Domain of One’s Own as Educational Pilot of Federated Web

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Reverend

Special thanks to George Kroner for pointing me to the article “The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds” which nicely frames some of the larger implications of taking control of your own domain:

If you had your own domain name and kept good backups you could move from host to host and even to entirely different blogging systems (though you might mess up your permalinks). E-mail can work the same way, if you use your own domain name instead of your host’s. These are what some people call “federated systems.”

I’m interested in plans to build federated versions of the internet, including “darknets” like Freenet, Crptosphere or wireless internet alternatives like Project Meshnet and the many many other project like it. But for those of us living in relatively free countries, just having an internet where everyone owns their own portable identity is good enough. Owning a domain name is a bit on the geeky side, but it’s not like asking people to learn to program or configure their own Linux servers. We can still rely on hosted services – as long as we can pack up and move out of them when the time comes.

This framework is important for me because part of thinking through a Domain of One’s Own at UMW has to be about architectures of empowerment for students and faculty alike. A long-view of our increasingly mediated realities that allows us to enable individual control over our digital artifacts. What is awesome about this project is it is at once architectural, technical, philosophical, and liberatory. I’m increasingly of the mindset that what’s happening at UMW with a Domain of One’s Own (all work born out of UMW Blogs and ds106) is yet another powerful and forward-thinking approach to federating the web and empowering our students and faculty who use it—which is all of them!

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The Uses and Limits of Tumblr

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Reverend

I’ve had a tumblr blog since 2007—well before it was cool :)—but never really used it. As I got more into ds106 and creating stuff on the web the design culture coming out of tumblr kept coming on my radar through blogs I follow, links on twitter, student work, etc. Not to mention the PSU blog creation crew of Brak Kozlek and Cole Camplese went all-in on tumblr, seeing WordPress as a bit bloated for quickly posting lifebits.

I think Bryan Alexander turned me onto a blogger on tumblr called Sarkos who is exceptionally good, with constant flow of compelling and interesting stuff. And of course the amazing De La Soul’s First Serve tumblr. Long story short, I recently starting using tumblr as a space where I post images, video, animated GIFs that I see on the web and want to save somewhere. And while my uses is somewhat pedestrian, I love how the dashboard is designed to simply show you what the people you follow post. That’s a feature that I think would be amazing for a course, especially if the aggregation was that seamlessly filtered and streamlined. In fact, streamlining syndicating is one of the course elements to making aggregation models like this smoother when approaching faculty and students.

But all that said the problem with tumblr—or maybe its the genius, I don’t know—is the context. You never really know who posted what, who re-blogged what, who is sharing what. I love this platform for promotion, but it gets tricky for attribution. What’s more, the simplified interface makes adding titles, tags, categories and other assorted metadata less likely. I imported 60 posts from my Tumblr blog into a WordPress blog on UMW Blogs to see how that works (the Stumblr theme is nice, thanks D’Arcy!), and it’s interesting how there’s no information available about any of the posts in the WP interface. Take a look at the last 20 posts I imported:

Absolutely nothing to search for or organize by when I import it from tumblr, which is distressing. Add to that, at least on UMW Blogs, the video links get lost in the import, leaving me with about 10 dead posts with no trace of the original YouTube link. I like a lot of things about tumblr—particularly the way it creates loose community and allows for quick promotion—but I also feel like my stuff is so fragile there, just like the thousands of links languishing on my Delicious account. After almost seven years of intensive blogging it really doesn’t make sense for me to go down a tumblr hole—it’s not open source, the importer is only decent at best, and the quick and easy nature may prove more work over time when it comes to archiving. That said, I would love to start thinking about how we might design an aggregation hub/space that allows people to follow, promote, and feature recent work like what’s going on in tumblr. I don’t necessarily want to put my data there, I just want something I can use to read, subscribe, discover, and promote stuff in a more compelling way than through an RSS reader. And for me this is kind of where the culture around RSS has been kinda lame, there haven’t been easy and creative ways to aggregate, explore and reframe the various feeds to make them attractive, accessible, and discoverable.

Posted in UMW Blogs, WordPress | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Opening Up Virginia or, Faith in a System of People

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Reverend

Stolen from the State of Virginia arts campaign

Funny that I should find myself as excited as I’ve been in a long while writing a post about a state-level higher education council committee meeting I attended. Who gets excited about committee work?! Well, today I did. Because I spent three stimulating hours with a bunch of committed and passionate people talking about what open education could mean for the Virginia public higher education system. The discussion instilled a sense of faith that good people and powerful ideas (like opening up education across institutions in Virginia) is not only possible, but feasible. What’s more, this conversations is happening in on a level where wide-scale change could happen on the level of a state system. I mean the idea isn’t too outlandish, right? David Wiley has been at this for years, and Tom Caswell and company did it in Washington more recently! Why not Virginia?  I truly believe this, and I am not alone—a lot of other people like Richard Sebastian (who deserves a ton of credit for orchestrating this) of VCCS, VCU’s own Jeff Nugent, Nicolle Parsons-Pollard from Virginia State University, M’Hammed Abdous from ODU, Radford’s Steve Helm, Lorraine Hall from CNU, and Tidewater Community College’s Diane Ryan, to name just a few, are bringing their a-game to the table to ensure that Virginia’s public education system remains vital to the state’s future. A committee where you feel like you have the possibility to make a real difference is an awesome thing!

The committee originated this Spring as a Digital Learning Resources (DLR) planning group whose original mandate was framed around “producing a report to articulate policy and process recommendations regarding incentives, funding, and measurement of progress in the improved use of DLR at Virginia public institutions.” The idea of what DLRs encompassed was a bit hazy. From the outset it seemed as if they were being defined as etexts that would produce immediate cost savings through deals with publishers—an idea, no doubt, born in some vendor’s boardroom somewhere. But at the first physical meeting of the committee back in April or May the idea of what, in fact, a digital learning resource is started to broaden the scope of the committee through vigorous conversation. Was it open courses? -open software development? -open publishing platforms? open access?  -open texts locally created? etc.

The conversation took a broader, philosophical view of resources and almost from the start was marrying that notion to something freely accessible and shareable—almost the diametric opposite of etexts as they were presented to the planning group. I found the first conversation exhilarating, but I was afraid it was beginners luck. A thoughtful, discursive state committee meeting by self-described bureaucrats was sure to be a mistake, right?  Surely at all subsequent committee meetings the group would come to its senses and rule out any real innovative alternative. It had to…

But it didn’t. Today’s conversation was even better than the first—conducted on a simultaneously philopsophical and practical plane of what the conceptual impact of open publishing systems could mean for sharing resources across state institutions of higher ed. We talked about everything from Massive Open Online Courses to a state wide open access journal to shared open classes and distributed campus resources—-and it was more than apparent, at least to me, that SHEV’s Academic Affairs and Planning Director,  Joe Defillipo and Policy Analyst Beverly Covington were not simply playing the part of  bureaucrats, they were groking the implications of what an open and connected state-wide higher education system could do “to promote the development of an educationally and economically sound, vigorous, progressive, and coordinated system of higher education.” That’s right out of  SCHEV’s mission, and that’s what we were all doing today on the 9th floor of the James Monroe Building in Richmond. Of this I am proud.

What’s even better than that is it won’t simply stop at today’s conversation. And while I can’t say with any certainty that the Virginia state system of higher education will usher in an era of open resources, I do believe that we have the ideas, people, and passion in place to make this much more than a conversation. We are in the midst of polishing off a Request for Proposals for a state-wide conference that will bring teams from every Virginia state institution together to feature the innovative teaching and learning work happening at their campus.  The conference is in many ways the beginning of the conversation around articulating how a statewide approach to creating and sharing Digital Learning Resources (and their concomitant interaction) can inform both the present and future of higher ed in Virginia. And that is not about committees and institutions, it is ultimately about people who honestly believe we can use the current cultural realities to, forgive the repetition here, “promote the development of an educationally and economically sound, vigorous, progressive, and coordinated system of higher education.” I am a believer!

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The Credit She Never Gets

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Reverend

Earlier today I posted a quick video about using the ds106 assignments repository to create engagement in an online learning experience. To be clear there are many things that go into such an experience, but I’ve found the ds106 assignment repository has allowed me to re-think ds106 over the last year and a half. The ability to syndicate filtered assignment posts, rate the difficulty level,  relate tutorials, and create new assignments puts the course in the unique position to allow students to shape the experience. The simple act that has proven powerful, fun, and created a sense of community.

The current state of the assignment repository came out of an experimental model Martha Burtis has been iterating on since December 2010. It’s pretty amazing because that was the beginning of the idea of ds106 as open architecture, a space that others can build sites onto, like Alan Levine’s Remix site, Tim Owens’ Daily Create, and Linda McKenna and Rachel McGuirk’s Inspire site.

What’s more, when you think about MOOCs, and ds106 more specifically—which isn’t all that MOOCy—Martha is rarely mentioned. Credit is a tricky thing, and I think Martha would be the last person to really care about all that. That said, she was in Spring 2011 building and teaching an open online course that would be massive in its conception 🙂

Soon after I became director of DTLT I’ve depended on Martha for advice, guidance, and direction—and she regularly abides. She shares her vast experience freely despite the fact she doesn’t get credit for her work as director of DTLT from 2006 to 2008, her seminal role in ds106 (she made the Summer of Oblivion; I failed the Magic MacGuffin), her deft WordPress coding skills, and her strategic acumen that has kept DTLT relevant and on the edge for years she refuses to be phased. She’s been the organizational and strategic mind running DTLT , and her leadership has been all too often overlooked. So here is a little know secret about the truth on the ground here at DTLT: Martha Burtis is the brains of the organization.

Just the other day while we were figuring out how to help UMW’s current Quality Enhancement Plan (a.k.a. QEP) figure out why they were going to pay a contractor way too much money to transform pre-packaged content in to three online modules (not sure how this idea emerged) covering speaking, writing, and library search skills respectively. The pre-fabricated modules would have a definitive lifespan, there would be no space for iteration, and it would ultimately be resources wasted. Within 10 minutes Martha adeptly refocused the conversation to experimenting with a publishing platform. And rather than rushing to get everything done as soon as possible, we test out one or two individual “lessons” online to see what works. Once we learn how faculty use this in their curriculum, and what would be most useful going forward we’ll make recommendations for developing a platform over the Summer. Hopefully that will be something we can build out from WordPress or MediaWiki or some other similar application, adding to the open ecosystem of options. That’s exactly how you want to run a meeting like this. This is the best possible outcome: experimentation, iteration, and open. Thanks to Martha (and Jerry after her) DTLT has been doing that for years, but this is only just a little of the credit she never gets. I guess we have to start somewhere.

Posted in digital storytelling, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

ds106 Assignments: Designing for Engagement in Online Learning

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Reverend

ds106 Assignments: Effective Engagement in Online Classes from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

Alexandra Pickett, who’s having students create an engaging online course space, asked if I would share some quick advice for thinking about how one might approach designing engagement into an online course experience. I can only steal from the best, and Martha Burtis‘ design of the ds106 assignments is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in this regard. What’s more, it changed the very notion of engagement for the high school ds106ers I taught two weeks ago. As a technical framework it fundamentally changed the way I teach the class. It allows me to personalize instruction, abstract the tools, and let the students choose and create what they want. That’s amazing in my mind. I would write more, but I have a post I am writing hailing Martha Burtis for the genius she is when it comes to ds106.

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Got My Head in the Cloud: Udell on Domain of One’s Own

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Reverend

Jon Udell blogged about the history of an experiment that is finally taking root here at UMW. The pilot is the dry run for giving every Freshman their own domain and web hosting space by Fall 2013 in order to embrace and encourage students to becomes master’s of their own spaces, and get in the habit of maintaining their own personal archive of work. It will be built into the curriculum of a number of courses, and it’s a model of that ask students to take responsibility of their digital presence. To manage their online identities and build it so that they can take it with them when they go. Also, it pushes courses to acknowledge and embrace the open web as an integral part of the of the process of teaching and learning in a classroom or online.

What this means is that universities have to start thinking more like the web, but not in the catastrophic terms of MOOCs and the end of institutions, but rather in terms of understanding how networks and networked culture can change our understanding of sharing, transparency, privacy, and building collaborative infrastructure (Jon Udell’s talk back in 2009, The Disruptive Nature of Technology, is a brilliant framework to oeprate from here if you’re looking for more). How can IT organizations like UMW’s DoIT, head up by CIO Justin Webb be on board with something like Domain of One’s Own? I don’t know, but UMW’s IT organization is! This is not a radical, subversive pilot behind IT’s back, this is a pilot the CIO not only sees promise in, but also funded it outright. DTLT and the Department of Information Technologies are partners in  pretty powerful ways—that is an amazing thing to be writing on this blog! It’s actually a great day in that regard. So major kudos to Justin Webb.

What’s more, Tim Owens came to UMW little over a year ago and rebooted the whole pilot (talk about a shot of adrenaline!), got the server up an running, learned how to be a sysadmin for 300-400 people, groked the tech immediately and made it transparent for every one. This is one guy? And moving into this semester—nevermind him blogging on the Makerbot blog about UMW’s Maker Space—he’s got the Domain of One’s Own project well in hand. We are working on documentation and a introductory video as we speak.

I got my head in the clouds right now, Domain of One’s Own is more than a dream and Jon Udell is blogging about it! That’s a good omen, and one that I hope frames the long and distributed life of an idea that UMW’s current perfect storm has been able to make official and legit. This is very good.

What’s more, do a quick google search for Domain of One’s Own (no quotes).  We also are the top 5 out of 47 million possible hits. Google juice.


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Collectively Innovating from Within or, Notes from the “I Love Me” Wall

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Reverend

David Wiley is teaching a MOOC this coming Fall titled Ed Startup 101 and oddly enough I’ve been asked to facilitate one of the sessions talking about some of the work I’ve done at UMW over the years. I’m not an entrepreneur and I have no desire to ever be part of a startup. So I’m the one who is going to talk the students down from the slippery ledge of finance capital 🙂

I’m going to talk about innovating within an existing institution, but not so much in terms of greater profits—as the term “intrapreneur” is commonly defined—but for the benefit of the culture of an organization.  None of the work we’ve done at UMW can be directly tied to increased revenues for the university. What we’ve done is help make the culture around teaching and learning that much more relevant and innovative within the national conversation—and that, as a result, may have implications for UMW’s national reputation at some point.

And that’s interesting to me because reputation remains the currency for higher ed institutions, and by experimenting and remaining open to a wide array of possibilities I want to believe UMW becomes that much more valuable to people who want to get a unique education at a relatively reasonable price. A system of currency, all the same, but I want to believe—and will try and argue—that it’s anchored in people and experiences rather than ledgers and profits. I’m looking forward to this session, and I am honored David asked me to facilitate a week, I really look forward to it.

On a different, but related, note, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an E-Book with a collection of essays and writings from the infamous “12 Tech Innovators.” I wrote a piece for that ebook that challenged the way in which innovation is defined as a singular, monolithic act of the individual in response to the piece they wrote about me. It was an attempt to frame the work that has happened at UMW more generally, and ds106 more specifically, as a process of intensely collaborative and collective innovation. It is easy to hang the name Jim Groom on UMW Blogs or ds106, but the fact is people like Martha Burtis, Tom Woodward, Alan Levine, Andy Rush, Tim Owens, and so many more, all made this class community what it is. I wasn’t sure they would publish my short essay, so when I found out a few weeks ago they were planning to I was pleasantly surprised. However, I was not so thrilled to see it actually costs money to buy the ebook, so here is a link to my piece “Innovation as Communal Act” that I blogged a few months ago if you have any interest.

What becomes increasingly clear to me over the years is just how dependent any real and lasting innovation is upon a community of people that trust one another and work together to scale that reality. But we don’t necessarily work together in lockstep—we disagree with one another, challenge one another, and have regular fallouts—but we do have a shared vision and mission of what we think education should be. We think the teaching and learning at UMW should be shared freely and augmented wildly through networks of engagement, respect, and thoughtfulness, and I’m afraid we are not alone 🙂

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Domain of One’s Own as Legacy Archival Project

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Reverend

Image credit dolescum’s Archives’ stacks

In the seven years I have been at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies we’ve done a fair bit of experimentation. Most of that has been centered around commodity web hosting, domains, and one-click install open source applications. That method has paid off for us beautifully, so much so that the experimentation we did early on resulted in a successful blogging platform, a cutting-edge university website run on WordPress, and even an extensible framework for a course like ds106. Our experimentation has resulted in grassroots projects that have become official platforms that the campus interfaces with on a daily basis. None of this happened because it was forced on people, but rather because people found the various services we provided useful. This, for me, is the ultimate sign of success for an outfit like ours.

The other, uglier  side of the early experimentation is that it can be messy. Early on there was the exciting and chaotic proliferation of sites, domains, and web hosting accounts as we were exploring. That momentum slowly began to shift as we built more scalable models like UMW Blogs and umw.edu on WordPress. Turns out folks around campus were more than willing to stop using their externally hosted sites and return to the fold once they had an easy, powerful publishing platform like WordPress to work with.

So for the last week or two Tim Owens, Andy Rush, and I have been trying to clean up the vestiges of the web hosting and domain diaspora that has been languishing for several years now. The Domain of One’s Own pilot provided us a perfect occasion to transfer all the various domains and web hosting files from the disparate accounts to our own dedicated server for the project so that we can consolidate and manage all these files. What’s more, we can give any individual and/or department their own web hosting access because that is what this pilot is all about. After we consolidate all the web hosting accounts and domains to the Domain of One’s Own server we’ll have saved the university anywhere from $1000-$2000 per year in ongoing domain and hosting costs which means the cost of the pilot is closer to $8000 or $9000 this year—now that’s an innovative bargain!

What’s interesting is that the diaspora of sites has slowly consolidated to the point where we can both manage and archive all of the legacy work we have done over the last seven years while getting rid of the chafe and making sure the sites don’t become overgrown with web kipple, or even worse just disappear. It feels really good to be working through this process this Summer to make sure the work students and faculty have done on a wide range of sites over a long period of time is archived, consolidated, and available for the foreseeable future. I may even get the pre-cursor to UMW blogs, ELS Blogs, back up and running over the next week or two—which would be awesome, not to mention it would fix a lot of broken links from a large number of bava posts from 2007.

Posted in Archiving | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Integrating FeedWordPress with BuddyPress

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Reverend

I am writing a larger post about open architectures and the implications of what appears to be a more general move away from a focus on open as in sharing, collaboratively building, and collectively designing a space for teaching and learning others can use freely and build upon liberally. No where in the raging discussion around MOOCs is there anyone talking about sharing the infrastructural/architectural work they’ve done freely with others.  CUNY’s Commons-In-a-Box project makes the innovative development work they have been doing for years freely available for others to experiment with. That is the spirit of sharing that seems to me should characterize the groundswell for open, online education—localizing the means of production for as many people as possible rather than turning to more taylorized broadcasting methods that deliver content—we’ve been there and done that. When did scaling the LMS become the next frontier of innovation?

Anyway, more on that in another post. What this post brings together is the thinking Martha Burtis, Alan Levine, Tim Owens, and I have done about integrating BuddyPress with FeedWordPress to allow the signup process to seamlessly load feeds, filter tags, and bring posts in without any manual intervention—of which there is all too much currently.

We actually virtually met with the designer of FeedWordPress, Charles Johnson, and ran all these ideas by him and he was up to the task. He’ll hopefully begin work on these elements for integration shortly, and we are hoping he can lean on Boone Gorges if he has any BuddyPress questions 🙂 (Poor Boone, I am always bothering him—HE’S A FAMILY MAN NOW, BACK OFF GROOM!) So, for anyone interested in the specifics of what we are trying to accomplish with this integration, the details (some of which are a bit technical) are listed below. Recommendations, feedback, and praise are all welcome 😉

  • Automatic registering of ds106 feeds from BuddyPress profiles
    • Someone enters a URL for the blog they want to use (Note, pre-explanation need; e.g if the entire blog is for ds1o6, enter that; if they have a blog used for other purpose, they need to add URL for a ds106 tag or category (e.g. http://somewordpressblog.com/category/ds106 or http://somewordpressblog.com/tag/ds106
    • Internal function looks for possible feed from site (prob an internal function in FWP as used for admin interface), also some test code at http://lab.cogdogblog.com/feedfinder.php this should pop an ajax window with options to set blog, and it should populate a new buddypress ds106 feed field
    • If no feed is found, it goes into moderation and an email is sent to admin
  • Widget to generate list of blogs associated with a particular FWP applied  tag (or all) – I [Alan Levine] just hacked one for magic macguffin http://magicmacguffin.info/subscribed/ documented at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/06/03/dynamic-opml-feedwordpress/
    • widget to generate list of blogs syndicated on a site (might have to have option for scrolling list in case it is long)
    • Function to generat OPML file based in tag
  • Automatic tagging of feeds based on buddypress profile options  (e.g. default tag for all, others based on affiliation)
  • Way to get data we can display or use from feed activity- e.g. frequency of posts, time of posts, etc. or at least some hooks into the database so we can more easily roll our own. e.g. API or functions to call on FWP for information
    • return array of blogs subscribed for whole site (and meta info), or by tag
    • function to test if blog is subscribed
  • Advice about cron jobs for feed updating, perhaps a means to spread into batches for large numbers of crons. Two uses cases:
    • Site like ds106, where we just have a lot feeds syndicating into a single site.
    • Site like UMW Blogs, where a bunch of sites have smaller numbers of feeds syndicating
  • Better  admin interface for managing tags/categories associated with syndicated posts; search to find feeds by url, title, tag?
  • Interface for grouping syndicated feeds and working with them. (sort of related to the previous idea)- mass tagging or unsubscribing
  • cron for all ds106 sites is now running as update mode (6/1/2011)
    The warning when feeds are set to cron is confusing  since feeds do update.Note: Automatic updates are currently turned off. New posts from your feeds will not be syndicated until you manually check for them here. You can turn on automatic updates under Feed & Update Settings.There should be separate settings for cron versus manual?
  • Another point is making sure that users who sign-up in BuddyPress have the FWP settings using the BP username and associated it with the Feed. As of now associating feeds with usernames is manual, and a major PITA

Posted in BuddyPress, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Refocusing and Refueling: Keene, Caulfield, and Udell

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Reverend

Downtown Keene, NH

 Image credit: Dougton’s  “Keene, New Hampshire”

Almost a month ago I spent four days up in Keene, New Hampshire thanks to a generous offer to present at the New Hampshire state college system’s Academic Technology Institute (can anyone point me to the official conference website?). I presented a version of a talk that has been evolving for the last year (ever since Maricopa), and you can see my slides for this one here. The talk was received by a very kind and engaged room of faculty and instructional technologists who were there to think about how they can integrate new media into their courses. But I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that the presentation was only part of the reason I was there. The other driving motivation for me to get to Keene, NH was to have some quality conversational time with Jon Udell and Mike Caulfield. And that I did, not to mention I killed quite a few zombies along the way  🙂

Jon and Mike may be two of the most simultaneously precise and abstract thinkers in educational technology I’ve met, although Jon might rightfully resist that categorization given his reach is far larger than just education. What’s so powerful about these two is that they both operate from a vast technical understanding that is filtered through a deeply abstract knowledge of the philosophical ideas that underpin the web as virtual phenomenon we’re still trying to get our collective heads around. More than 6 years ago Jon came to UMW as the keynote speaker at Faculty Academy in 2006 to talk about 21st Literacy Century, and since then he’s been somewhat of a guiding light for our work. His ideas of aggregation, web thinking, the professional uses of blogging, a domain of one’s own, and archiving have driven much of the spirit of our work at UMW since. In just about every project we have done there is a deep debt of conceptual thinking to Udell. He’s kinda like the patron saint of DTLT 🙂 My own intellectual lineage of ds106, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure, a Domain of One’s Own, etc., can be traced back to a recommendation by Gardner to listen to a podcast by Jon that I blogged about back in 2008 (while I was at University of Richmond no less) that was titled “Imagining Cyberinfrastructure.”

So being able to talk to him at length about A Domain of One’s Own, UMW Blogs, the future of UMW’s website, and more general plans for syndication, aggregation, and  archiving UMW’s work was an absolute treat. We actually spent 9 innings of a Keene Swamp Bats baseball game talking about all of this, and I couldn’t have imagined a better backdrop for two red-blooded Americans 🙂 One of the issues we talked about extensively is the ability for individuals to manage their own data across a wide variety of social spaces that enables them to truly control their contexts and build a sense of who they are, what’s more it begins to disrupt the idea of content as currency for profit-driven systems that only understand you as a commodity, ideas very much in line with Brian Lamb’s recent post about the limits of content. A topic which reminds me of deep problems Jon had back in 2006 at Faculty Academy with technologists referring to people as users.

Talking at length with Udell was inspiring because so much of these questions also start to lead back to personal archiving, some basic ideas of how the web works, and a sense of ownership and participation in the process—in many ways the time just further reinforced just how important and vital the work so many of us are doing on the margins of the corporate parades of massive online learning. Bringing it back to the individual, because as Gardner Campbell has said again and again—and his thinking and metaphors and connecting is absolutely integral to all this—the individual scales on the web, it’s the only thing that can! So talking at length with Jon has re-inspired my work here at UMW—he really charged me up to take the Domain of One’s Own pilot by storm. I think some localized experimentation is the best tonic for the hype and mechanization that everywhere surrounds us.

Mike and I ate pizza here

Image credit: Dougton’s “Keene, New Hampshire”

But that’s only the half of it because when I return from baseball with Jon (not unlike Fishing with Jon), I come face-to-face with madman Mike Caulfield. If he’s not killing zombies he is talking about the deep problems with our approach to online learning more generally. One of the things Mike and I have in common is that we both do basically the same thing at very similar schools. Keene State is a public, liberal arts college like UMW. Keene State has 5000 students like UMW. Keene State is trying to understand where it fits in the online learning world like UMW. So Mike and I have a lot to talk about on these accounts, and from the moment he picked me up at the airport until the moment I left that’s most of what we did, save killing some zombies. One of the many things I picked up from Mike along the way was the refocusing of the online education away from “the end of the liberal arts, campus-based experience” rhetoric and towards the idea of how online learning at schools like UMW and Keene can actually reinforce what the campus-based, liberal arts experience. Mike sys it brilliantly here:

When it comes to online education boosterism, I’m pretty hardcore. You can do a ton with online as well as (or better) than you can face-to-face. But I can’t imagine anything like my undergrad experience online, anything as powerful as it without the residential element. The big face-to-face experience that online has trouble replacing isn’t the absence of the physical teacher, it’s the face-to-face experience of students meeting other students and re-envisioning who they are in the process.

This idea of congregating in space as part of the experience is crucial, and often overlooked because it is somewhat intangible, it is the interstitial experiences that are often the most powerful part of the process. Mike understands this intuitively, he is subtle in his critique, and exacting with his facts and details—he’s the best friend you could have if you want someone to really challenge you on your thinking. What’s more, he is an invaluable asset for Keene State as they start to negotiate the reality of online learning as part and parcel of the future of public liberal arts colleges like ours. And every school needs someone who will call them on all the bullshit associated with online learning right now, it is essential!

Another deep affinity I have with Mike is that over the last two years or so we’ve both been experimenting wildly in the classroom. In parallel with the work we’ve done at UMW with ds106, Mike has been building an awesome course around Statistics and Quantitative Reasoning on a site call “Making Fair Comparisons” that is doubling as an open textbook that he will be feeding his future classes through. It’s a brilliant project designed in WordPress, and he’s working on how to integrate infographics, daily creates, assignments, etc. into the mix. This is the stuff that we should be talking about, this is someone pouring their heart into a process of teaching that isn’t offloading it to the next vendor driven system, it’s a process is made up of his blood, sweat, and tears. It’s a way he can help students at Keene State and beyond think creatively and critically about the information they are being fed. It is a life’s mission to educate that is open and free to all, where has that sentiment gone lately in all the hoopla around massive? Seems like we ware exchanging the open and free for the massive and profitable.

I can’t thank Mike and Jon nealy enough for helping me refocus and refuel during my four days in Keene, NH. It’s a little-known New England mecca for creative thinking about the future of the web and education, and I’m honored to have experienced even a little of it. I feel safer knowing you are both doing what you are doing—keep on rocking in a free state 🙂

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