IndieWeb for Education | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a post by

Ryan Randall (hcommons.social)

Slowly customizing my site layout enough to get it to validate h-entry info according to this nifty tool: https://indiewebify.me Wow, do I teach myself best by exploring other examples. #blogging #indieWeb

@ryanrandall @natalie I’m seeing more HCommons folx looking at #IndieWeb, so I’ll mention that I’ve got several IndieWeb friendly sites including on #WordPress as does @KFitz, who I think has also been experimenting with static sites lately. If you need support, there’s a great and helpful community you’ll find at https://chat.indieweb.org for all your questions. You might find some useful tidbits and examples at https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education as well.

Replied to a post by

Ryan Cordell (hcommons.social)

I genuinely enjoy building standalone course websites, in part to more easily share teaching materials—see https://ryancordell.org/teaching/ for examples—& in part to maintain some ownership over my course materials. But increasingly I feel its in students’ better interest to just build in the university’s LMS, where they’re accessing their other classes—why should they enjoy juggling multiple systems any more than I do? And I don’t really want to build two sites for every class, so this spring I may just put all my courses in Canvas

I more than appreciate the extra work involved and affordances of the alternate, but I have to say a small piece of #IndieWeb spirit in my soul died as I read this. sigh

I wonder if anyone is documenting the amount of course material that disappears and dies in LMSs the way that some track the loss of data and content when social media silos disappear? Our institutions need to do more to help us here.

Replied to Microblogging with Mastodon: Posting Automatically to My WordPress Site by

Dr. Scott Schopieray (schopie1.commons.msu.edu)

When the Humanities Commons team started to spin up hcommons.social I started to wonder if this platform would be a way to conduct my microblogging activities in a space that might have a better distribution network, allowing my work to be more visible.

OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

Scott (@schopie1), you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others’ work within A Domain of One’s Own, there’s also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all stripes working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:

Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can’t wait to see what she’s come up with over the weekend and in the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you’ll find people like Ben Werdmuller who founded both WithKnown (aka Known) and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

I’m thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making to ensure some of these practices come to fruition.

If you’re game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I’m around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

Replied to a thread by @tjoosten and @grandeped (Twitter)

What are you using for open courses (beyond EdX and Coursera)?#DETAopen #DETAdev
— Tanya Joosten (@tjoosten) June 7, 2021

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

Wow. Nice.
— Tanya Joosten (@tjoosten) 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.

I did a short demonstration of what the current website-to-website space looks like at the recent OERxDomains21 Conference. You can find the short video here on my site.

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.

Bookmarked Whiki by

Whitney Trettien (whitneyannetrettien.com)

This is an online commonplace book for Whitney Trettien. You're welcome to use these notes and reading lists to guide you in your own studies.

This has to be one of the baddest-ass things I’ve seen in months. I wish more people had public-facing commonplace books like this!

Bonus points that Whitney calls it a Whiki! 🙂

Bookmarked Digital Mappa | an open-source DH platform (Digital Mappa)

Collect and mark up digital images and texts, link them together, annotate them, invite friends to collaborate, publish with one click.

This looks like a cool little project. I wonder how well this might make for a platform for a Domain of One’s Own/IndieWeb for Education?

I came across it via

I’m excited to share a digital edition of Susanna Collet’s 17th-century commonplace book, held at @morganlibrary. @zoe_braccia & I made it using @digitalmappa. It features a full transcription/facsimile & a searchable library of Collet’s source texts.https://t.co/VSCMmBhMS6 pic.twitter.com/fyrbwS9kk1

— whitney trettien (@whitneytrettien) April 7, 2021

which makes it sound like an off-label use case for their application. But given the functionality, it looks like it would fun/useful for those in the digital humanities space and could be a cool tool in one’s DoOO workshop.

Does anyone else have experience with it?

ᔥ whitney trettien on Twitter: “I’m excited to share a digital edition of Susanna Collet’s 17th-century commonplace book, held at @morganlibrary. @zoe_braccia & I made it using @digitalmappa. It features a full transcription/facsimile & a searchable library of Collet’s source texts. https://t.co/VSCMmBhMS6 https://t.co/fyrbwS9kk1” (04/09/2021 10:49:31)

Replied to What I want from a GLAM/Cultural Heritage Data Science Network by

Jez Cope (erambler.co.uk)

As I mentioned last year, I was awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship to pursue the project of setting up a Cultural Heritage/GLAM data science network. Obviously, the global pandemic has forced a re-think of many plans and this is no exception, so I’m coming back to reflect on it and make sure I’m clear about the core goals so that everything else still moves in the right direction.

It warms my heart to see another person in the education/library space using Webmention on their site. Even more so when I think that Jez Cope is doing so while starting to build an online community. Being able to communicate from website-to-website this way while also being able to reach out to people who choose to use Twitter or Mastodon is a very powerful thing to see and is an incredible example within the Education, Domain of One’s Own, and Library Carpentry spaces.

So much of the tone of this piece has not only an IndieWeb feel, but also sounds like it could benefit from some of the organizational structure that I’ve seen the IndieWeb employ, particularly small scale events and collaborations I’ve seen at Homebrew Website Clubs. This may help to

“Organise less-formal learning and sharing events to complement the more formal training already available within organisations and the wider sector, including “show and tell” sessions, panel discussions, code cafés, masterclasses, guest speakers, reading/study groups, co-working sessions, …”

Watched Anatomy of a Great Faculty Website by

Steve Ryan from WPCampus 2020 Online - July 29-30 - Where WordPress meets Higher Education

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.

This is an awesome little session at WPCampus 2020 Online. (Video for it available shortly.) It reminds me a lot of the Drupal project Open Scholar that does something similar. I can see it being useful for folks in the Domain of One’s Own space.

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?

Project description and examples: https://asuengineering.github.io/asu-labs-theme/
GitHub repo: https://github.com/asuengineering/asu-labs-theme

For Micro Monday, I’m following and recommending @jennifermjones, another in the growing list of educators and altacs on micro.blog. Do stop by and welcome her to micro.blog.

Listened to Alan Levine by Terry Greene from Gettin' Air The Open Pedagogy Podcast | voicEd

Terry Greene (@greeneterry) speaks with Alan Levine (@cogdog) about the endlessly amazing work Alan has done in the open over the years, including his involvement in the Ontario Extend project and where that work is headed.

I’m starting to see a pattern in these episodes. 😉

Terry puts a hard out at about 30 minutes and teases the audience by saying to the guest something like “I want to have you back again, our time was too short.” Some of the older episodes are old enough, he’d surely have had guests back by now. What he’s doing is great, but I have to inure myself against the disappointment of great guests coming back (any time real soon.)

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.

Bookmarked Teaching with WordPress (blogs.ubc.ca)

This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:

open education, open pedagogy and design

WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning

examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes

plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other

Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.