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I spent some time cleaning out a huge amount of cruft amongst my website’s taxonomy today. There were lots of empty tags and too many close duplicates which have been concatenated and cleaned up. I haven’t gone through the entire thing because there were over 7,700 tags and are now just 6,991, but hopefully getting rid of some of the misspellings will make tagging easier in the future. I suspect there’s probably a plugin or something to make it easier, but there’s something nice about doing it manually.
I’m subscribed to a handful of subs on IndieWeb.xyz, but I’ve noticed after having been away for a while that the number of subs has nearly tripled! This is great, but I’m curious if there’s a way to get notified of new subs that I might like to follow in the future. I’ve taken a stab at subscribing to the subs page at https://indieweb.xyz/subs/en using microformats in hopes that I’ll see new subs pop up.

I’ll try creating a discovery sub and we’ll see what happens?!

Replied to a tweet by Jesse StommelJesse Stommel (Twitter)

When you worry students won’t understand an assignment, the answer is often not to add more instructions, but to take instructions away.

Students get bogged down by all the words and minutiae we clutter assignments with. I think the best assignments are spare and evocative, not weighed down by expectations.

But this also means making sure we don’t have “hidden” expectations — making sure we are genuinely prepared for students to do something novel and unexpected. And prepared to work (or collaborate) with students at any point in the process.

I’ve seen assignment sheets for 1-page papers that were themselves more than a page. I wouldn’t demean anyone using those. As teachers, we care deeply about our work. But I’d ask whether all those words are actually helping get us or students closer to the germ of the work.

The final project for my digital studies course goes to the other end of the extreme. In the syllabus, I call the prompt “deceptively simple.” It’s just 8 words: “do something on the Web about the Web.”

When students ask for clarification, we talk about what’s possible, about all the ideas they have, even maybe imaginatively about the kinds of stuff I might do in their place. I tell them my final project is the course syllabus I’ve been building (with their help) all semester.

I don’t add more instructions. I don’t answer “do you mean,” “can I,” or “are you looking for” kinds of questions. I don’t show examples (unless students get really stuck).

The point of an assignment, for me, is not to create gotcha moments or to point students toward paint by numbers outcomes. An assignment, in my mind, should be like a canvas for students to experiment upon.

Not all assignments can be expressed in just 8 words. Some are more intricate, layering different skills atop one another. I teach with that kind of assignment as well.

As a side-note, I’ve actually stopped using the word “assignment” altogether. I say the “work of the course,” “do some stuff,” or “project” to remove transactional language like “assignment” or “submit.”

I also don’t have students “turning in” their work to just me. By whatever means I (or we) devise in a given semester, students share their work with each other (and also me) or with the world.

Me also, my instructions (across the board) have become more and more spare over the last 20 years. I have 50 students this semester, and I've gotten only about 3 questions all term about instructions or logistics.

I’ve noted before the idea of 10 word answers with relation to politics and complexity highlighting a short video snippet from The West Wing.

Jessie Stommel distills assignments down to a roughly similar 8 words, but then smartly relies on students to fill in the complexity of the idea with their own work. In the West Wing framing, he’s asking students to give the next 10 words and then again and again. Filling out the complexity of ones’ ideas is really where learning takes place.

His idea is closely related to the one I had been making about Trump’s communication style. Though even in the completely made up versions of things like the Turbo Encabulator, teachers will need to be careful about what’s coming back in the assignments.

Replied to a tweet thread by John Mark TroyerJohn Mark Troyer (Twitter)
Framing things as just using a “blog” in reverse chronological order is a tough one. I might recommend having a website that does much more. It could be a business card, have a blog, have a portfolio, it could have collections, series, etc. The real key at the end of the day is having a website you own and control to put on it what you’d like. This way you can decide not only how to represent yourself on line but how you communicate.

Perhaps another interesting place to start thinking about this is Mike Caulfield’s post The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, which also looks closely at wikis as a separate framing?

Other than a blog, another common pattern is to have a /Now page which describes what you’ve been up to lately. (The problem with this is keeping it up to date on a frequent basis, and you might get back to the problem of having a blog which hasn’t been updated in a while.)

Of course, why not take back control of all of your social presence and put that on your site too? That way your social stream on your site will more frequently be up to date. This is roughly what I do on my site at /blog. It’s not just a stream of longer articles, but of all my social posts, photos, checkins, and other interactions. Of course if you just want the longer form stuff, that’s available too.

For some examples on portfolios, perhaps try the IndieWeb wiki which has some examples and links to other resources.

I like John Mark Troyer’s idea of mini-ebooks and collections of projects. I’ve got a collection of some of my IndieWeb experiments with WordPress that touches on his idea, but eventually I’ll roll some of it up into a book of some sort.

I’ll also indicate another idea being that of having a site that acts like a digital commonplace book, which is roughly how I use my website. I keep a lot of the content primarily for myself, but it does have some social interest for those who may appreciate that I’ve aggregated it in one place.

While the conversation has (temporarily?) shifted to social platforms, I don’t think that it’s always going to stay there. The barriers and issues with owning, controlling, and maintaining a website are coming down every day. Why would one want/need dozens or more social sites to communicate when they should be able to do it in one place–on their own site? Just like I can use my phone and phone number with AT&T service to call you on your phone number with Sprint service, I should be able to use WordPress on my domain to chat/@mention you on your domain running any other CMS. Eventually social media will decentralize, though there still may be a place for aggregation hubs for discovery. I’ll mention passingly that individual websites can also act as stand-alone members of the Fediverse. While not the prettiest thing at the moment because of limitations of the Fediverse, you can follow my website here @chrisaldrich from Mastodon and other Fediverse instances. Simultaneously feed readers are improving to better allow users to read what they want without relying on social services to control it for them.

In the past, many people have indiscriminately syndicated material from one social site to another, but it generally never looks good unless it’s done very carefully. Naturally none of the corporate silos make this type of syndication easy because it’s not in their financial interest to do so–they’d rather you used their services exclusively. This is part of what makes it look like one is dropping off fliers. However, I would suggest that with a more IndieWeb approach that syndicating via POSSE and using appropriate backfeed via webmention, that one can have not only a reasonably organic experience, but you can add a lot more to a much bigger (and hopefully more substantive) conversation. POSSE is a temporary bandaid until we’ve been able to reshape the web the way we want to consume it rather than being forced into consumption on social media services’ terms.

Hopefully this post itself is an example of a response to a larger stream of content that provides a bit more space than Twitter’s 280 character limit would have otherwise allowed. This post might also indicate that a conversation online doesn’t need to be so forced and linear or crammed within Twitter’s restrictive confines. Twitter forces us into a stream as a means of getting us to scroll endlessly rather than think, mull, and respond. It’s not unnoticed by me that the tweet that started this thread has branched off into half a dozen different, but related conversations. This makes even Twitter’s UI difficult to navigate and respond to appropriately. We definitely need (and deserve) something better. If they won’t do it for us, then why not take the means of production and do it ourselves.

You’ve asked some excellent questions. I can’t wait to see your experiments and what you end up making John.

Watched "The West Wing" Game On from Netflix
Directed by Alex Graves. With Rob Lowe, Stockard Channing, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney. Toby falls prey to a practical joke by the rest of the staff, after which everyone but Leo takes off for the debate in San Diego. Sam makes a side trip to Newport Beach to explain to the congressional campaign manager of the late Horton Wilde why the campaign has to fold even though Wilde is still on the ballot; what Sam doesn't expect is a stalwart named Will Bailey who, determined to keep the ...
Watched "The West Wing" Debate Camp from Netflix
Directed by Paris Barclay. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. Sequestered in North Carolina to prepare for the one and only debate between Bartlet and opponent Robert Richie, the staff and several consultants (incl. Andrea Wyatt and Joey Lucas) flash back to the days just before and after the president's first inauguration, which were marked by an ill-advised choice for attorney general and ongoing concerns about fertility for then-married Toby and Andrea. ...
Watched "The West Wing" The Red Mass from Netflix
Directed by Vincent Misiano. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. A possible third-party candidate threatens to upset the President's lead in the polls. As Qumar threatens to blame Israel for Shareef's death, Leo must convince the Israeli ambassador not to respond. Charlie teaches his new ward a lesson in basic government. When the committee in charge of presidential debates rules that there will only be two, Sam and CJ propose a risky strategy.