edu522 | Chris Aldrich

Think the unthinkable: My Version for the Future of Digital Teaching and Learning for EDU522

I’m still evolving what my version of the future of digital teaching and learning looks like, but I am certainly enamored of the idea of mixing in many ideas of the open internet and IndieWeb ways of approaching it all. Small, open, relatively standardized, and remixable pieces can hopefully help lower barriers to teachers and learners everywhere.

The ability to interact directly with a course website and the materials in a course using my own webspace/digital commonplace book via Webmention seems like a very powerful tool. I’m able to own/archive many or most of the course materials for later use and reflection. I’m also able to own all of my own work for later review or potential interaction with fellow classmates or the teacher. Having an easier ability to search my site for related materials to draw upon for use in synthesizing and creating new content, also owned on my own site, is particularly powerful.

Certainly there are some drawbacks and potential inequalities in a web-based approach, particularly for those who don’t have the immediate resources required to access materials, host their own site, own their own data, or even interact digitally. William Gibson has famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Hopefully breaking down some of the barriers to accessibility in education for all will help the distribution.

There’s also questions relating to how open should things really be? How private (or not) should they be? Ideally teachers provide a large swath of openness, particularly when it comes to putting their materials in the commons for others to reuse or remix. Meanwhile allowing students to be a bit more closed if they choose to keep materials just for their own uses, to limit access to their own work/thoughts, or to potentially limit the audience of their work (eg. to teachers and fellow classmates) is a good idea. Recent examples within the social media sphere related to context collapse have provided us with valuable lessons about how long things should last, who should own them, how public should they be in the digital sphere? Students shouldn’t be penalized in the future for ideas they “tried on” while learning. Having the freedom and safety to make mistakes in a smaller arena can be a useful tool within teaching–those mistakes shouldn’t cost them again by being public at a later date. Some within the IndieWeb have already started experimenting with private webmentions and other useful tools like limiting audiences which may help these ideas along despite their not existing in a simple implementation for the masses yet.

Naturally the open web can be a huge place, so having some control and direction is always nice. I’ve always thought students should be given a bit more control over where they’re going and what they want out of a given course as well as the ability to choose their own course materials to some extent. Still having some semblance of outline/syllabus and course guidelines can help direct what that learning will actually be.

Some of what I see in EDU522 is the beginning of the openness and communication I’ve always wanted to see in education and pedagogy. Hopefully it will stand as an example for others who come after us.

Written with Module One: Who Am I? in mind.

👓 Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague. | Kevin Marks

Read Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague. by Kevin Marks (epeus.blogspot.com)

By choosing images over links, and by restricting markup, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are hostile to HTML. This is leading to the plague of infographics crowding out text, and of video used to convey minimal information. The rise of so-called infographics has been out of control this year, though the term was unknown a couple of years ago. I attribute this to the favourable presentation that image links get within Facebook, followed by Twitter and Google plus, and of course though other referral sites like Reddit. By showing a preview of the image, the item is given extra weight over a textual link; indeed even for a url link, Facebook and G+ will show an image preview by default.

👓 The Infographic Plague is actually a plague of lazy journalists and bloggers | The Next Web

Read The Infographic Plague is Just Laziness by Martin Bryant (The Next Web)

I breathed a sigh of relief when I read Megan McCardle's Ending the Infographic Plague on The Atlantic a few days ago. Someone had said it at last! As useful as a really well-produced infographic can be, there's some real dross out there and it's time we talked about the problem.

👓 #EDU522 Week Two Update | Greg McVerry

Replied to #EDU522 Week Two Update #literacies #doo #edtechchat by Greg Mcverry (jgregorymcverry.com)

You are right Miguel!

This is awesome. What might otherwise be a relatively dull update is suddenly awesome and entertaining to watch. I may lose the month to playing around with Plotagon now.

I do wish they had a way to do embeds directly though. The iframe isn’t the best and I suspect is doing wonky things for the page, though at least it’s viewable. Perhaps using the page’s .mp4 with <video> tags?

Replied to a post by

Greg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)

For today’s #edu522 #dailyponderance you need to highlight some cool #edtech tools. Give us 3-5 apps or websites we should try in class.

Some of my favorite and often used edtech tools:

Hypothesis – a service that allows me to quickly highlight and annotate content on almost any web page or .pdf file

IFTTT.com – a service which I use in combination with other services, most often to get data from those sites back to my own. For example:

Huffduffer.com – a service I with audio related content I find online. I use its bookmarklet to save audio from web pages. Huffduffer then creates a custom RSS feed that I can subscribe to in any podcatcher for catching up on podcasts while I’m on the go.

Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress – since many in the class are also using it, I’ll mention that I love using its bookmarklet functionality to quickly bookmark, favorite, or reply to other posts on the web.

URL Forwarder – This is an Android-based app that I’ve configured to dovetail with the Post Kinds Plugin and my website for posting to my site more quickly via mobile.

Jon Udell’s media clipper – I use this audio/video tool for finding and tagging the start and stop points of media so that I can highlight specific portions for others

👓 On Using Titles, Tags, and Categories | Greg McVerry

Read On Using Titles, Tags, and Categories by

Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)

There seems to be some confusion uin #edu522 about when to add a title and when to leave a post with a title. This is the #IndieWeb the choice is utimatley yours. If a one word post deserves a title..give it one;…a 3,000 word treatsie doesn’t need it…then skip it. Best Practice Yet here is a q...

I still need to figure out how I want to structure tags for individual modules. Is it really worthile? Who would use them and how would those be used?

While I like the idea of “backstage” posts, I’m not sure that tagging them as such has as much value to me. Since my site is my living commonplace book, such a tag doesn’t have as much meaning somehow. I’ll have to think about it and figure out what I want to do there. I can see some value for syndicating out, or potentially to fellow classmates, but I’d suspect that for the volume of content I’m producing with the edu522 tag, it may not be as valuable. Perhaps in a larger class it might or one in which I was producing a much higher volume of posts? Time will tell, but some of these mechanics could be useful/valueable to think about for teachers vis-a-vis their classrooms and digital pedagogy based on expected class size and post volume as well as how they might structure their “planets”.

👓 Learning to Love the Stable Link | Uncommon Sense

Replied to Learning to Love the Stable Link by

Karen Wulf (Uncommon Sense — The Blog | Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)

When you’re striving to make your students’ lives just a click easier by embedding an article in your syllabus or posting it to Blackboard (or another online learning environment), however, it’s important to embed the link to the article rather than the PDF of the article itself. It’s easy to do; you simply paste the link from JSTOR or MUSE into the same field you would paste a document or PDF. It’s no more difficult for the students, and it makes a big difference to the journals whose articles you’re teaching.

I can’t help but read this and think that there’s a good use case for the Webmention spec here. Similar to my thinking in IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing, it seems relatively obvious that professors could be referencing the DOIs or other permalink URLs for journals and articles they’re assigning and sending webmentions so that the journal itself could receive webmentions of those facts. This in turn would help those journals have a better understanding of the number of incoming links as well as referrer traffic and potential readers they’ve got.

I’ve outlined a bit of how read posts on the web can send notifications to journal articles to allow them to better track traffic. Similar to use cases I’ve outlined for podcasts which have some large aggregate download data, but absolutely no actual “I listened to this particular episode” data, explicit read webmentions for journal articles could be a boon to these journals as well as to the greater research enterprise.

Separately but similarly, it would be nice if journals could take advantage of annotation platforms like Hypothes.is (especially if they sent webmentions to the canonical links or DOIs for .pdfs) to get a better idea of how closely, or not, academics are reading and annotating their works.

👓 The New York Times just shut down a major bullying tactic of the alt-right | Vox

Read The New York Times just shut down a major bullying tactic of the alt-right (Vox)

The "controversy" over hiring tech journalist Sarah Jeong, explained.

I was just thinking about the Quinn Norton episode the other day, and along comes this nice follow up. It’s nice to see that big institutions are coming to understand the trolling- (and some might say bot-) culture and making more clear-headed distinctions.

Another related case can potentially be found with Kevin Williamson at The Atlantic.

👓 The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger | Quinn Norton | The Atlantic

Read The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger by Quinn Norton (The Atlantic)

I saw the internet create and destroy a bizarro version of myself.

I’ve been reading some pieces from my archive on context collapse and people losing jobs/opportunities as the result of online bullies digging up old social media posts which has become a bigger issue as of late. Many people have been wanting to leave social media platforms for their toxic cultures, and this seems to be a subset of that in that it has people going back and deleting old social posts for fear of implications in the present.

Quinn Norton has some relatively sage advice about the internet in this piece. Of course it’s no coincidence that The New York Times editorial board wanted to hire her.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:00AM

I have a teenage daughter, and I have told her all her life that all the grown-ups are making it up as they go along. I have also waggled my eyebrows suggestively while saying it, to make it clear to her that I mean me, too. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:00AM

This taught me that not everyone worthy of love is worthy of emulation. It also taught me that being given terrible ideas is not a destiny, and that intervention can change lives. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:02AM

Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool. Engagement is not the one true answer to the societal problems destabilizing America today, but there is no one true answer. The way forward is as multifarious and diverse as America is, and a method of nonviolent confrontation and accountability, arising from my pacifism, is what I can bring to helping my society. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:03AM

I am not immune from these mistakes, for mistaking a limited snapshot of something for what it is in its entirety. I have been on the other side. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:04AM

I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:05AM

I had even written about context collapse myself, but that hadn’t saved me from falling into it, and then hurting other people I didn’t mean to hurt. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:06AM

It helped me learn a lesson: Be damn sure when you make angry statements. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:07AM

Don’t internet angry. If you’re angry, internet later. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:07AM

Context collapse is our constant companion online. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:07AM

I used to think that showing someone how wrong they were on the internet could fix the world. I said a lot of stupid things when I believed that. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:08AM

I am not, and will never be, a simple writer. I have sought to convict, accuse, comfort, and plead with my readers. I’m leaving the majority of my flaws online: Go for it, you can find them if you want. It’s a choice I made long ago. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:09AM

If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past. ❧

August 03, 2018 at 08:13AM

👓 How Public? Why Public? | finiteeyes.net

Read How Public? Why Public? by

Matthew Cheney (Finite Eyes)

In the Interdisciplinary Studies program where I have begun working, we encourage students to go public with their work. It’s a common idea well beyond interdisciplinary studies: for students to feel more engaged with the work they do, to feel that what they are doing matters, they need to do that...

An interesting take on open pedagogy to be sure. On my own website, I often default to public without taking much thought for the difference between open vs. private–though to be sure I do have a lot of private posts hidden on my back end that only I or other invited guests can view.

This article is sure to be germane to those reading on the topic of Open and Privacy for #EDU522. Within that realm I have automatically defaulted to posting everything public, in part to act as a potential model for my fellow classmates as well as for how teachers and students in general could potentially execute on open pedagogy using an IndieWeb model built on webmentions.

While my website apparently gets about 400 views a day lately, I suspect it’s a very small and specific niche audience to the set of topics I tend to write about. Since I post everything that I post online to my own website first, I have a more concentrated posting velocity than many/most, but it also means that some specific topics (like #EDU522 for example) can get lost in the “noise” of all the other posts on my site. If one compares this to others in the class who’ve only recently set up sites which have less than 10 views a day likely, there is a marked difference in public/private for them. (The concept of “privacy through obscurity” similar to its predecessor “security through obscurity” comes to mind, but one must remember it only takes one intruder to cause a problem.) Of course this doesn’t discount the fact that one’s public posts today, which seemingly disappear from the immediate rush of information, may still be found in the long-tails of their personal data to potentially be found years hence. With recent examples of people being fired for Tweets they made years ago (often taken out of context, or with serious context collapse) this can be a troubling issue.

Some recent examples:

1. Disney Fires ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Director Over Offensive Tweets¹
2. New York Times Editorial board hired and fired Quinn Norton on the same day because internet trolls created a digital effigy of her using old social media posts from years prior. Even more ironic, she’s written and extensively studied context collapse.^2–4

Public figures and journalists⁵ are actively deleting their tweets as a result, though this isn’t really a new phenomenon as people know that employers and others can search for their old content. As Ella Dawson has indicated, “We’re all public figures now”.

I don’t suspect there may be anything too particularly controversial in my #EDU522 posts recently that I might want to make private at a later date following the course (or even delete altogether), but who knows? Perhaps the public thinking on these topics changes drastically and I would wish to make them disappear a decade or two hence? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.

One of the benefits of supporting many of the IndieWeb tools and philosophies is that I can quickly make my old posts private to just me and with syndication links on them indicating where I’ve syndicated them in the past, I could very quickly go to those silos and delete them there as well. Of course this doesn’t get rid of copies out of my control or in locations like the Internet Archive.

Within the realm of open pedagogy, IndieWeb technology (and Webmention), one could certainly default their classes websites to private or semi-private. The WithKnown platform may presently be the best one for doing such a thing, though there are a few hoops one may need to jump through to set it up properly. As a brief example, there would need to be a private class hub site on which the teacher and students would need their own accounts. Then, so that students might own all of their own work, they would need their own sites to which they might post privately as well. The hub and the students’ sites could then use the Known OAuth2 server so that students could post their work privately on their own site, but still automatically syndicate it into their account on the semi-private class website. Of course, even here a student is relying on reasonable data security for the semi-private class site as well as having the expectation that their professor, fellow classmates, or the institution itself wouldn’t put their semi-private data into the public sphere at a future date.

As a proof of concept and an example of this type of workflow, I’ll highlight two posts (though in this case, both public instead of private so that you can actually see them) which I’ve made on two separate domains both running WithKnown:

A post on my personal website
A syndicated copy of that post on a public and openly aggregated multi-user Known install

image credit (also used on Matthew Cheney’s original post): “Dundas Square in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada” by Pedro Szekely, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

References

Barnes B. Disney Fires ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Director Over Offensive Tweets. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/business/media/james-gunn-fired-offensive-tweets.html. Published July 20, 2018. Accessed August 3, 2018.

Windolf J. After Storm Over Tweets, The Times and a New Hire Part Ways. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/business/media/quinn-norton-new-york-times.html. Published February 14, 2018. Accessed August 3, 2018.

Norton Q. The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/the-new-york-times-fired-my-doppelganger/554402/. Published February 27, 2018. Accessed August 3, 2018.

Norton Q. Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows. The Message | Medium. https://medium.com/message/context-collapse-architecture-and-plows-d23a0d2f7697. Published November 8, 2013. Accessed August 3, 2018.

Dreyfuss E. Why I’m Deleting All My Old Tweets. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/im-deleting-all-my-old-tweets/. Published July 27, 2018. Accessed August 3, 2018.

👓 Making changes | Colin Walker

Replied to Making changes by

Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)

I've been doing some thinking - I know, always dangerous.

Returning to pen and paper on the way to work this morning I started making a few notes in response to James' post and extrapolated somewhat to the point where I set some things in motion internally. I think they're continuations of how I've been thinking and feeling for a while but have coalesced into something more solid.

Being largely offline for a number of days felt right, it felt like how I need to be at the moment. So I'm going to be stepping back.

Since reading James’ post I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and how to best respond myself. I haven’t figured it all out yet. I’ve been considering taking a bit of a break, particularly as Facebook and other platforms are making drastic changes to how they operate on the web.

I’ve also been thinking about it in light of the Greg McVerry’s EDU522 course which has a bit of a social media purge built into it.

That said, I’m not sure what I’ll ultimately be doing, but I find it refreshing that Colin’s made this decision for himself. It sounds like it’s coming from a genuine place and I know he probably needs the break as much as many of us do.

Colin, I know many of your friends stretched across the world will miss your regular presence, even if we don’t say it on a regular basis, but good luck, and know that we’re always here for you if you need anything!

I miss him already…

👓 That Meme You’re Sharing Is Probably Bogus | The Atlantic

Read That Meme You’re Sharing Is Probably Bogus (The Atlantic)

Why linguistic urban legends go viral online

I can’t wait to have not only salmentions, but saltruths as a thing. This way when people spread bogus information online and it gets shared, then potentially one (or a few posts) could travel back upstream and to debunk the whole thing.

Of course, how are we to architect such a thing?!

👓 The Information on School Websites Is Not as Safe as You Think | New York Times

Read The Information on School Websites Is Not as Safe as You Think (nytimes.com)

Some tracking scripts may be harmless. But others are designed to recognize I.P. addresses and embed cookies that collect information prized by advertisers.

The idiotic places we end up seeing surveillance capitalism just kills me.

Administrators: But they were give us the technology for free…
Really? Why not try pooling small pieces of resources within states to make these things you want and protect your charges? I know you think your budget is small, but it shouldn’t be this expensive.