I’ll be hosting a Domain of One’s Own meetup on Thursday, July 23, 2020 at at 10:30 AM Pacific / 1:30 PM Eastern / 7:30 PM CEST. Everyone who is interested in the topic is welcome to attend. 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.
Attendees will be expected to have read and agree to the IndieWeb Code of Conduct which will apply to the meetup.
We will
Have discussions about A Domain of One’s Own and the independent web;
Get to know other colleagues in the space;
Ask colleagues for help/advice on problems or issues you’re having with your domain;
Find potential collaborators for domains-related projects you’re working on;
Explore new and interesting ideas about what one can do or accomplish with a personal domain;
Create or update your domain
Agenda
Welcome
Introductions: short 2 minute introductions of attendees with an optional brief demonstration of something you’ve done on your domain or purpose for which you’re using your domain.
Group photo for those who wish to participate
Main meetup: Ideally everyone should bring a topic, demonstration, question, or problem to discuss with the group. Depending on time and interest, we can try to spend 5-10 minutes discussing and providing feedback on each of these. If questions go over this time limitation, we can extend the conversation in smaller groups as necessary after the meetup.
RSVP
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.
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.
This open access Nursing Pharmacology textbook is designed for entry-level undergraduate nursing students. It explains basic concepts of pharmacology and describes common medication classes. This book is not intended to be used as a drug reference book, but direct links are provided to DailyMed, which provides trustworthy information about marketed drugs in the United States.
This textbook is aligned with the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) statewide nursing curriculum for the Nursing Pharmacology course (543-103). The project is supported by a $2.5 million Open Resources for Nursing (Open RN) grant from the Department of Education and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This book is available for download in multiple formats, but the online version is required for interaction with the adaptive learning activities included in each chapter.
Replied toa thread by geonz, ThomasJTobin, actualham (Twitter)
My statewide university system is likely going to go with a single LMS across all institutions. Moodle and Canvas are the two contenders. I have my thoughts, but would like to know yours. If you would cast a vote for one or the other, let me know. Use replies to explain.
— Cognitively_Accessible_Math (@geonz) June 8, 2020
I’m helping to host an online IndieWebCamp at the end of June. I’ve stubbed out a session on A Domain of One’s Own “LMS” to discuss just this problem. I’d encourage other creators to join as well to propose other education, #DoOO, and OER related topics for that weekend. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Domain of One’s Own LMS
The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly forced educators to flee online where there is a wealth of predatory, amoral, and questionable platforms for managing online pedagogy. Starting closer to first principles, how might we design and build an LMS (Learning Management System) based on IndieWeb Principles or using the related ideas behind A Domain of One’s Own where the teacher and students own their own content, learning content, and personal learning network. Can we dovetails ideas and principles from the Open Educational Resources (OER) space with this at the same time?
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.
I’ve seen a few people in the wild using Hypothes.is as a blog commenting system.[1][2] Since they don’t yet have separate support for Webmention or require a bit of programming to get notifications, I thought I’d highlight this particular implementation as it has a simple, but relatively elegant user interface for creating feeds to provide notifications for just such a use case.
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.
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.
Webmention is a relatively recent web standard (or W3C recommendation) that allows notifications when one website mentions a URL on another website. Think of it like @mentions on social platforms, but instead of just working within a particular website from one account to another, they work across websites. Your website can now @mention my website!
The goal is for other websites to be able to reference content in my TiddlyWiki website, and if those websites support sending the notifications as either webmentions (or the older pingbacks), I’ll get a notification that my content was referenced elsewhere on the web. This is just the beginning of allowing two way communication between websites.
My exploration today is how to quickly get these up and running on a public TiddlyWiki instance. The public part is important because webmentions won’t work for non-public URLs which includes private TiddlyWikis. If you’re wondering how to self-host a TiddlyWiki on your own domain, I’ve recently written up a tutorial for doing just that. At the end of this article, I’ll make a few notes about how one might use webmentions, particularly in a TiddlyWiki ecosystem.
I’ll start out by saying that writing a full JavaScript implementation of the Webmention spec is beyond my capabilities presently, but it could be something that TiddlyWiki core might implement in the future. (Maybe something like Lazymention which is written in node.js might be leveraged?)
Here I’m going to focus on using a third party service to do all of the heavy lifting and code our behalf. It’s relatively common, especially in the static website space, for websites to rely on third party or publisher services to either send or receive Webmentions on their behalf. Given my current knowledge of TiddlyWiki and how its internals work and my knowledge of Webmention services, I thought it would be quickest and easiest to look at using the Webmention.io service to handle receiving these @mentions from other sites on my behalf.
While this article may seem long, I’m hoping it’s detailed enough for those who are code averse to follow the recipe and do this themselves. If you can create a Tiddler, cut and paste some text, and follow the tutorial you won’t need to know anything about code. I did the entire thing myself in about five minutes from start to finish.
Receiving Webmention notifications for your TiddlyWiki
As a quick overview, we’re going to cut and paste a few lines of code into a special tiddler of our TiddlyWiki based website. This will allow us to do two things:
Log into Webmention.io to create an account
Allow other sites that send webmentions to us to find an endpoint on our TiddlyWiki website that accepts them on our behalf.
We’ll then rely on the Webmention.io dashboard to show us our notifications or received webmentions.
Logging into Webmention.io
Webmention.io requires you to log in with your domain name/URL and relies on you being able to authenticate yourself using it. Since I’m not aware of an IndieAuth or equivalent mechanism for using TiddlyWiki to log into Webmention.io, the quickest method to accomplish this is to rely on RelMeAuth using IndieAuth.com to log into Webmention.io using either a Twitter or GitHub account. From a non-technical perspective, we’ll be using either our Twitter or GitHub account and it’s OAuth2 security to log into the service.
First we want to put a link to our public TiddlyWiki website into the website field on either Twitter or GitHub using the profile settings of one of those services. Here’s what mine looks like on GitHub:
Next we want to place a corresponding link to the relevant service into the <head> of our TiddlyWiki site using one (it’s okay to use both) of the the following lines of code:
where you will replace the username in these links with the respective usernames of your accounts. (I’ll note that you don’t need to do this for both accounts, you can use either Twitter or GitHub.)
Then cut and paste one or both of these links as appropriate into this tiddler and save it (and your TiddlyWiki).
You should now be able to go to webmention.io and enter the URL for your TiddlyWiki into the web sign in box and click “sign in”. The service will parse your website’s page, find the link to either Twitter or GitHub and present you with the appropriate sign in button for one or both of those services. Click on the button for your chosen service. IndieAuth.com will then take you to that service to log into it, or, if you’re already logged in, it will take you back to webmention.io to your new account.
Creating your Webmention endpoint
Within webmention.io you can now go to the “settings” page which will give you two more links which are your webmention and pingback endpoints. They will look something like this:
where example.com will be replaced with the URL for your website.
Now you should cut and paste these two <link>s into the same tiddler you created above: $:/plugins/indieweb/core/rawMarkup. Now save the Tiddler and your TiddlyWiki. (Be sure to leave the previous links in case you need to log back into webmention.io in the future.)
You’re done!
That hopefully wasn’t too hard.
But what does this do? When another website links to your website and sends you a notification, the code on your page will delegate the receipt of the webmention to webmention.io which will verify that the sending site has your URL on a publicly viewable page (this helps to cut down on spam problems that pingbacks used to have). It will then store the notification for you.
If you need a reminder to check them occasionally, maybe you could add a Tiddler with the link to your dashboard to appear on your wiki when you open it next.
Perhaps in a future tutorial I’ll delve into the specifics of actually showing these mentions directly within your TiddlyWiki on the Tiddlers to which they relate.
Optional Webmention badge
Some may notice that I’ve put a small Webmention badge into the footer of my TiddlyWiki site to visually indicate to human readers that the site accepts webmentions. You can optionally do this for fun if you’d like.
Sending Webmentions with TiddlyWiki
Sending Webmentions seems to be an issue as the fragment-based URLs that TiddlyWiki uses as permalinks using JavaScript seem to cause an issue with many receivers. They apparently have problems resolving and parsing pages due to js;dr related issues. I would send webmentions manually, but most receivers I’m aware of have this js;dr problem. I’m not sure if there is an easy way around this issue.
Hyperchats, Wikis, and Open Educational Resources
What’s interesting about supporting Webmention, particularly from a TiddlyWiki perspective, is that if my TiddlyWiki is notified of mentions of it from outside sources, I can quickly cut and paste those responses directly into my Wiki pages in a pseudo-comment section similar to the comments section on this post which could serve as a model. If those mentions of a particular Tiddler are from other TiddlyWikis, I could also choose to drag-and-drop (or import) them into my TiddlyWiki!
If I want to go a step further, I could transclude those imported Tiddlers into the Tiddler that they’re in reference to. Perhaps I might do this under a heading of “@mentions” or perhaps “Comments” and suddenly I’ve got a way of displaying two-way conversations on my own TiddlyWiki site.
As is mentioned in Kicks Condor’s post about Hyperchat Modality, one could potentially use custom theming information (cleverly named “whostyles” in that post) from imported Tiddlers (or themes from other platforms) to identify the web identities of the sites they’re received from. I’ll also mention Kicks’ post about Hypertexting which is related and forms an interesting melange of websites, blogs, wikis, and hypertext of all kinds to form a more interesting web medium.
For the broader information collecting and building or academic communities (and here I can’t help thinking about the Open Educational Resources space that uses Creative Commons licensing to build their teaching resources), one could use these webmentions as a means of notifying sites that their content has been used, changed, or updated (typically those using Creative Commons will credit their source using a link). Then the receiver of the notification could optionally add to or change their version or even just collect the changes. This becomes particularly useful when the Tiddlers can be easily dragged and dropped between TiddyWikis!
As an explicit example, imagine a professor who wanted to build a textbook anthology, but who could do so by dragging and dropping a variety of Tiddlers from one site to another to create a quick textbook or reader for their students. This idea is particularly exciting to me when combined with the idea behind TW5-powered ebooks!
What could you imagine doing with webmention notifications on your TiddlyWiki site?
As a result of the development of the COVID-19 outbreak, ALT had to cancel the face to face OER20 Conference in London, 1-2 April 2020 (12 March announcement).
Online (United Kingdom)
April 1, 2020 at 01:30AM- April 1, 2020 at 08:30AM
THIRTEEN
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.
On this site we have a curated collection of open textbooks that align with the top 40 highest enrolled 1st and 2nd year post-secondary subject areas in British Columbia. But there are many other places to find open textbooks that have already been developed and are ready for adaptation or adoption. The following resources contain existing open texts and other teaching resources that are openly-licensed and free for educators to use and adapt to their own needs.
ISKME's digital librarians have curated collections of Open Textbooks and full courses to help leverage OER in your classroom. Whether you are looking for more affordable options for your students, or dynamic content to inspire your own teaching and learning practice, this hub, organized by discipline and provider will help you discover the resources you need at your fingertips.
With Zocurelia you can increase the fun of reading online literature together. The browser tool shows the activity of a reading community directly in the context of the texts being read and discussed. This way learners can be motivated to participate and join the discussion - hopefully hypothetically. In this article I will explain my motivation, ideas and decisions that led to the development of Zocurelia.
For those interested in online reading groups, journal clubs, OER, open education, marginal syllabus, etc., Axel Dürkop has created quite a lovely little tool that mixes Zotero with Hypothes.is.
Using his online version (though the code is open source and it looks like I could pretty quickly host my own), it only took me a few minutes to mock up a collaborative space using an Econ Extra Credit group I’d tried to encourage. This could be quite cool, particularly if they continued the series past the first recommended textbook.
I could easily see folks like Remi Kalir using this as part of their marginal syllabus project and allowing students to recommend texts/articles for class and aggregating discussions around them.
First of all, I wanted to learn more about how to inspire learners to read. And this means for me as an educator to create a technical and social environment that is welcoming and easy to participate in. ❧
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:01PM
I want to have ways to show learners that I chose the texts for them, as I’m convinced that empathy is motivating. ❧
I quite like this idea as a means of pedagogy.
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:03PM
Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. When I use the phrase “reducing friction” in this context, I mean taking things that are needlessly difficult and making them much easier. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridicul...
Does anyone/organization maintain a wiki or centralized repository of OER textbooks? (Especially a consortium of institutions which provide financial support).
It should contain a list of people/departments who’ve adopted (an indicator of quality).
It could maintain lists of people with technical expertise that can help to reshuffle pieces or allow customization? Maybe create easier methods for customization with related UI.
How to best curate resources and put them into a searchable repository for easy later use?
Can we create an organization that somewhat models the instutionalization of traditional textbook publishers that organize and track their assets? This institution should be supported by a broad array of colleges and universities as a means of supporting the otherwise invisible labor that is otherwise going on.
How can we flip the script to allow students to choose their own materials instead of allowing professors to do this? Their economic pressure alone will dramatically help the system. (Especially the hidden labor issues.)
Axel Dürkop
David Wiley