In an ongoing effort to chronicle all the OER16 goodness, I wanted to point to this 20 minute conversation I had with Ammie Scott and John Johnston for Radio Edutalk. I just re-listened to the audio because it had been almost two months since we chatted and I was kinda foggy on the details.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was a fairly focused and cogent discussion around issues such as open educational infrastructure, personal archiving, and the tensions between ease-of-use and critically interrogating the digital space we inhabit. In those terms, we spent some time discussing SPLOTs versus managing one’s own domain and web hosting.
The conversation then moved into the broader questions around personal archiving—a space I continue to be fascinated with. The notion that no one will care more about your digital footprint than you, and the importance of thinking about we begin to start approaching the management and preservation of these digital lifebits. This led to questions around what Ammie noted were the “limits of the archive,” the idea that there are things you don’t want to keep and that should also be a point of empowerment.
From there we talked about POSSE, or publishing on one’s own site and syndicating everywhere. In this context Known came up, and one of the ongoing issues with a distributed POSSE publishing platform like Known is the lack of an integrated reader for context. Why don’t publish to Twitter on Known? Simple, because I am not reading the tweets in Known, and I am too lazy to do twice the work. This led us back to where we started, which was kind of nice, the importance of balancing design and ease-of-use with distributed systems based on personal empowerment. And that was a wrap!
It was quite a fun conversation, and it tightly encapsulates many of the questions and concerns I want to spend much more of my time dealing with in the foreseeable future.
