Below are posts associated with the “ICT 302” tag.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good'
Look, I don’t know all the finer points of this debate, but Mullenweg has repeatedly struck me as petty and juvenile, so it’s hard to imagine taking his side on any of the more substantive issues here. link to “To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good”
setting up an iOS image posting POSSE workflow for Hugo
Several days ago, I posted that: One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it. A couple of days later, I realized I wasn’t alone in this when Alex Sirac picked up the post on their website, and it got another sympathetic comment there, too.
some thoughts on joining Bluesky, maintaining platform independence, and tweaking Mastodon
It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts. I’m on Bluesky now, I guess? First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin'
I am slowly writing something related to open source governance this semester, so naturally this story keeps getting wilder to give me things to think about. link to “WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In'
This was a hell of a semester to decide to not dedicate a whole lecture to WordPress in my CMS class. link to “‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed'
I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow. link to “If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed”
webcomics and the importance of content aggregation
One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.
setting up POSSE-style microblogging with a Hugo static site and Micro.blog
I was recently talking to some friends about how I’ve been working to make my Hugo blog the center of my online presence. In particular, even though I didn’t know the term at first, I’ve been trying since 2019 to follow the POSSE strategy of “Publish (to) Own Site, Send Elsewhere” (note that, in the grand tradition of many tech acronyms, everyone agrees what the acronym means, but there are multiple ways of understanding what it stands for exactly).
pre-conference updates to my online presence
This week, I’m attending two different research conferences (well, I only barely attended the first one, to be honest). The leadup to these conferences has involved some changes to my web presence, just in case people actually check my website when I put it on my slides. Overall, I’m happy with the changes that I’ve made, so I thought I’d take advantage of my free Delta in-flight wi-fi to blog about some of the changes I’ve made and why.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work | Ars Technica'
Haven’t read this yet, but I’m bookmarking for my classes. link to ‘A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work | Ars Technica’
how I'm talking about generative AI in my content management class
Fall 2023 will mark my fifth time teaching my department’s class on Content Management Systems. I have really loved taking on this class and making it my own over the past several years. It’s also been fun to see how teaching the class has seeped into the rest of my life: It’s a “cannot unsee” situation (in a good way!) where the concepts I teach work themselves into everyday encounters with the news, my own websites, and other things around the internet.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Internal Twitter Video Reveals Twitter Bent Over Backwards To Protect Trump And Pro-Trump Insurrectionists | Techdirt'
Helpful summary by Masnick; bookmarking for later. link to ‘Internal Twitter Video Reveals Twitter Bent Over Backwards To Protect Trump And Pro-Trump Insurrectionists | Techdirt’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Moderator Mayhem: A Mobile Game To See How Well YOU Can Handle Content Moderation | Techdirt'
This is a neat game that shows how difficult content moderation is. Excited to have my content management students play it in the Fall. link to ‘Moderator Mayhem: A Mobile Game To See How Well YOU Can Handle Content Moderation | Techdirt’
a small victory for not policing students
I’ve never been a fan of policing student behavior in my classes. I don’t take attendance, I’m pretty generous when it comes to late work and making up assignments, and I try to make participation in class something that’s organic rather than something structured and forced. In recent years, this hasn’t necessarily gone well. For example, the undergrad class I’m currently teaching has lousy attendance, and I struggle to get anyone except the 3-4 same voices to contribute to class discussions.
data privacy and kiddo's school
In addition to all the irritating ClassDojo stuff going on at kiddo’s school, I’ve also spent some time banging my head against the wall made up of two forms: One to opt out of FERPA directory information sharing, and the other to opt out of kiddo’s information being shared with media outlets. I’m too tired tonight to get into all the details of what’s been going on, but the short version is that there’s no (clear, easy) way for spouse and I to request that kiddo’s name and image not be shared on school social media without also insisting that kiddo’s name and image not appear in innocuous things like… a school yearbook.
some Hypothesis (and other) updates for the blog
Shortly after last week’s mostly-successful experiment with Hypothesis, I noticed Chris Aldrich posting to Micro.blog about the software and started up a conversation. I’d followed Chris a few weeks before in trying to get more into Micro.blog (perhaps my favorite indie social media platform out there, though I’m also enjoying getting into Mastodon) by following academia and academia-adjacent folks, and was pleased to see an area of common interest. It wasn’t until a separate conversation on Mastodon this morning that I remembered that my Hypothesis setup was dependent on my manually checking annotations on my website.