’ll join us. 
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