From border crossings to hacking conferences, that Bitcoin or political sticker may be worth leaving on a case at home.
I had a very short conversation at the IndieWeb Summit 2018 in Portland with Nate Angell about the stickers on his laptop. Who knew he was such a subject area expert that Motherboard/Vice was using his material?
Of course this also reminds me that if academics, journalists, and publications/outlets were using webmentions when they credited creative commons articles, photos, audio, or other content, then the originator would get a notification that it was being used. This could also tip the originator off that their licensed content is being properly used.
I see some of you here are moving to RSS and blogs. I never understood trackbacks in Web2.0 days, are we still gonna use it and can someone explain it to me?
It is a small part of an #IndieWeb suite of open protocols including Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub for allowing site to site communication and interaction which goes to the broader scope of your question about RSS feeds and blogs. See also: Lost Infrastructure
I keep meaning to provide a better overview of it all, but this recent pencast overview captures a chunk of it. Aaron Parecki’s article Building an IndieWeb Reader captures some of the rest of the microsub/reader portion.
A short video on how to send a manual webmention to a WordPress site that's using the Webmention plugin.
WordPress sites also have a separate visual endpoint that can be used manually. They’re typically found at http://example.com/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint.
Don’t forget that I’m listening to content in the class as well! Perhaps this will be your first listen webmention? 😉
For badges from static sites, you could simply use raw HTML on a page like Aaron Parecki outlines.1 The “sending” site doesn’t need to be able to send webmentions although the receiving site needs to be able to receive them. You can then use a service like http://mention-tech.appspot.com/ or https://telegraph.p3k.io/send-a-webmention to have your static site send the webmention for you!
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.
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.
Here is a video describing the power of webmentions in #edu5222. My students are amazed that they do all their learning from their own domain but their replies show up on each other’s post and our rss feed magically slurps up everything they write.
One thing to note you don’t need a reply post-kind for your webmention to work. You can just mention somebody’s url in you post or or link to a specific page or post on their website in any post-kind at it will work as well.
Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
But don’t be deceived. Lurking behind that unassuming name lies something that might eventually offer users a way of ditching not just Facebook and Twitter but also those other massive corporations straddling the web.
An awfully inflamatory headline and opening, but the rest was not so up-in-arms and seemed relatively measured. Was it intended to try to be link bait?
Researcher posts research work to their own website (as bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, annotations, etc.), they can post their data for others to review, they can post their ultimate publication to their own website.
Discovery/Subscription methods
The researcher’s post can webmention an aggregating website similar to the way they would pre-print their research on a server like arXiv.org. The aggregating website can then parse the original and display the title, author(s), publication date, revision date(s), abstract, and even the full paper itself. This aggregator can act as a subscription hub (with WebSub technology) to which other researchers can use to find, discover, and read the original research.
Peer-review
Readers of the original research can then write about, highlight, annotate, and even reply to it on their own websites to effectuate peer-review which then gets sent to the original by way of Webmention technology as well. The work of the peer-reviewers stands in the public as potential work which could be used for possible evaluation for promotion and tenure.
Feedback mechanisms
Readers of original research can post metadata relating to it on their own website including bookmarks, reads, likes, replies, annotations, etc. and send webmentions not only to the original but to the aggregation sites which could aggregate these responses which could also be given point values based on interaction/engagement levels (i.e. bookmarking something as “want to read” is 1 point where as indicating one has read something is 2 points, or that one has replied to something is 4 points and other publications which officially cite it provide 5 points. Such a scoring system could be used to provide a better citation measure of the overall value of of a research article in a networked world. In general, Webmention could be used to provide a two way audit-able trail for citations in general and the citation trail can be used in combination with something like the Vouch protocol to prevent gaming the system with spam.
Archiving
Government institutions (like Library of Congress), universities, academic institutions, libraries, and non-profits (like the Internet Archive) can also create and maintain an archival copy of digital and/or printed copies of research for future generations. This would be necessary to guard against the death of researchers and their sites disappearing from the internet so as to provide better longevity.
Need to read more about webmentions. I like https://t.co/OZ8c3cSblj style annotations. Wonder if something like that but run by trusted journos would be interesting
I've long felt that webmentions would be a perfect fit for #WordPress core. This article makes me even more sure. Let's get to work! https://t.co/hBofSwJruR
Social media networks provided immediate solutions to a few problems with those early blogging networks: they relieved the moderately heavy lift in getting started and they created the possibility of connections that were immediate, dense, and growing. But as those networks expanded, they both pulled authors away from their own domains — so much quicker to tweet than to blog, and with a much speedier potential response — and they privatized and scattered conversations. ❧
Exactly the use case that annotation is hoping to solve! Enabling the connection between different sites.
While I’m pondering on this, I can’t help but feel like your annotation here is somewhat meant as a reply to Kathleen. I’m left searching to see if you tweeted it with an @mention to notify her. Otherwise, your annotation seems like a cry into the void, which I’ve happened to come across.
I say this because I know that her website now supports sending and receiving Webmentions (she notes as much and references a recent article I wrote on the topic within her text.) If Hypothes.is supported sending Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) for highlights and other annotations on the page they occurred on, then the author of the post would get a notification and could potentially show it on the site (as an inline annotation) or in their comment section, which might also in turn encourage others to open up the annotation layer to do the same. Hypothesis could then not only be an annotation system, but also serve as an ad hoc commenting/conversation tool as well.
You may notice in her comment section that there are 60+ reactions/comments on her site. One or two are done within her native comment interface, and one directly from my website, but the majority are comments, likes, reshares, and mentions which are coming from Twitter by webmention. Imagine if many of them were coming from Hypothesis instead… (try clicking on one of the “@ twitter.com” links following one of the commenter’s avatars and names. What if some of those links looked like:
I've added some basic support for webmentions to my Jekyll-powered site using webmention.io and this Jekyll plugin. If any of my posts are mentioned elsewhere and my site receives a webmention, it's displayed below the post content.
Since Jekyll is a static site generator, the plugin can only check ...
(Further update: webmentions are working!!!)
(UPDATE: It’s now been a year since I first posted this. Just today I discovered a year-old blog post which mentioned this one, and an ensuing discussion. Of course I knew nothing of this because – well, I couldn’t get webmentions to work! I have ...
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