Tag: IndieWeb

RSVPed Attending Academia, race, and the pandemic

We're going to explore how racism and white supremacy shape social and academic responses to COVID-19.  On Thursday, May 21st, from 2-3 pm EST, we'll be joined by Jessie Daniels, an activist and scholar of racism and the digital world.  Daniels is faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and professor at Hunter College (Sociology) and The Graduate Center, CUNY (Sociology, Critical Social Psychology, Africana Studies).

Daniels is an internationally recognized expert in Internet expressions of racism, and the author or editor of five books, two of which are about racism on either side of the digital revolution: White Lies (Routledge, 1997) and Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). She is currently at work on Tweet Storm:The Rise of the Far Right, the Mainstreaming of White Supremacy, and How Tech and Media Helped. In 2016, she co-edited (with Karen Gregory and Tressie McMillan Cottom) Digital Sociologies, which has been adopted by courses at several universities around the world.

Daniels’ attention is increasingly focused on how digital media technologies are changing higher education. She has co-authored two books on this topic, Being a Scholar in the Digital Era  and Going Public , along with a number of articles. In 2020, Daniels launched Public Scholar Academy to help faculty who aspire to be public scholars achieve their goals and to help university administrators who want to assess and respond to attacks from the far right against their institutions. 
I plan on asking Dr. Daniels about how racism shapes the unfolding pandemic. How does that impact colleges and universities?  What can we do to create a more just academy?

Read Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech by Audrey WattersAudrey Watters (Hack Education)
This is the ninth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

And this resistance is happening… ❧

This link (on resistance) rotted, but can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20160305223237/http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2015/09/09/adios-ed-tech-hola-something-else/
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 11:49AM

Here’s what I wrote last year when I chose “the Indie Web” as one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2014”: ❧

I want to go back and read this too.
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 12:06PM

The Indie Web posits itself as an alternative to the corporate Web, but it is a powerful alternative to much of ed-tech as well, which as this series has once again highlighted, is quite committed to controlling and monetizing students’ and teachers’ connections, content, and data. ❧

Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 12:08PM

I mean, what does an alternative to ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering look like? What does resistance to the buzzwords and the bullshit look like? I don’t have an answer. (There isn’t an answer.) But I think we can see a glimmer of possibility in the Indie Web Movement. It’s enough of a glimmer that I’m calling it a trend. ❧

For Audrey Watters (the self-described Cassandra of EdTech) to indicate even a glimmer of hope is rare! This ranks as a glowing recommendation as a result.
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 12:08PM

Replied to a post by Bix Bix (bix.blog)
Has anyone gotten webmention set up on a WordPress blog solely for internal references? So that when you link to previous of your own posts, those posts will then also link back, creating a deeper contextual web on your blog?
Bix, this functionality is definitely built into the Webmention for WordPress plugin as a default. You may need to go to Webmention settings (/wp-admin/admin.php?page=webmention) and make sure your self-ping settings will allow it. 

If you wanted, you could also modify the Webmention type and/or the excerpt that shows in the comment section, though you’d need to do it manually.

I’m not aware of anyone using it “only” for this purpose. I think David Shanske also has built some whitelisting settings for Webmention moderation so that you can automatically approve ones from certain domains. I would suspect you could use some of those portions to reject any incoming webmentions from external URLs, but it may require a few lines of code to do it.</p

ONLINE: Homebrew Website Club West Coast on May 13, 2020

Working on your website? Want some camaraderie? Need ideas about what you could build next? Want to share what you’ve built with others? I’m hosting next week’s meetup on Wednesday. Come and join the fun!

May 13, 2020
Wed 6:00 – 7:30pm (America/Los_Angeles)
Code of Conduct indieweb.org/code-of-conduct

Join the Zoom call

We will provide a Zoom video conference link 20-30 minutes before the meetup here and in the IndieWeb chat. Here’s the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85315852710?pwd=OGlSSTQxV1A3blVmR2Y3R21XOW1FZz09

Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you’re a blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve their presence on the web, this meetup is for you.

  • Demos of personal website breakthroughs
  • Discussion around the independent web
  • Get to know other members of the IndieWeb!
  • Create or update your personal web site!
  • Finish that blog post you’ve been working on!

Join a community with like-minded interests. Bring friends that want a personal site, or are interested in a healthy, independent web!

RSVP (optional)

If your website supports it, post an indie RSVP. Or simply post a comment below. If none of that means anything to you, don’t worry about it; just show up!

Now weekly!

Check https://events.indieweb.org for next week’s meetup! There are some meetups in European and US Eastern timezones as well.

RSVPed Attending ONLINE: Homebrew Website Club West Coast
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you’re a blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve their presence on the web, this meetup is for you.
6:00pm–7:30pm IndieWeb Meetup
I’m hoping we’ll have some conversation about read, listen, and watch posts.
Read The 2010s and alternative Social Media: A decade full of work, hope, and disappointment by Dennis Schubert (schub.wtf)
Looking back at the decade of 2010 and developments in the internet, in Social Media, and inside alternative Social Media projects.

It feels a lot like the reason we are unable to offer real alternative social networks is not that we cannot do so. It is because most people with the abilities to do so spend their time working on things that only work for the tiny audience that is the tech sector, while happily ignoring the needs of all those billions of non-technical humans out there. This is something that frustrates me more than I want to admit. ❧

Annotated on May 06, 2020 at 08:17AM

He’s definitely got some interesting and insightful ideas here on why alternative social media efforts may not have the desired effect. I’ve also heard some of his technical issues with Activity Pub by other developers (and implementers). Many find it not only difficult to implement, but find it difficult to actually federate properly. 

Read Getting so-so-social with #bridgy and the #IndieWeb by Will Stedden (bonkerfield)
As a first step, I started by building an aggregator of all my blog and social activity to my "viewfoil". The goal is to have anybody on any social media platform be able to get a good sense of who I am (and that I am indeed a real person and not a bot/Russian troll). I now have most of my personal sources in the stream, and I've made it filterable by source. Letting strangers see everything I do online is a start, but it's not very social if my site only contains content from me. I want my site to be open to input from others.
Read Homebrew Website Club Notes by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
Quite a few people showed up for last night’s online Homebrew Website Club and there were a few new faces! We have been hosting these weekly now and trying different things to streamline the process. Here are some notes from the discussions. Participants gRegor Morrill David Shanske Joe Crawford S...