In essence, the open Web, while not free from governmental and commercial pressures, is about as free from such pressures as a major component of modern capitalist society can be. And indeed it is this decentralized organizational model, coupled with heavy reliance on volunteer labor, that invites the model of stewardship I commended earlier in this essay. No one owns the Internet or the World Wide Web, and barring the rise of an industrial mega-power like the Buy-n-Large Corporation of Pixar’s 2008 movie WALL•E, no one will. Indeed, the healthy independence of the Internet and the Web is among the strongest bulwarks against the rise of a Buy-n-Large or the gigantic transnational corporations that play such a major role in the futures imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson, especially in his Hugo Award–winning Mars trilogy.
Some of the people most dedicated to the maintenance and development of the open Web also produce open-source software that makes it possible to acquire the skills I listed above. In this category we may find nonprofit organizations such as Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, as well as for-profit organizations that make and release free and open-source software—for instance, Automattic, the maker of the popular blogging platform WordPress, and Github, whose employees, along with many volunteers, have created the excellent Atom text editor. One could achieve much of the independence I have recommended by using software available from those three sources alone.
IASC: The Hedgehog Review – Volume 20, No. 1 (Spring 2018) – Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future –
A Domain of One’s Own: Your Space for a Think
Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web, to have their scholarship be meaningful and accessible by others. It allows them to demonstrate their learning to others beyond the classroom walls. To own one’s domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.
The Web We Need to Give Students – BRIGHT Magazine
Often when I say that I think that the “Domain of One’s Own” initiative is one of the most important education technologies, I always hear pushback from the Twitter riffraff. “What’s so special about a website?” folks will sneer.
Well, quite a lot, I’d contend. The Web itself is pretty special – Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a global hyperlinked information system. A system that was – ideally at least – openly available and accessible to everyone, designed for the purpose of sharing information and collaborating on knowledge-building endeavors. That purpose was not, at the outset, commercial. The technologies were not, at the outset, proprietary.
Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)
I’m pretty resistant to framing “domains” as simply a matter of “skills.” Because I think its potential is far more radical than that. This isn’t about making sure literature students “learn to code” or history students “learn to code” or medical faculty “learn to code” or chemistry faculty “learn to code.”
Rather it’s about recognizing that the World Wide Web is site for scholarly activity. It’s about recognizing that students are scholars.
Mike talks about the difference between what he describes as the “garden” and the “stream.” The stream are the other threats to the Web, I’d argue – these are Twitter and Facebook most obviously. The status updates and links that rush past us, often stripped of context and meaning and certainly stripping us of any opportunity for contemplation or reflection. The garden, on the other hand, encourages just that. It does so by design.
And that’s the Web. That’s your domain. You cultivate ideas there – quite carefully, no doubt, because others might pop by for a think. But also because it’s your space for a think.
Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)
As originally conceived at the Virginia liberal arts university, the Domains initiative provides students and faculty with their own Web domain. It isn’t simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school’s dot-edu, but their own domain – the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student’s choosing. The school facilitates the purchase of the domain; it helps with installation of WordPress and other open source software; it offers both technical and instructional support; and it hosts the site until graduation when domain ownership is transferred to the student.
And then – contrary to what happens at most schools, where a student’s work exists only inside a learning management system and cannot be accessed once the semester is over – the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.
The Web We Need to Give Students – BRIGHT Magazine
The importance of giving students responsibility for their own domain cannot be overstated. This can be a way to track growth and demonstrate new learning over the course of a student’s school career – something that they themselves can reflect upon, not simply grades and assignments that are locked away in a proprietary system controlled by the school.
The Web We Need to Give Students – BRIGHT Magazine
But there remains this notion, deeply embedded in Domain of One’s Own, that it is important to have one’s own space in order to develop one’s ideas and one’s craft. It’s important that learners have control over their work – their content and their data. In a 2009 article that served as a philosophical grounding of sorts for the initiative, Gardner Campbell, then a professor at Baylor University, called for a “personal cyberinfrastructure” where students:
The Web We Need to Give Students – BRIGHT Magazine
DIY Your Domain
For the last few years we’ve been hearing a good many people (most of them computer programmers) say that every child should learn to code. As I write these words, I learn that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has echoed that counsel. Learning to code is a nice thing, I suppose, but should be far, far down on our list of priorities for the young. Coding is a problem-solving skill, and few of the problems that beset young people today, or are likely to in the future, can be solved by writing scripts or programs for computers to execute. I suggest a less ambitious enterprise with broader applications, and I’ll begin by listing the primary elements of that enterprise. I think every young person who regularly uses a computer should learn the following:
IASC: The Hedgehog Review – Volume 20, No. 1 (Spring 2018) – Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future –
- how to choose a domain name
- how to buy a domain
- how to choose a good domain name provider
- how to choose a good website-hosting service
- how to find a good free text editor
- how to transfer files to and from a server
- how to write basic HTML, including links to CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files
- how to find free CSS templates
- how to fiddle around in those templates to adjust them to your satisfaction
- how to do basic photograph editing
- how to cite your sources and link to the originals
- how to use social media to share what you’ve created on your own turf rather than create within a walled factory
Blogging
25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs – The Ed Techie
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows.
As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit – release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.
Small b blogging
I struggle with the conflict between writing something new and building on existing ideas but shouldn’t; a blog is just as much a process, an evolution of thought, as an act of creation.
Required – Colin Walker
I love blogging. It’s why I got into tech reporting.
I feel like that is actually tech’s salvation.
Blogging.
Save the bloggers.
The Shareholder Supremacy – Better Offline – Omny.fm
WordPress
In the aftermath, we find that we live in a post truth world filled with fake news and alternative facts. And all around us, people are pointing at the web as the engine that allowed all this to advance: it turns out that understanding how search engines work is really important; it turns out that understanding Facebook algorithms really does matter; it turns out that knowing how to create and disseminate information on the Web is a very, very powerful force.
And it turns out that we have a lot of work to do.
Through its coded spaces, the LMS values a learning experience that is as streamlined and predictable as possible, and, thus the teaching we do in the LMS never addresses the Web below the surface. What spaces can we imagine on the Web that might push us deeper?
Within our personal Web spaces, the application that captured our imaginations the most was an open source blogging platform called WordPress. WordPress was popular back then; it’s even more popular now. Some estimates suggest that it powers close to 30% of the Web. Within WordPress, users can use plugins and themes to extend and alter the application. Themes let users change the way their site looks; plugins let them change the way it behaves. This extensibility of WordPress is why it has become, for me, a game-changer. When faculty or students have something they want to build on the Web, I can almost always figure out a way they can achieve it with WordPress.
WordPress, which I’ve already mentioned several times and which so many of our students use and learn, is a powerful force on the Web. Because it is used by so many sites, learning it is an actual marketable skill that our students can include on their resumes. This matters, and it’s worth pointing out and emphasizing to our communities.
Let’s talk about the more philosophical underpinnings of the project — the notion that we are pushing our students to develop a deeper understanding of how the Web works and why that matters to us in 2017. Let’s return to WordPress for a moment. WordPress is, indeed, a specific, popular content management system. But even if it wasn’t the most popular, or, even if some other open source tool were to overtake it in popularity in the next four years, that doesn’t mean the experience of learning it loses value for our students, not if we approach that learning in a particular way.
For WordPress can actually serve as an exemplar, a symbol with which our students can grapple as a way towards a deeper understanding. The things they learn to do in WordPress are generalizable to other systems and other online spaces: identifying an audience; honing a voice; organizing and architecting an online space; mixing media to create compelling narratives; considering the interplay between design and content; understanding how Web applications work “under the hood” and how databases and scripts interact; adapting sites to consider accessibility and universal design; connecting disparate online spaces so they relate to each other in synthesized whole; adapting a site as it grows and develops in new directions; responding to comments and finding other spaces and sites upon which to comment; learning how search engines rank sites and how those search engine’s algorithms impact the findability of their own site. This list goes on and on, and it leads us to a more fundamental conversation about the Web and it’s place within our classrooms, our disciplines, and our culture.
I’ve begun to think that we need to push for an approach to the Web that considers it as space that begs of us an interpretive approach. Much like in our specific disciplines we learn how to interpret text, research, data, stories, art, I believe we need to approach the Web as an object of this kind of interrogation and consideration. The Web is not merely the content we read or view. It’s not merely the sites we browse or post on.
This is the Web we need to grapple with, for our students’ sakes as well as our own. And there is still so much work we have to do.
Messy & Chaotic Learning: A Domains Presentation at Keene State College | The Fish Wrapper
Systems that maximise connectivity between the pace layers offer organisations competitive advantage. WordPress’ ubiquity has driven it to enjoy a rich ecosystem of connectivity and integration, something that the baked-in WordPress REST API now extends that connectivity infinitely. This is why things will accelerate in 2017.
How WordPress Ate The Internet in 2016… And The World in 2017
Hyperlinks
The hyperlink is our most potent weapon in the fight against disinformation.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
It’s time we brought back the hyperlink and learned how to really use it. It’s time we used information abundance to our advantage. And it’s time we disentangled our communications from platforms tuned for the spread of disinformation. The health of our democracies just might depend on it.
The oldest and simplest of internet technologies, the hyperlink and the “new” kind of text it affords — hypertext — is the foundational language of the internet, HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Hypertext connects all the disparate pieces of the web together. And it’s Sci-Fi name isn’t an accident. It’s hyperdrive for the internet, bending information space so that any user can travel galaxy-scale information distances with a small movement of a finger. The hyperlink still remains one of the most powerful elements of the web. In fact, I’d argue that the hyperlink is our most potent weapon in the fight against disinformation.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
With experience in evaluating and distinguishing various kinds of sources, the critically minded student can parse these links and filter bias to pull nuanced meaning from these various texts. More importantly in our current information landscape, the student/professor/researcher-as-public-scholar/educated-graduate-as-mindful-citizen can curate the best primary and secondary sources as links, and use the opportunity not simply to prove their credentials and bolster their argument, but to educate the public, bringing more light than heat to whatever issue they are unpacking.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
First, academic work — both for students and faculty — still tends to be centered around traditional, pre-web conventions of writing. The printed book/article/essay, with footnotes and a bibliography, does not speak the language of the web, and footnotes/endnotes on a website do not encourage an audience to engage with more material more deeply. Putting an academic paper on the web is nothing like writing for the web. Until more faculty help their students learn to do the latter (and until faculty promotion and retention policies encourage faculty themselves to be fluent in writing for a public audience on the web), we’ll continue to raise up future generations of graduates (including the next generation of professors) who aren’t ready for their role in the fight against disinformation.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
Second, social-media platforms have worked hard to kill the hyperlink.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
As propagandists and perpetrators of (dis)information operations find those social-media limitations amenable to their aims, we need to resist. And we resist not only with better information, and better interpretation, but in recovering the language of the internet — the language of (digital) scholarship.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
It’s time we brought back the hyperlink and learned how to really use it. It’s time we used information abundance to our advantage. And it’s time we disentangled our communications from platforms tuned for the spread of disinformation. The health of our democracies just might depend on it.
Education in the (Dis)Information Age – Hybrid Pedagogy
