Reclaim

Episode 3 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, looking at the transition from monolithic vendor-provided enterprise solutions to more flexible and adaptive projects. Some of the segments are also used in episodes 1 and 2, but in order for this to work as a standalone piece, needed to be re-included here as well. When I do a longer supercut version, I’ll remove the duplicate clips. Reclaiming Educational Technology - episode 3 from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo....

Episode 2 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, focusing on the DTLT unit at the University of Mary Washington, and how they are able to successfully foster a culture of innovation. Reclaiming Educational Technology - fostering a culture of innovation from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

During the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project....

I’ve been withdrawing from relying on Google wherever possible, for various reasons. One place where I was still stuck in the Googleverse was with the embedded site search I was using on my self-hosted static file photo gallery site. That was one of the few places where I couldn’t find a decent replacement for Google, so it stayed there. And I wasn’t comfortable with that - I don’t think Google needs to be informed every time someone visits a page I host1....

I've really been loving running my own dropbox clone, by using owncloud running on my Hippie Hosting Co-op account. It's (mostly) seamless and automatic, and (usually) Just Worksâ„¢. It's not as polished as Dropbox's UI, but that's not critical (although the status badges on files and folder badges would be nice…) But, over the last week or 2, I've been noticing that owncloud on my work computer gets wedged. Digging into the status, the URL changes from my owncloud instance to something intercepted by browser-based wifi authentication....

Yahoo! is buying Tumblr for $1.1B US. Cash, not stock paper-shuffling. Why? Marissa Mayer says: In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!'s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they'll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!'s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience....

Audrey Watters and Jim Groom were at the MIT Media Lab with Philipp Schmidt and others for a hackathon. Sounds like it was a pretty incredible couple of days. The video below captures some of the discussion. So much goodness in it. We haven’t lost the open web. We can (continue to) choose to build it. Yes, there are silos and commodifcation and icky corporate stuff that would be easy to rail against, but what if we just let go of that and (continue to) build the web we want and need?...

David Weinberger shared his notes from Anil Dash's recent talk at Berkman about social media and the (d)evolution thereof. Some really important stuff in there. on shared values and culture: There was a time when it was meaningful thing to say that you're a blogger. It was distinctive. Now being introduced as a blogger "is a little bit like being introduced as an emailer." "No one's a Facebooker." The idea that there was a culture with shared values has been dismantled....

I’ve been thinking about the Posterous shutdown, and about previous large-hosted-service shutdowns, going all the way back go Geocities. I think I’ve been so deep in the host-your-own-stuff world that I haven’t been seeing the larger context. Just because I host my stuff, and just because most of the people I know host some (or most) of their stuff, doesn’t mean that the rest of the online population does the same thing....

"Use Posterous," they said. "It's easy. Just write your posts there. No need to run your own blog." Today, Posterous announced they'll shut down in 3 months. On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit. Posterous will no longer be available to either view or edit....