The Web that Is

That is, the present

But is it a web?

And what are its presents?

Varied lived experiences

That may not all be gifts

Silky fibres attached invisibly

Woven to weaponize our very presence

But alongside those creative spaces on the web were a few other developments: 2003 saw the launch of Friendster and MySpace, and then – fairly quietly, at first – this thing called FaceMash. And with them came the platformization of ostensibly social networking, in which the accumulation of connections (and, not incidentally, venture capital) rather than the building of relationships became the point. By the time FaceMash turned into Facebook and started moving beyond Harvard’s gates, the writing was on the wall (so to speak) for thoughtful sociality on the web; Twitter was only the final nail in the coffin.

This talk will look at the web that was both for what it could have been and for what it turned into, in order to think through where we are today and the possibilities that we might consider in working toward the web of tomorrow.

We’ll focus on the steps to enable our students to help with tech based projects such as Domain of One’s Own along with enabling faculty to take a risk incorporating innovative and creative assignments in the classroom. Besides that, we will showcase how the Tech Bar has evolved from first piloting Domain of One’s Own, to fully supporting it, offering training, and opening a studio.

Supporting Links

• techbar.knight.domains
• knight.domains

Come and join a group of people who feel exactly the same way, and are struggling to work out what, if any responses can make a meaningful difference?

Pre-pandemic, a small group of enthusiastic and bright eyed individuals formed the Higher Education After Surveillance network, with the aim of imagining and developing alternatives to problematic visibility and surveillance in higher education. In 2019 we toyed with some ideas about setting up a Higher Education Surveillance Observatory, to gather data about good, bad, and mixed surveillance practices in higher education. We planned to use the power of the open web and crowdsourcing to document and make this information visible in an open, organised, and centralised place.

From our exhausted and beaten down vantage point of 2023, this work now feels pointless, and we feel defeated as well as exhausted. We still care deeply about problematic surveillance in higher education, but experiences of the last 3 years, the rampant increase in the adoption of surveillance tech in HE, and the extent to which we feel professionally precarious has us existing in a state of digital resignation. Why bother? Is anything we do going to make a difference? Is anyone ever going to use what we might produce? Is there any way to get people to participate?

How can the open web be a place for grassroots collective action?

In this workshop we’ll cover off a little of the history of the Surveillance Observatory idea and what exists today. Then we need YOU to help us understand whether this is worth continuing with, and if so, what does it need to be from our vantage point of 2023?

How do we push back against increasingly harmful and invasive surveillance practices, most of which are underpinned by commercial technologies antithetical to what open education and the open web are?

Is some kind of nowtopia possible? Or should we just go home and give up?

References

• Beetham, H., Collier, A., Czerniewicz, L., Lamb, B., Lin, Y., Ross, J., Scott, A.-M., & Wilson, A. (2022). Surveillance Practices, Risks and Responses in the Post Pandemic University. 23.
• Ross, J., & Collier, A. (2019). Higher education after surveillance. aftersurveillance.net/

ds106 has always been not just on the web but of the web, and as such it reflects the transitions the web has gone through. How can a course remain open, online, on the web, of the web, in the world going forward? Attendees are invited to participate in brainstorming the digital storytelling course of the future.

Back in the early twenty-teens, the DTLT team at the University of Mary Washington was hitting its zenith of experimentation (technology, not drugs). The digital storytelling course known as DS106 was wildly popular and had several creative iterations. Part of my contribution to “DS 106” was called Fast, Cheap, and Under Control, a resource available to help point folks to simple and low cost or free tools to help shoot, edit, encode and publish video to the web.

This presentation will be part nostalgia. Part update. And hopefully packed with tons of useful information regarding the incredible tools – hardware and software – that I use on a daily basis. What was once called “new media” is now being used in the 2020’s to create new types of stories, as well as new realities on the web.

Of course I’ll talk about:
* Web video concepts, such as codecs, resolution, and compression.
* Simple and advanced video editors such as QuickTime, Davinci Resolve, and Lossless Cut
* Software vs. hardware live-streaming solutions
* Video players like IINA, YouTube downloaders like Downie, video automation tools like Companion, interactive video content like H5P, and even home video streaming software like Infuse
* Virtual video and green screens
* Finally, we’ll wrap things up with some futuristic tools such as video collaboration featuring Frame.io, advanced 360º image and video editing, and AI video tools like Runway ML
* I’ll even talk about OG DVD Rippers!

Where does video fit into the current open web? Will, or has, the definition of video change(d)? What’s the future of video? This presentation will explore where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We’ll start the clock at 30 minutes and see how far we get – and the website will get us the rest of the way there.

Supporting Links:

• digitalmediacookbook.com/fast-cheap-and-under-control-2023/ – not available until the presentation
• https://www.slideshare.net/rushaw/encoding

The history of SUNY’s Domain of One’s Own services go back to an exploration of Open Pedagogy done by SUNY’s Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology (FACT²). In their summary report to the SUNY System Provost, they recommended exploring shared infrastructure to enable Open Pedagogy and Creation of original OER. This original focus on OER and publishing openly licensed materials is still part of SUNY Create, with a central Pressbooks server as part of the shared offerings.

Early adopters of the SUNY Create system continue to keep in touch, despite being located at multiple campuses throughout the SUNY System. Last year, for the first time, they met at SUNY Oneonta for the first SUNY Digital Learning Conference. The conference was presented as an argument that the innovation we are seeing around the country in digital humanities, citizen science, digital publishing, and data visualization can be mapped directly to what the AAC&U calls “High Impact Practices.” Using the open web for Capstone Projects, Collaborative Assignments and Projects, Global Learning, and ePortfolios can all be done as part of our Domain of One’s Own Initiative, expanding our focus beyond Open Pedagogy. By connecting to well-respected organizations that are influential in accreditation we can better articulate to our administration the value of their investment in digital pedagogies.

An area of future exploration will be connecting our domains initiative to micro-credentials, which will require creating a modular curriculum, identifying key competencies, and building learning modules targeted at the undergraduate level. Through the digital fellowship program, we hope to highlight the digital competencies they learn through our programs.

In collaboration with the Skidmore Physics department, Skidmore’s Learning Experience Design group and Reclaim Hosting, Alex Carney ‘23, developed Skidmore’s first Reclaim Cloud initiative and datahub project: the Skidmore Extragalactic Catalog. It’s a website using an API hosted in a Docker container for uploading, querying, and sharing data used in astrophysics research. In this presentation, we’ll demo the site and share highlights of its dev story; from getting started with the learning challenges, to experiencing hallelujah moments of insight alongside Reclaim Cloud support and good cheer. We’ll also point out some lessons learned and share news about prototyping new cloud hosting and simulation projects like building a new type of digital microscope.

Supporting Links

• Skidmore Extragalactic Catalog: http://skidmore-datahub.us.reclaim.cloud

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• We are revolutionizing the future of the web by mixing activism, CDNs, Open Source, OER and taking a page from the Web of the Past
• We have fused classroom pedagogy with platform development to form a “pedagogical pipeline” of developers for our platform
• Participants will be encouraged to install, play with and explore HAX on Reclaim hosting (or Reclaim Cloud) to see how it can be used in teaching
• The technical approach is mentioned, but the focus of this talk is pedagogy and the revolution being built as a result of this approach

Details

HAX is a visual web builder for producing content in a “forever” format known as HTML, with a wrinkle. Imagine being able to reprogram the <strong> tag. While silly, this would fundamentally change the way you build and develop everything on the web. When we describe HTML as forever, it’s because the HAX platform is literally a <h-a-x> tag in the browser that we can reprogram after initial implementation. This means courses written in HAX 5 years ago, never touched by faculty, leveraging advanced JS and CSS yet never known about by faculty, are more accessible, higher in usability, load faster, and are easier to use by students with 0 additional effort by faculty or staff.

We’ve developed 500+ reusable HTML tags, all of which work on any website on the internet they are loaded onto. All can be changed retroactively thanks to a free (PSU pays the bill, and it’s cheap), fast (AWS), CDN + Documentation on how to implement it via copy and paste. Our editor isn’t just a page editor, it can design full outlines of web content and is quickly becoming a popular replacement for WordPress at Penn State, where HAX.psu (HAX + Azure) is mind-brickingly easy to use, fun and ever improving thanks to our “pedagogical pipeline” (TM).

I am an adjunct advanced web educator for Information Science and Technology College on the side. And in that role, I’ve gotten to use HAX as the back drop for learning about web development in seven courses and dozens of independent studies the last four years. This pipeline has seen 100s of students contribute to HAX through making elements, fixing documentation, performing UX audits, writing themes, and fixing bugs, all while learning web skills that will benefit them throughout their career.

May ’22, four independent study students teamed up to make site creation in HAX into a fun, “Doodle Jump” inspired journey complete with 8-bit visuals, sound effects, and remixable RPG characters.

While sounding technical, this talk will be more about showing pedagogical solutions, like building courses from Word Doc files via upload, converting GitBook courses to HAX courses with a copy and paste, and challenging ideas of portability, remix and what OER platforms can be. There will be lots of time for getting hands on as HAX is part of Reclaim’s products as they support HAX via their dashboards!

HAX isn’t just a web builder, it’s an NGLDE, a community, and a revolution.

Supporting Links:

• https://hax.psu.edu/