a perfect storm. We’ve doubled-down on courses and the LMS, we’ve bought into the notion that what technology afforded us for teaching and learning was standardization of experience and pedagogy, and we’ve abandoned the nascent spaces that might have let us continue to explore the Web as a flexible, open, and powerful platform for teaching and learning.

And instead of putting our resources and skills into imagining what those spaces could become for teaching and learning, we began spending a lot of money on learning managements systems and other educational technologies.

But when the LMS goes beyond merely providing administrative and management features and instead is offering features designed (perhaps badly) to build community, share information, and collaborate with others, it is obviously influencing pedagogy.

even if we had decided for centuries that in our schools the course would be how we’d standardize administration of our schools, we didn’t, systematically, believe that courses themselves were standardized

What if the early Web adopters in higher education had imagined Domain of One’s Own instead of Course in a Box?

When I call for each of us to have a domain of our own, I’m not really invoking “ownership” in the way in which Maha suggests the "Domain of One's Own" initiative implies; but I am, I do confess, invoking Virginia Woolf and the importance having the space and safety and security (financially well before technologically) to think and write and be.

How do we resist this? (And resist this, I contend, we must.) We resist through education. Yes. But we also must resist at the level of structure, at the level of systems, at the level of infrastructure.

I’m not so sure it does, or at least that it does in the same way as Bush's vision of an “ownership society”. It seems, rather, that the rest of ed-tech – the LMS, adaptive learning software, predictive analytics, surveillance tech through and through – is built on an ideology of data extraction, outsourcing, and neoliberalism. But the Web – and here I mean the Web as an ideal, to be sure, and less the Web in reality – has a stake in public scholarship and public infrastructure.

In part, I think we resist through education; we help students and scholars understand how new digital technologies work, how these technologies shape and reshape and are shaped by culture, politics, money, and law.

A Domain of One's Own in a Post-Ownership Society

The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century

How can WordPress inflect your teaching and research? Let’s look at a couple of examples:

F1000Research is an Open Research publishing platform offering immediate publication of articles and other research outputs with no editorial bias. All articles benefit from transparent peer review and the inclusion of all source data.

The Open Publishing Revolution, Now Behind A Billion-Dollar Paywall

why I’m quitting Mendeley (and why my employer has nothing to do with it)

My thoughts on Mendeley/Elsevier & why I left to start PeerJ

A new way for researchers to share their outputs

Why we’re launching a new publishing platform

a new MLA style for the network age

I have heard anecdotally from a number of scholars who have told me that their departments or colleges relied on our guidelines for evaluating digital work in rethinking their tenure and promotion guidelines, or in their own particular tenure cases. I hear much less frustration than I used to about institutions failing to accept or recognize or adequately consider digital work, and that’s a great thing.

Hello Again, 2006: The Economics of Reference Management Software

Okay, so here I was in one room with university administrators. I chose the concept I was going to present by three main criteria: a) The concept should scaffold ongoing, constructive and critical discussions around the different ideas of digital pedagogy, identity, teaching and learning among faculty and students. b) I wanted to show ‘proof’ that what I was pitching had worked before elsewhere, that it had been applied. c) Under no circumstances did I want to promote a centralized use of technology that follows ideas of control or restraint. (you may read “LMS” here) Instead, I was looking for something that provided students and educators with agency over their own digital identities and their learning and teaching.

It’s not like a disaster not to own one’s domain. It’s something that makes sense at some stage of One’s digital existence, but not the FIRST step imho.

Antigonish 2.0 offers a call to colleges and universities around the globe to consider how their resources—staff, faculty, students, space, digital infrastructures, brands—can be deployed at all three layers of the initiative.

Antigonish 2.0, therefore, is a community capacity-building project about media literacy and civic engagement.

Its vision was as education-focused as it was economic, with an emphasis on building literacy as an avenue toward civic participation. The Antigonish Movement addressed people's poverty and lack of agency by creating collaborative capacity for pushing back on the structures of their disenfranchisement.

A funny thing happened on the way to academic integrity. Plagiarism detection software (PDS), like Turnitin, has seized control of student intellectual property. While students who use Turnitin are discouraged from copying other work, the company itself can strip mine and sell student work for profit.

Six Steps to Superior Product Prototyping: Lessons from an Apple and Oculus Engineer

Feldstein’s Law: Any educational app that is actively developed for long enough and has a large enough user base will become indistinguishable from a badly designed LMS.

provide a set of discussion APIs

no responsible human being should ever willingly inflict yet another electronic grade book on the world

A moderating entity should provide access to and active moderation of “layers” of information and discourse, creating “separate fabrics” for the production and circulation of new knowledge.

Another Human Solution

Rather than sit back and let a so-called free market do its thing, I found Esther’s commentary an encouraging invitation to get one’s hands dirty

last Thursday’s opening keynote by Esther Dyson

my thanks to Nate Angell for frequently emphasizing this stance, it’s good learning for me and others

shun historical perspective in favor of future-oriented technological determinism

video of that session, and others, is forthcoming

Identity intersects with education, education with power and power always intersects with identity. I want all of us to shine light onto these intersections and then do better because we looked and learned.

In her podcast, Audrey likened unwanted annotation to someone entering your house and writing on your walls without invitation.

you can think of the hoax as meeting a demand technology creates

what platforms reward as successful digital identity performance and practice is antithetical to those platforms ever becoming more pro-social spaces at a grand scale

when it comes to truth the necessary conditions to a functional marketplace don't exist

We're vulnerable to state-sponsored attacks, he says, because we are too narrowly technological in our solutions.

People want to turn this into a legal debate, but it's not. It's a tools debate, and the main product of a builder of social tools is not the tool itself but the culture that it creates. So what sort of society do you want to create?

It convinces us that we should never delete any information ever, that we should always post under our real name, that we should spend our time online defining for platform capitalism the things we like and the things we don't so that we can be more effectively manipulated by advertising.

Concerns

Annotation As a Marketplace for Context

Marketplace

the first ten amendments to the Constitution

How do we reassert humanity’s moral compass over these alien algorithms? We may need to develop a version of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” for algorithms.

Each item added to the repository will be assigned a DOI, which means you can trust they will be persistently resolvable.  In our exemplar role, we will ultimately be connecting the DOI to the creator’ ORCID iDs

What’s Hot and Cooking In Scholarly Publishing

Liberating Structures

10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Moving into Management

Annoter le web

TextThresher MVP Screencast Walk-Through

Hypothesis is a lightweight option for adding website annotation with the aim of bringing “a new layer to the web”.

A fundamental concern when evaluating educational technology for use is the balance of the effort required to learn and implement it against the value it provides in the educational endeavour. Hypothesis is well-position with respect to this balance.

Use d3-annotation with built-in annotation types, or extend it to make custom annotations. It is made for d3-v4 in SVG.

My plea to designers and software engineers: Ignore the fads and go back to the typographic principles of print — keep your type black, and vary weight and font instead of grayness.

It wasn’t hard to isolate the biggest obstacle to legible text: contrast, the difference between the foreground and background colors on a page. In 2008, the Web Accessibility Initiative, a group that works to produce guidelines for web developers, introduced a widely accepted ratio for creating easy-to-read webpages.To translate contrast, it uses a numerical model. If the text and background of a website are the same color, the ratio is 1:1. For black text on white background (or vice versa), the ratio is 21:1. The Initiative set 4.5:1 as the minimum ratio for clear type, while recommending a contrast of at least 7:1, to aid readers with impaired vision. The recommendation was designed as a suggested minimum contrast to designate the boundaries of legibility. Still, designers tend to treat it as as a starting point.

twenty dollars

On the Web, people use the concept of “above the fold” to support layout decisions, call to action designs, ad placements, and more. Here’s why most of these arguments don’t fly.

We can officially get rid of this myth of above-the-fold once and for all. There is no fold!

Introduction to Open

We’ve designed our products to meet essential needs of journalism through effective online communities.

English for Media Literacy

The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

What are the risks in assuming that we start from a place of shared values and goals?

fostering authentic relationships

whose values are aligned with ours

One area for-profit edtech companies seem to have trouble understanding is the degree to which higher ed puts a premium on transparency and information sharing.

U.S. public higher education institutions will spend $10.8 billion this year on information technology.

Community of Online Research Assignments

shift resources from capturing knowledge — which we've been doing almost exclusively for the past five years — toward packaging and distributing knowledge

Because of the magnitude of its budgetary effects, thislegislation is “major legislation,” as defined in the rules of the House of Representatives.1Hence, ittriggers the requirement that the cost estimate, to the greatest extent practicable, include the budgetary impact ofits macroeconomic effects. However, because of the very short time available to prepare this cost estimate, quantifying and incorporating those macroeconomic effects havenot been practicable.

Most of that increase would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate. Some of those people wouldchoosenot to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.

in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under the legislationthanunder current law

American Health Care Act

Here's one way higher education can help: teach critical thinking modes that bring scholarly best practices to the modern web.

Zebra companies are often started by women and other underrepresented founders.

To state the obvious: unlike unicorns, zebras are real.

We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time.

When VC firms prize time on site over truth, a lucky few may profit, but civil society suffers.

Fundamentally, these efforts miss because what’s needed is not an understanding of news but of the web.

Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, is pressing the president to officially pull the United States from the landmark accord, according to energy and government officials with knowledge of the debate. But, they say, he is clashing with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who fear the move could have broad and damaging diplomatic ramifications.

Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity.

I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention then certainly in effect.

His objection is to objectivity itself.

Annotators are into “meta”.

Annotators are into “meta”.

Best States Rankings

we think of it as like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out where your strengths and weaknesses are down to the percentile.

Compliance, Privacy, and Security

the simple, digital-based solution to reduce student costs and support universal access to course materials

In a world of rapidly evolving science and technology, imagination and moral foresight are our greatest human advantage.

This taxonomy serves as a useful guide to OER advocates seeking to diversify or tailor their outreach strategy.

benefits students

an eight-stage theory of psychosocial development

the goal posts must be placed further than simply cheaper textbooks.

Within this broader vision, significant cost savings to students are the least significant benefit of OER.

expense

University of Edinburgh has hired a Wikimedian-in-residenc

Advancing digital literacy has profound implications for global economies

Digital Polarization Initiative

Creating and participating in the digital space also surfaces a number of digital literacy issues, including security, privacy, and openness.

isc recommends staff-student partnerships to drive innovation while upskilling the digital prowess of all involved, and has published a guide for planning a collaborative approach.

cultivating skills for mindful media consumption

new category of competenc

The Building Blocks of Visual Design

Let me count the ways

Welcome to the Toolshed!

29 principles for making great font combinations

we must put digital literacy at the core of the curriculum

We’ll let you know who made the millionth annotation

Powerful ASCII art editor

I got a standing ovation.

Outbound

We need everyone to have the skills to read, write and participate in the digital world

Web Literacy

Finally, the sophisticated contextual approach circles back around to unite the two previous categories, in a way. From this approach knowledge is seen as created by individuals to serve a purpose. What is true depends on evidence and a given context. There are authorities, but they are not absolute. Knowledge is always changing and you come to know by creating knowledge, collecting the most up-to-date and appropriate evidence.

In the subjective approach, the individual recognizes that not all knowledge is absolute but takes it to a position that there is no authority, knowledge depends entirely on what works for each individual. In the subjective approach the stance is often “If I believe something, it is true for me. You can believe something different, and that’s true for you.” Knowing comes from personal experience.

The simplistic and absolute approach is an outlook where knowledge is simple: there is a right and wrong. There is a Truth. Knowledge comes from some official authority, and you come to know when that authority transmits the information to you.

In talking back to something through annotation are we not inherently questioning some authority, immediately pushing ourselves out of an absolute stance?

conversing with an author

you come to know by creating knowledge

links to understand fact-checking

fact-checkers’ code of principles

Putting the "Person" Back into Personalized Learning

highlighting

Scientists Have Figured Out How to Make Sarcasm Land in a Text.

Searching For The Perfect Emoji For Any Occasion

Emoji can lead to huge misunderstandings, research finds

That evidence shows that partisans who score highest on a standard measure of AOT are in fact the most polarized on the reality of human-caused climate change.

MahaBali

you should find a method here that works for you

an Update on My Use of the Bullet Journal Method

writing is more effective for learning and remembering

Strikethru

Inbox Zero

use Evernote as a frictionless GTD list application