Hey Aaron I haven't read Ian's piece yet but I can guess where it's going. It's the same place you have been traveling with us. You know the destinati

Hey Aaron

I haven't read Ian's piece yet but I can guess where it's going. It's the same place you have been traveling with us. You know the destination..just over the horizon, to the left when you look right and yonder over right when you glance left.

Cathie rocks. Her call for the mindset first made me rethink how onboarding works. Do you plan for the person knocking on your door or hang a welcome sign in the yard?

I am exploring and contributing to the #indieweb WordPress community for a variety of reasons. First I want to say thanks to folks like David Shanske and Chris Aldrich by giving back to the community.

I also believe in the #indieweb goals found on https://indieweb.org/ and the principles of the community. If my school has a social justice mission this must include protecting the web and more importantly the people who use the web.

To this end I usually onboard people on the web through WordPress so learning about the user experience in spaces that we want to intentionally to design groom the mindsets Cathie discusses is critical. Focusing on the importance of owning your data and shaping your privacy requires long conversations with learners. I can't contribute much to the plug-ins beyond some basic design but I can do user research and help shape tools to make the experience more user friendly.

I also see evidence of the headless CMS I have always wanted is closer with #indieweb technologies. We have all taught through RSS for some time. There are short comings but I see a future that addresses our issues while still preserving "loosely connected" learning.

I am especially thinking about OER and course materials. I wonder how microformats can be used to make our courses more remixable while providing attribution to creators. It startled me when I asked about OER18 about standards and all I could find was documentation from 2013. The elements of instructional design are not endless. We can develop the classes to get this done.

I also know markup can be counted. Things that can be tallied can often be modeled. I don't want all the machine learning models and AI in education to be new silos. I want to think long term as an OER community not simply about resources but about the future. A standard language today will ensure we all have access to the bots of tomorrow.

I also want to think about our role in Higher Education. For the last five years I have tried to dedicate 15-20% of my work each week to open source projects. I believe we need to fundamentally rethink what counts as research in higher education. We need to push for open data when possible, community based research, and flexibility over fidelity. So I am contributing to #indieweb because I believe I can still conduct research that meets the rigorous standards of the academy while creating community and not simply chasing citations.