Tuesday on the NewsHour, a historic day on Capitol Hill as the House delivers articles of impeachment against President Trump -- and a long-anticipated trade deal. Plus: The details of the USMCA, how strategic mistakes derailed the war in Afghanistan, grim news about Arctic ice melt, why Maryland has harsher prison sentences than other states and the “sober curious” movement among millennials.
Statuses
📗 Started reading An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris
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.
Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and "open" assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.
I talked briefly about the "innovation" part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.
A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed. I have a column set up in Tweetdeck where I'm following the # Domains19 conference. With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I'm doing, to see if anything looks interesting. People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we've talked about. Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.
One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting. I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn. I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they're doing. If I don't find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.
And inevitably, over months and years, I'll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they're doing, about why they're doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.
This is the open web I hope we're teaching our students about -- place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn.
Thanks for the shout out! Making those kinds of lists can certainly be repetitive, time consuming, and thankless. The only thing worse is that hundreds or thousands should try to reinvent the same wheel.
If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.
- Here’s the sub-list of relevant people: IndieWeb and Education
- The OPML file, which you can import into many readers, for the same: IndieWeb and Education (OPML)
Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested.
Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)We've talked about and experimented with various video projects in our Learning Community. Reading this piece by sociologist Jess Calarco this week reminded me that we haven't talked as much about audio production and editing as a means having students show what they know and to share what they've learned on the open web.
I recall seeing a lot of resources for audio media creation and podcasting via KQED Teach, which was geared toward a broad level of students and technical abilities.
These types of literacies are really important to explore.
Dr. Ryan Straight (Twitter)Has anyone gathered a collection of interesting and/or unexpected ways of using @hypothes_is beyond its standard use case? @xolotl #SquadGoalsNetwork
— Dr. Ryan "Rebel Without a Clause" Straight (@RyanStraight) December 7, 2019
What a great prompt! Here are a few interesting off-label use cases I’ve used, imagined, or seen in the wild:
Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.
I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:
- Writing posts with a reasonably full-featured text editor and the ability to edit and delete posts later;
- HTML and markdown support;
- Public and private posting as well as sharing content with other private groups;
- The ability to reply to other websites;
- The ability for others to comment on your posts natively;
- A robust tagging functionality;
- The ability to socially bookmark web pages (blank page notes);
- An RSS feed;
- The ability to share posts to other social platforms including meta data for Twitter cards;
- Naturally, it’s very easy to use for writing short notes, creating highlights and annotations, and keeping track of what you’ve read;
- It has a pseudo-social media functionality in that your public posts appear on a global timeline where people can read and interact with them.
- It’s also opensource, so you can self-host, modify it, or add new features.
I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.
And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.
And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?
If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.