Domain of One's Own: Reclaim Your Data
Groom, Jim
A Domain of One's Own is an international initiative in higher education to give students and faculty more control over their personal data. The movement started at the University of Mary Washington in 2012, and has since grown to tens of thousands of faculty and students across hundreds of universities. This presentation will explore how Domain of One's Own could provides a powerful example in how higher education could harness application programming interfaces (APIs) to build a more user-empowered data ecosystem at universities.
 I think this is on yes it is. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me here. It's awesome to be in Berlin. This is my first time. It's a beautiful city. We'll talk about Edgipunk in a second and I have a couple of jokes lined up for that. But I'm a little bit nervous because this is my first talk in Germany but not only that, it's my first talk in a room filled with Germans who speak English better than me. So it's kind of nerve-wracking. But I do want to actually start this talk looking at some 70s. There's a great Tumblr, Twitter blog called Sci-Fi Art from the 70s. And this is one of them. And this illustration is from a 1974 textbook called Understanding Human Behavior. And it's a beautiful, it's basically the textbook, this is the chapter about education. And I don't know how well you can see it here, but there's a series of kind of like topics, brain surgery, wood crafts, psychology, economics. And the idea in this textbook, which is kind of almost like an alternative bizarre textbook, they were trying to theorize what learning would be like in the future. So what they came up with was you would go with those wild 70s headphones, you would click on one of those buttons, and then you put in your personal data and out would come the name of someone else who you would meet at a predefined cafe talking about the subject. And the way they would know it was you was you would bring the right book. So they'd see you by your book, you'd come together. And what they called this in 1974 in this textbook was networked learning, which is fascinating, right? This is the future I wanted, but never got. So bizarre, it's so beautiful. Look at the jacket. This could be a Berlin spy movie, right? This is awesome. And that brings me to from Berlin, we'll pretend this is Berlin to Torin. And I dig bizarre B, almost like not B movie, but B novel European literature. In particular, this is by Giorgio de Maria, and he's an Italian. He wrote in Torin, that's where he lived. And this is a bizarre book. It was just published in English last year by translator Ramon Glazov. And this book is kind of builds on top of the picture I just showed you. Why? This book is about a social network in 1975 in Italy. Bizarre, right? But the kind of social network you would more kind of be akin to Facebook than to say, you know, a bar. Why? How? I don't know how much you know about Italian history, but in the late 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s, you know, it was a pretty rough space in the cities of Italy. They called it the Ianni di Piumbo, or the years of lead. And you had right wing, left wing groups fighting over kind of, you know, political space and territory. It was a bloody time. Well, this novel was written in a response to those times. And the novel, the way in which the novel works and the plot is fascinating. It's about a library to pick up on what Phillip just talked about earlier. It's about a library, but what you do is you go to the library and you write your story. You write down, almost like you're blogging. You write down everything you know. And knowing that Republic of Stardust a blogging conference, it's kind of interesting. And then you put it, you give it to the library for a fee, and then they let other people read it anonymously. And if you pay another fee, they connect you. But what happened is this library was be running by these strange kind of very clean cut kids who were actually stealing the data of the people, right? And then in a weird sci-fi, Italian twist, these big giants come out for 20 days and eat the residents of Turin. I don't mean to give it away too much, but there's this kind of weird subtext to this idea of social networking as imagined in the 70s that I find really fascinating. So another good example, if nothing else, read the book. Now I'm jumping back to 1957, back from Italy to Germany, to talk about a book that's near and dear to my heart. It's called The Glass Bees. I don't know how to say it in German, but I'm sure you do. It's written by a man whose name you can pronounce better than me. I'm going to say Ernst Junger. But how many of you have heard of this book? Not many, a few. It's a crazy, crazy, crazy novel. It's about a military guy who's at work and he actually goes, and it's two days of his life, and he's kind of reminiscing about his childhood, but he feels left out because technology is moving so fast. So he goes and he meets this gentleman named Zapparoni. And Zapparoni is kind of like the Mark Zuckerberg of the time. And he's invented, and it's a futuristic novel like the 20 Days of Torrent. It's a futuristic novel, and he goes to speak with this guy Zapparoni. And Zapparoni has built these glass bees. And what was so trippy about this novel is in the 50s, I don't know how much you know about the 50s kind of history, when you talked about robots, they were like gigantic human-sized Robby the robots who would come to you and say, can I get your tea? Well, you never had imagined this whole micro-nano technology that is far more akin to the future we live in now than anything we were imagining in the 50s. But one of the things I want to kind of now stop and help me kind of give you a sense of where I'm going with this talk, because right now it's like, I didn't sign up for bad European sci-fi, although it's good. The introduction to the glass bees that was republished in 2000 by the New York Review of Books has an introduction by Bruce Sterling, who's known as a futurist, who's a cyberpunk, who's kind of famous, actually lives in Torrent as well. He writes this, I'm going to read it. Junger perceived that industrial capitalism is a ridiculous game, so he proved remarkably good at predicting its future moves. He understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power. He fully understands that popular entertainment comes with a military industrial underside. How much of this is kind of ringing true? Particularly this. He understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power. Now, Joran talked about this idea of edgupunk, and it's pretty hard for me to get up here and pretend I'm an edgupunk. I spent my morning in the Berlin Mall shopping for my son for Beyblades. The idea of punk, as soon as you say it, it becomes almost ridiculous. It becomes a fight about who's more punk than who. But in 2008, at the moment of reading that book by Junger, thinking about the relationship between the technology we use for teaching and learning and power, this vision of how do we situate ourselves as students and as teachers outside of that military industrial complex? Can we? And that's a question. Well, this morning I get on Twitter, which I've been on for a while, and I see this. This is a German group of teachers who have been, basically, for the last year and change, using social networks to connect and share strategies for how they bring technology into the classroom, which I think is awesome. And it's pretty radical. In fact, I came here, and I don't think they ever heard of my edgupunk from 10 years ago, right? I'm completely irrelevant. This is me playing the hits, right? But here, you get to see, like, through Twitter and because of a series of connections, I get to meet one of these edgupunks from Germany, in Germany, in a completely different context, but using the same basic tools to think about how we rethink, how technology, and I think the military industrial complex, changes the way we work. Now, let me get to my point. In 2005, 2006, this is a long time ago now, part of our mission was to think through how we use alternative open source technologies, which in the day were completely, completely kind of marginal. Media Wiki, you all know, is the technology that runs Wikipedia, but in 2004, 2005, right, it was an anomaly. WordPress now powers 30% of the web and all websites on it, and if you haven't heard of a website of WordPress and you're at this conference, there's probably some dissonance going on there, or you have amnesia. So like, these are the tools that we built an infrastructure for at our schools in 2007, 2008. For example, this is UMW blogs. This was a blogging platform using what is now WordPress Multisite to provide thousands of blogs for the university I worked at, the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Even cooler, in 2008, John Beasley Murray, working with Brian Lamb, had an entire course build Wikipedia articles and actually try and get them to the status of featured article. The name of the course was Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, and it was about Latin American literature, and they actually, this class got eight featured articles out of the 20 they've written, and it's extremely hard to get a featured article in Wikipedia, and those students work at 15, 20, even 200,000 views a month. Think about the cost involved in having your class work on Wikipedia. Server costs? None, right? The only cost is the research they're doing in the library, their time they're spending and figuring out how the community works. Think about the value of this project, not so much because of the technology, although that, but also because of thinking through how knowledge is socially created in a community like Media Wiki. That's a very valuable skill in this day and age when we're not sure what or who to trust and how things get determined and built. Now, Edgy Punk, like I said, died a quick death, right? But it came back in the form of something at the University of Mary Washington we called DS106. I don't know how many horror film fans are here on one, but this is a reference to Poltergeist, right? Here you have it. DS106 was an interesting class, and it was the beginning of a way of rethinking how we give students and faculty more power over their work, over their data. The idea of the class was this, simply, every student who comes into the class gets their own domain, their own web hosting, and they build their own infrastructure. They actually create their own digital identity as part of the class over 15 weeks. They work on imaging, image creation, editing, video, they create a radio show, podcasts, you name it, a complete infrastructure, so by the end of the semester, they have a presence online. They're tweeting, they're sharing on Flickr, et cetera. It was an extremely fun class. It was not meant to be open. It did become open, and this is before the Moog Grave, and over 500 people joined from all over the world. What's cooler is Martha Burdus, who was a colleague of mine at the time at University of Mary Washington, built an assignment bank. And what this meant was any student in the class or all over the world could submit an assignment. They got over 400 assignment submissions the first semester, and students had people in Portugal, Australia, you name it, doing their assignments. And it was cool because the assignment bank kind of worked like the knitting site Ravelry. I don't know how many of you are knitters here, but it's interesting because all the assignments people did showed up so you could see each other's work through a stream. It's pretty powerful. Well, DS106 was also a hashtag on Twitter. And this is one of the first times, this is 2010, 2011, where I really saw the value of the hashtag to frame and kind of visualize a network. It was a very powerful reality to see all these people in all these disparate places. What's more, students who had taken the class a semester or two semesters previously could actually join the conversation of that class through the hashtag. Twitter was this weird kind of horizontal network space that kind of folded time on top of each other in some weird, powerful ways. Well this opened the door to this idea that I'm kind of here to talk about a little bit called Domain of One's Own. What is that? Well, Domain of One's Own is inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel A Room of One's Own. And the idea is why don't faculty and students have a space of their own to build, to create, right? Why are we all using these institutional spaces that we have no control over our data? So we did it at Merrill Washington in 2013. Every student and faculty who wanted their own space got it. And we built a network through the school, through these individual nodes on the web. For example, this is Sydney Mullis. This is her site. She was an art student. If you go to that URL, it's a completely different site where she's actually selling and framing her artwork for other people. But that domain becomes a consistent presence of who she is and her work over time. Radically different than our notions of the learning management system or the virtual learning environment. Same goes with faculty. There's two examples of faculty sites, but don't stop there. Also core sites. Students could work together to build a resource on the web. For example, Tai Ping Civil War, a major historical event in China. Millions of people died. This is the third hit on Google, at least in the US, when you searched that event. And this is built by students at the University of Merrill Washington. So the idea of a Domain of One's Own was an idea of reclaiming the academic web, but also people's presence on that web. Great, right? My talk should be done. Good job, Jim. Big fan. See you next year. Stage one. You were awesome. Not really, right? But I want to do a quick quiz, because I want to go through this history a little bit to find out where we were. Okay. What's the oldest tool on this page? Anyone? What year? If you know, yell it out and tell me what year. Skype. How old? 14 years old. Facebook. 13, almost 14 years old. How old's Tumblr? Tumblr's 12 years old. YouTube. 13 years old. WhatsApp. 9 years old. These are not infants anymore, right? Our babies are growing up. Twitter. 12 years old. Gmail. 14 years old. We have, collectively, lived through a generation that's watched these apps gain the millions, if not billions of users they have right now. In relationship to that, what we thought was this kind of utopia, right? Oh, my God. Twitter. We can share. Look at the network. And I was one of those youthful idiots that got up and said that, right? We saw this as a kind of utopian vision city of the future. Not realizing or realizing but not wanting to admit what we were really doing was providing the space to be mined for our personal data again and again, right? And what that means and how that narrative, Dana Boyd and other folks in this conference have done that much better than me, so I'm not going to reiterate. But there are some simple things like clickbait, filter bubbles, personalization of the term of cookies, platforms that lock us in, right? And sooner or later, start looking at this, right? A political, not joke anymore, but reality. Now we can talk about how this happened or why this happened. And there are people who do that better than me, so please look for them. Audrey Waters, at least in education, Mike Caulfield, there are many. But I want to talk a little bit about these open technologies. One being RSS, the other being the API or the application programming interface. RSS was an open format. Google Reader, you'd subscribe to a few blogs, right? Those posts would come in, right? You weren't being baited, you weren't being followed, you weren't being cookied, your information was not being mined. The API, as much as for many as the future, was a completely different reality. You ever hear it, and even if you don't know what an API is, you ever hear someone say, damn, Google changed their API, right? What does that mean? Well, it means Google changed access to something without you having any control over that. When Twitter changes their API, usually it means they control your access. And so these are corporate programming interfaces that are deciding what we get and how we get it, right? We're feeding off of them. Once they shut us off, we're screwed, often. People like Orgy Waters and Kin Lane have been talking about this since 2013, 2014, talking about the idea of data, right? And data as the new gold. And we saw that recently in the Economist. Now I'm interested in this because I do think right now, at least in the US, I can't speak for Germany, although I understand Germany has now got funding. They're actually building a wall called the LMS or a school or whatever you want to call it. And I want to give you a little bit of a word of warning. Right now, EDUCAUSE is talking about this thing called the NGDLE. If we don't have enough acronyms, here's another one. The next generation digital learning environment. And the art is done by a gentleman by the name of Brian Mathers, great artist, really fun. But it's intentionally like a Lego. Why? Because as we talk more about the personalization of the web, these new platforms, these new possibilities, one of the things we all have to come to terms with is that this stuff is premised upon giving third parties complete access to our students and our faculty's information. That's what personalization effectively means as it's framed by the NGDLE. Your personalization doesn't come for nothing. The API, the experience API, the XAPI is about collecting the experience that matters. And this is in their kind of frame. Quantifiable, shareable, trackable. That's what we're doing to our faculty and students. We're making them quantifiable, shareable, and trackable. I think for me, this becomes a kind of problematic relationship. Audrey Waters says it well. How much of personalized learning is imagined and built and sold by tech companies precisely for metrics, marketing, conversion rates, customer satisfaction? They just use different words. Outcomes based, learning analytics. So as Germany heads down this road, and it's an interesting road and it's a fun road, and it's an exploration, and I can't sit back and say, you know, I had a lot of fun even when I was maybe sharing a product or an idea that was somewhat questionable. But more and more, we're moving into this question of surveillance capitalism, of how these companies and these services are monetizing. And you know what? There can be a relationship that's somewhat negotiable. There's a group working out of Finland. They call themselves MyData, and I've been following their stuff since about 2015, and I'm really interested in their framework. Their framework is basically, do we have a bill of rights for sharing data? Right? The GDPR starts to get at this point. But what if we had not a corporate API that we depended on, but a personal API? What if you decided who got access to your information, your address, your birth date, your post, and for how long? What if we kind of reinvented the notion that the service is at the center and we pay homage and give data to it, and put the individual at the center and make of a more equitable relationship? Google wants your information, Twitter wants your information, fine. They should pay you for it. They should let you know when they're using it. Right? What is a model like that look like? So let me get back to my point. The way of one's own, in my mind, and in my imagination, becomes that. It becomes your node where you build and frame your personal identity, and you share it wherever you want. It's not like the social networks are going to go away. But what does it mean for us to have a more equitable web where we decide who uses it for how long and what our relationship is to that data? Right now, there's no transparency on how this stuff is being used. For me, the first step in this relationship is reclaiming that presence and then deciding how everything works from that. So with that, I will end the talk, and I will thank you for your time. Great. Thank you.
 I think this is on yes it is.  Hi everyone.  Thanks for having me here.  It's awesome to be in Berlin.  This is my first time.  It's a beautiful city.  We'll talk about Edgipunk in a second and I have a couple of jokes lined up for that.  But I'm a little bit nervous because this is my first talk in Germany but not only that,  it's my first talk in a room filled with Germans who speak English better than me.  So it's kind of nerve-wracking.  But I do want to actually start this talk looking at some 70s.  There's a great Tumblr, Twitter blog called Sci-Fi Art from the 70s.  And this is one of them.  And this illustration is from a 1974 textbook called Understanding Human Behavior.  And it's a beautiful, it's basically the textbook, this is the chapter about education.  And I don't know how well you can see it here, but there's a series of kind of like topics,  brain surgery, wood crafts, psychology, economics.  And the idea in this textbook, which is kind of almost like an alternative bizarre textbook,  they were trying to theorize what learning would be like in the future.  So what they came up with was you would go with those wild 70s headphones, you would  click on one of those buttons, and then you put in your personal data and out would come  the name of someone else who you would meet at a predefined cafe talking about the subject.  And the way they would know it was you was you would bring the right book.  So they'd see you by your book, you'd come together.  And what they called this in 1974 in this textbook was networked learning, which is  fascinating, right?  This is the future I wanted, but never got.  So bizarre, it's so beautiful.  Look at the jacket.  This could be a Berlin spy movie, right?  This is awesome.  And that brings me to from Berlin, we'll pretend this is Berlin to Torin.  And I dig bizarre B, almost like not B movie, but B novel European literature.  In particular, this is by Giorgio de Maria, and he's an Italian.  He wrote in Torin, that's where he lived.  And this is a bizarre book.  It was just published in English last year by translator Ramon Glazov.  And this book is kind of builds on top of the picture I just showed you.  Why?  This book is about a social network in 1975 in Italy.  Bizarre, right?  But the kind of social network you would more kind of be akin to Facebook than to say, you  know, a bar.  Why?  How?  I don't know how much you know about Italian history, but in the late 60s, 70s, and into  the early 80s, you know, it was a pretty rough space in the cities of Italy.  They called it the Ianni di Piumbo, or the years of lead.  And you had right wing, left wing groups fighting over kind of, you know, political space and  territory.  It was a bloody time.  Well, this novel was written in a response to those times.  And the novel, the way in which the novel works and the plot is fascinating.  It's about a library to pick up on what Phillip just talked about earlier.  It's about a library, but what you do is you go to the library and you write your story.  You write down, almost like you're blogging.  You write down everything you know.  And knowing that Republic of Stardust a blogging conference, it's kind of interesting.  And then you put it, you give it to the library for a fee, and then they let other people  read it anonymously.  And if you pay another fee, they connect you.  But what happened is this library was be running by these strange kind of very clean cut kids  who were actually stealing the data of the people, right?  And then in a weird sci-fi, Italian twist, these big giants come out for 20 days and  eat the residents of Turin.  I don't mean to give it away too much, but there's this kind of weird subtext to this  idea of social networking as imagined in the 70s that I find really fascinating.  So another good example, if nothing else, read the book.  Now I'm jumping back to 1957, back from Italy to Germany, to talk about a book that's near  and dear to my heart.  It's called The Glass Bees.  I don't know how to say it in German, but I'm sure you do.  It's written by a man whose name you can pronounce better than me.  I'm going to say Ernst Junger.  But how many of you have heard of this book?  Not many, a few.  It's a crazy, crazy, crazy novel.  It's about a military guy who's at work and he actually goes, and it's two days of his  life, and he's kind of reminiscing about his childhood, but he feels left out because technology  is moving so fast.  So he goes and he meets this gentleman named Zapparoni.  And Zapparoni is kind of like the Mark Zuckerberg of the time.  And he's invented, and it's a futuristic novel like the 20 Days of Torrent.  It's a futuristic novel, and he goes to speak with this guy Zapparoni.  And Zapparoni has built these glass bees.  And what was so trippy about this novel is in the 50s, I don't know how much you know  about the 50s kind of history, when you talked about robots, they were like gigantic human-sized  Robby the robots who would come to you and say, can I get your tea?  Well, you never had imagined this whole micro-nano technology that is far more akin to the future  we live in now than anything we were imagining in the 50s.  But one of the things I want to kind of now stop and help me kind of give you a sense  of where I'm going with this talk, because right now it's like, I didn't sign up for  bad European sci-fi, although it's good.  The introduction to the glass bees that was republished in 2000 by the New York Review  of Books has an introduction by Bruce Sterling, who's known as a futurist, who's a cyberpunk,  who's kind of famous, actually lives in Torrent as well.  He writes this, I'm going to read it.  Junger perceived that industrial capitalism is a ridiculous game, so he proved remarkably  good at predicting its future moves.  He understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify  power.  He fully understands that popular entertainment comes with a military industrial underside.  How much of this is kind of ringing true?  Particularly this.  He understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify  power.  Now, Joran talked about this idea of edgupunk, and it's pretty hard for me to get up here  and pretend I'm an edgupunk.  I spent my morning in the Berlin Mall shopping for my son for Beyblades.  The idea of punk, as soon as you say it, it becomes almost ridiculous.  It becomes a fight about who's more punk than who.  But in 2008, at the moment of reading that book by Junger, thinking about the relationship  between the technology we use for teaching and learning and power, this vision of how  do we situate ourselves as students and as teachers outside of that military industrial  complex?  Can we?  And that's a question.  Well, this morning I get on Twitter, which I've been on for a while, and I see this.  This is a German group of teachers who have been, basically, for the last year and change,  using social networks to connect and share strategies for how they bring technology into  the classroom, which I think is awesome.  And it's pretty radical.  In fact, I came here, and I don't think they ever heard of my edgupunk from 10 years ago,  right?  I'm completely irrelevant.  This is me playing the hits, right?  But here, you get to see, like, through Twitter and because of a series of connections, I  get to meet one of these edgupunks from Germany, in Germany, in a completely different context,  but using the same basic tools to think about how we rethink, how technology, and I think  the military industrial complex, changes the way we work.  Now, let me get to my point.  In 2005, 2006, this is a long time ago now, part of our mission was to think through how  we use alternative open source technologies, which in the day were completely, completely  kind of marginal.  Media Wiki, you all know, is the technology that runs Wikipedia, but in 2004, 2005, right,  it was an anomaly.  WordPress now powers 30% of the web and all websites on it, and if you haven't heard of  a website of WordPress and you're at this conference, there's probably some dissonance  going on there, or you have amnesia.  So like, these are the tools that we built an infrastructure for at our schools in 2007,  2008.  For example, this is UMW blogs.  This was a blogging platform using what is now WordPress Multisite to provide thousands  of blogs for the university I worked at, the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.  Even cooler, in 2008, John Beasley Murray, working with Brian Lamb, had an entire course  build Wikipedia articles and actually try and get them to the status of featured article.  The name of the course was Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, and it was about Latin American  literature, and they actually, this class got eight featured articles out of the 20  they've written, and it's extremely hard to get a featured article in Wikipedia, and  those students work at 15, 20, even 200,000 views a month.  Think about the cost involved in having your class work on Wikipedia.  Server costs?  None, right?  The only cost is the research they're doing in the library, their time they're spending  and figuring out how the community works.  Think about the value of this project, not so much because of the technology, although  that, but also because of thinking through how knowledge is socially created in a community  like Media Wiki.  That's a very valuable skill in this day and age when we're not sure what or who to trust  and how things get determined and built.  Now, Edgy Punk, like I said, died a quick death, right?  But it came back in the form of something at the University of Mary Washington we called  DS106.  I don't know how many horror film fans are here on one, but this is a reference to Poltergeist,  right?  Here you have it.  DS106 was an interesting class, and it was the beginning of a way of rethinking how we  give students and faculty more power over their work, over their data.  The idea of the class was this, simply, every student who comes into the class gets their  own domain, their own web hosting, and they build their own infrastructure.  They actually create their own digital identity as part of the class over 15 weeks.  They work on imaging, image creation, editing, video, they create a radio show, podcasts,  you name it, a complete infrastructure, so by the end of the semester, they have a presence  online.  They're tweeting, they're sharing on Flickr, et cetera.  It was an extremely fun class.  It was not meant to be open.  It did become open, and this is before the Moog Grave, and over 500 people joined from  all over the world.  What's cooler is Martha Burdus, who was a colleague of mine at the time at University  of Mary Washington, built an assignment bank.  And what this meant was any student in the class or all over the world could submit an  assignment.  They got over 400 assignment submissions the first semester, and students had people in  Portugal, Australia, you name it, doing their assignments.  And it was cool because the assignment bank kind of worked like the knitting site Ravelry.  I don't know how many of you are knitters here, but it's interesting because all the  assignments people did showed up so you could see each other's work through a stream.  It's pretty powerful.  Well, DS106 was also a hashtag on Twitter.  And this is one of the first times, this is 2010, 2011, where I really saw the value of  the hashtag to frame and kind of visualize a network.  It was a very powerful reality to see all these people in all these disparate places.  What's more, students who had taken the class a semester or two semesters previously could  actually join the conversation of that class through the hashtag.  Twitter was this weird kind of horizontal network space that kind of folded time on  top of each other in some weird, powerful ways.  Well this opened the door to this idea that I'm kind of here to talk about a little bit  called Domain of One's Own.  What is that?  Well, Domain of One's Own is inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel A Room of One's Own.  And the idea is why don't faculty and students have a space of their own to build, to create,  right?  Why are we all using these institutional spaces that we have no control over our data?  So we did it at Merrill Washington in 2013.  Every student and faculty who wanted their own space got it.  And we built a network through the school, through these individual nodes on the web.  For example, this is Sydney Mullis.  This is her site.  She was an art student.  If you go to that URL, it's a completely different site where she's actually selling  and framing her artwork for other people.  But that domain becomes a consistent presence of who she is and her work over time.  Radically different than our notions of the learning management system or the virtual  learning environment.  Same goes with faculty.  There's two examples of faculty sites, but don't stop there.  Also core sites.  Students could work together to build a resource on the web.  For example, Tai Ping Civil War, a major historical event in China.  Millions of people died.  This is the third hit on Google, at least in the US, when you searched that event.  And this is built by students at the University of Merrill Washington.  So the idea of a Domain of One's Own was an idea of reclaiming the academic web, but  also people's presence on that web.  Great, right?  My talk should be done.  Good job, Jim.  Big fan.  See you next year.  Stage one.  You were awesome.  Not really, right?  But I want to do a quick quiz, because I want to go through this history a little bit to  find out where we were.  Okay.  What's the oldest tool on this page?  Anyone?  What year?  If you know, yell it out and tell me what year.  Skype.  How old?  14 years old.  Facebook.  13, almost 14 years old.  How old's Tumblr?  Tumblr's 12 years old.  YouTube.  13 years old.  WhatsApp.  9 years old.  These are not infants anymore, right?  Our babies are growing up.  Twitter.  12 years old.  Gmail.  14 years old.  We have, collectively, lived through a generation that's watched these apps gain the millions,  if not billions of users they have right now.  In relationship to that, what we thought was this kind of utopia, right?  Oh, my God.  Twitter.  We can share.  Look at the network.  And I was one of those youthful idiots that got up and said that, right?  We saw this as a kind of utopian vision city of the future.  Not realizing or realizing but not wanting to admit what we were really doing was providing  the space to be mined for our personal data again and again, right?  And what that means and how that narrative, Dana Boyd and other folks in this conference  have done that much better than me, so I'm not going to reiterate.  But there are some simple things like clickbait, filter bubbles, personalization of the term  of cookies, platforms that lock us in, right?  And sooner or later, start looking at this, right?  A political, not joke anymore, but reality.  Now we can talk about how this happened or why this happened.  And there are people who do that better than me, so please look for them.  Audrey Waters, at least in education, Mike Caulfield, there are many.  But I want to talk a little bit about these open technologies.  One being RSS, the other being the API or the application programming interface.  RSS was an open format.  Google Reader, you'd subscribe to a few blogs, right?  Those posts would come in, right?  You weren't being baited, you weren't being followed, you weren't being cookied, your  information was not being mined.  The API, as much as for many as the future, was a completely different reality.  You ever hear it, and even if you don't know what an API is, you ever hear someone say,  damn, Google changed their API, right?  What does that mean?  Well, it means Google changed access to something without you having any control over that.  When Twitter changes their API, usually it means they control your access.  And so these are corporate programming interfaces that are deciding what we get and how we get  it, right?  We're feeding off of them.  Once they shut us off, we're screwed, often.  People like Orgy Waters and Kin Lane have been talking about this since 2013, 2014, talking  about the idea of data, right?  And data as the new gold.  And we saw that recently in the Economist.  Now I'm interested in this because I do think right now, at least in the US, I can't speak  for Germany, although I understand Germany has now got funding.  They're actually building a wall called the LMS or a school or whatever you want to call  it.  And I want to give you a little bit of a word of warning.  Right now, EDUCAUSE is talking about this thing called the NGDLE.  If we don't have enough acronyms, here's another one.  The next generation digital learning environment.  And the art is done by a gentleman by the name of Brian Mathers, great artist, really  fun.  But it's intentionally like a Lego.  Why?  Because as we talk more about the personalization of the web, these new platforms, these new  possibilities, one of the things we all have to come to terms with is that this stuff is  premised upon giving third parties complete access to our students and our faculty's information.  That's what personalization effectively means as it's framed by the NGDLE.  Your personalization doesn't come for nothing.  The API, the experience API, the XAPI is about collecting the experience that matters.  And this is in their kind of frame.  Quantifiable, shareable, trackable.  That's what we're doing to our faculty and students.  We're making them quantifiable, shareable, and trackable.  I think for me, this becomes a kind of problematic relationship.  Audrey Waters says it well.  How much of personalized learning is imagined and built and sold by tech companies precisely  for metrics, marketing, conversion rates, customer satisfaction?  They just use different words.  Outcomes based, learning analytics.  So as Germany heads down this road, and it's an interesting road and it's a fun road, and  it's an exploration, and I can't sit back and say, you know, I had a lot of fun even  when I was maybe sharing a product or an idea that was somewhat questionable.  But more and more, we're moving into this question of surveillance capitalism, of how  these companies and these services are monetizing.  And you know what?  There can be a relationship that's somewhat negotiable.  There's a group working out of Finland.  They call themselves MyData, and I've been following their stuff since about 2015, and  I'm really interested in their framework.  Their framework is basically, do we have a bill of rights for sharing data?  Right?  The GDPR starts to get at this point.  But what if we had not a corporate API that we depended on, but a personal API?  What if you decided who got access to your information, your address, your birth date,  your post, and for how long?  What if we kind of reinvented the notion that the service is at the center and we pay homage  and give data to it, and put the individual at the center and make of a more equitable  relationship?  Google wants your information, Twitter wants your information, fine.  They should pay you for it.  They should let you know when they're using it.  Right?  What is a model like that look like?  So let me get back to my point.  The way of one's own, in my mind, and in my imagination, becomes that.  It becomes your node where you build and frame your personal identity, and you share it wherever  you want.  It's not like the social networks are going to go away.  But what does it mean for us to have a more equitable web where we decide who uses it  for how long and what our relationship is to that data?  Right now, there's no transparency on how this stuff is being used.  For me, the first step in this relationship is reclaiming that presence and then deciding  how everything works from that.  So with that, I will end the talk, and I will thank you for your time.  Great.  Thank you.
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I think this is on yes it is. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me here. It's awesome to be in Berlin. This is my first time. It's a beautiful city. We'll talk about Edgipunk in a second and I have a couple of jokes lined up for that. But I'm a little bit nervous because this is my first talk in Germany but not only that, it's my first talk in a room filled with Germans who speak English better than me. So it's kind of nerve-wracking. But I do want to actually start this talk looking at some 70s. There's a great Tumblr, Twitter blog called Sci-Fi Art from the 70s. And this is one of them. And this illustration is from a 1974 textbook called Understanding Human Behavior. And it's a beautiful, it's basically the textbook, this is the chapter about education. And I don't know how well you can see it here, but there's a series of kind of like topics, brain surgery, wood crafts, psychology, economics. And the idea in this textbook, which is kind of almost like an alternative bizarre textbook, they were trying to theorize what learning would be like in the future. So what they came up with was you would go with those wild 70s headphones, you would click on one of those buttons, and then you put in your personal data and out would come the name of someone else who you would meet at a predefined cafe talking about the subject. And the way they would know it was you was you would bring the right book. So they'd see you by your book, you'd come together. And what they called this in 1974 in this textbook was networked learning, which is fascinating, right? This is the future I wanted, but never got. So bizarre, it's so beautiful. Look at the jacket. This could be a Berlin spy movie, right? This is awesome. And that brings me to from Berlin, we'll pretend this is Berlin to Torin. And I dig bizarre B, almost like not B movie, but B novel European literature. In particular, this is by Giorgio de Maria, and he's an Italian. He wrote in Torin, that's where he lived. And this is a bizarre book. It was just published in English last year by translator Ramon Glazov. And this book is kind of builds on top of the picture I just showed you. Why? This book is about a social network in 1975 in Italy. Bizarre, right? But the kind of social network you would more kind of be akin to Facebook than to say, you know, a bar. Why? How? I don't know how much you know about Italian history, but in the late 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s, you know, it was a pretty rough space in the cities of Italy. They called it the Ianni di Piumbo, or the years of lead. And you had right wing, left wing groups fighting over kind of, you know, political space and territory. It was a bloody time. Well, this novel was written in a response to those times. And the novel, the way in which the novel works and the plot is fascinating. It's about a library to pick up on what Phillip just talked about earlier. It's about a library, but what you do is you go to the library and you write your story. You write down, almost like you're blogging. You write down everything you know. And knowing that Republic of Stardust a blogging conference, it's kind of interesting. And then you put it, you give it to the library for a fee, and then they let other people read it anonymously. And if you pay another fee, they connect you. But what happened is this library was be running by these strange kind of very clean cut kids who were actually stealing the data of the people, right? And then in a weird sci-fi, Italian twist, these big giants come out for 20 days and eat the residents of Turin. I don't mean to give it away too much, but there's this kind of weird subtext to this idea of social networking as imagined in the 70s that I find really fascinating. So another good example, if nothing else, read the book. Now I'm jumping back to 1957, back from Italy to Germany, to talk about a book that's near and dear to my heart. It's called The Glass Bees. I don't know how to say it in German, but I'm sure you do. It's written by a man whose name you can pronounce better than me. I'm going to say Ernst Junger. But how many of you have heard of this book? Not many, a few. It's a crazy, crazy, crazy novel. It's about a military guy who's at work and he actually goes, and it's two days of his life, and he's kind of reminiscing about his childhood, but he feels left out because technology is moving so fast. So he goes and he meets this gentleman named Zapparoni. And Zapparoni is kind of like the Mark Zuckerberg of the time. And he's invented, and it's a futuristic novel like the 20 Days of Torrent. It's a futuristic novel, and he goes to speak with this guy Zapparoni. And Zapparoni has built these glass bees. And what was so trippy about this novel is in the 50s, I don't know how much you know about the 50s kind of history, when you talked about robots, they were like gigantic human-sized Robby the robots who would come to you and say, can I get your tea? Well, you never had imagined this whole micro-nano technology that is far more akin to the future we live in now than anything we were imagining in the 50s. But one of the things I want to kind of now stop and help me kind of give you a sense of where I'm going with this talk, because right now it's like, I didn't sign up for bad European sci-fi, although it's good. The introduction to the glass bees that was republished in 2000 by the New York Review of Books has an introduction by Bruce Sterling, who's known as a futurist, who's a cyberpunk, who's kind of famous, actually lives in Torrent as well. He writes this, I'm going to read it. Junger perceived that industrial capitalism is a ridiculous game, so he proved remarkably good at predicting its future moves. He understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power. He fully understands that popular entertainment comes with a military industrial underside. How much of this is kind of ringing true? Particularly this. He understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power. Now, Joran talked about this idea of edgupunk, and it's pretty hard for me to get up here and pretend I'm an edgupunk. I spent my morning in the Berlin Mall shopping for my son for Beyblades. The idea of punk, as soon as you say it, it becomes almost ridiculous. It becomes a fight about who's more punk than who. But in 2008, at the moment of reading that book by Junger, thinking about the relationship between the technology we use for teaching and learning and power, this vision of how do we situate ourselves as students and as teachers outside of that military industrial complex? Can we? And that's a question. Well, this morning I get on Twitter, which I've been on for a while, and I see this. This is a German group of teachers who have been, basically, for the last year and change, using social networks to connect and share strategies for how they bring technology into the classroom, which I think is awesome. And it's pretty radical. In fact, I came here, and I don't think they ever heard of my edgupunk from 10 years ago, right? I'm completely irrelevant. This is me playing the hits, right? But here, you get to see, like, through Twitter and because of a series of connections, I get to meet one of these edgupunks from Germany, in Germany, in a completely different context, but using the same basic tools to think about how we rethink, how technology, and I think the military industrial complex, changes the way we work. Now, let me get to my point. In 2005, 2006, this is a long time ago now, part of our mission was to think through how we use alternative open source technologies, which in the day were completely, completely kind of marginal. Media Wiki, you all know, is the technology that runs Wikipedia, but in 2004, 2005, right, it was an anomaly. WordPress now powers 30% of the web and all websites on it, and if you haven't heard of a website of WordPress and you're at this conference, there's probably some dissonance going on there, or you have amnesia. So like, these are the tools that we built an infrastructure for at our schools in 2007, 2008. For example, this is UMW blogs. This was a blogging platform using what is now WordPress Multisite to provide thousands of blogs for the university I worked at, the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Even cooler, in 2008, John Beasley Murray, working with Brian Lamb, had an entire course build Wikipedia articles and actually try and get them to the status of featured article. The name of the course was Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, and it was about Latin American literature, and they actually, this class got eight featured articles out of the 20 they've written, and it's extremely hard to get a featured article in Wikipedia, and those students work at 15, 20, even 200,000 views a month. Think about the cost involved in having your class work on Wikipedia. Server costs? None, right? The only cost is the research they're doing in the library, their time they're spending and figuring out how the community works. Think about the value of this project, not so much because of the technology, although that, but also because of thinking through how knowledge is socially created in a community like Media Wiki. That's a very valuable skill in this day and age when we're not sure what or who to trust and how things get determined and built. Now, Edgy Punk, like I said, died a quick death, right? But it came back in the form of something at the University of Mary Washington we called DS106. I don't know how many horror film fans are here on one, but this is a reference to Poltergeist, right? Here you have it. DS106 was an interesting class, and it was the beginning of a way of rethinking how we give students and faculty more power over their work, over their data. The idea of the class was this, simply, every student who comes into the class gets their own domain, their own web hosting, and they build their own infrastructure. They actually create their own digital identity as part of the class over 15 weeks. They work on imaging, image creation, editing, video, they create a radio show, podcasts, you name it, a complete infrastructure, so by the end of the semester, they have a presence online. They're tweeting, they're sharing on Flickr, et cetera. It was an extremely fun class. It was not meant to be open. It did become open, and this is before the Moog Grave, and over 500 people joined from all over the world. What's cooler is Martha Burdus, who was a colleague of mine at the time at University of Mary Washington, built an assignment bank. And what this meant was any student in the class or all over the world could submit an assignment. They got over 400 assignment submissions the first semester, and students had people in Portugal, Australia, you name it, doing their assignments. And it was cool because the assignment bank kind of worked like the knitting site Ravelry. I don't know how many of you are knitters here, but it's interesting because all the assignments people did showed up so you could see each other's work through a stream. It's pretty powerful. Well, DS106 was also a hashtag on Twitter. And this is one of the first times, this is 2010, 2011, where I really saw the value of the hashtag to frame and kind of visualize a network. It was a very powerful reality to see all these people in all these disparate places. What's more, students who had taken the class a semester or two semesters previously could actually join the conversation of that class through the hashtag. Twitter was this weird kind of horizontal network space that kind of folded time on top of each other in some weird, powerful ways. Well this opened the door to this idea that I'm kind of here to talk about a little bit called Domain of One's Own. What is that? Well, Domain of One's Own is inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel A Room of One's Own. And the idea is why don't faculty and students have a space of their own to build, to create, right? Why are we all using these institutional spaces that we have no control over our data? So we did it at Merrill Washington in 2013. Every student and faculty who wanted their own space got it. And we built a network through the school, through these individual nodes on the web. For example, this is Sydney Mullis. This is her site. She was an art student. If you go to that URL, it's a completely different site where she's actually selling and framing her artwork for other people. But that domain becomes a consistent presence of who she is and her work over time. Radically different than our notions of the learning management system or the virtual learning environment. Same goes with faculty. There's two examples of faculty sites, but don't stop there. Also core sites. Students could work together to build a resource on the web. For example, Tai Ping Civil War, a major historical event in China. Millions of people died. This is the third hit on Google, at least in the US, when you searched that event. And this is built by students at the University of Merrill Washington. So the idea of a Domain of One's Own was an idea of reclaiming the academic web, but also people's presence on that web. Great, right? My talk should be done. Good job, Jim. Big fan. See you next year. Stage one. You were awesome. Not really, right? But I want to do a quick quiz, because I want to go through this history a little bit to find out where we were. Okay. What's the oldest tool on this page? Anyone? What year? If you know, yell it out and tell me what year. Skype. How old? 14 years old. Facebook. 13, almost 14 years old. How old's Tumblr? Tumblr's 12 years old. YouTube. 13 years old. WhatsApp. 9 years old. These are not infants anymore, right? Our babies are growing up. Twitter. 12 years old. Gmail. 14 years old. We have, collectively, lived through a generation that's watched these apps gain the millions, if not billions of users they have right now. In relationship to that, what we thought was this kind of utopia, right? Oh, my God. Twitter. We can share. Look at the network. And I was one of those youthful idiots that got up and said that, right? We saw this as a kind of utopian vision city of the future. Not realizing or realizing but not wanting to admit what we were really doing was providing the space to be mined for our personal data again and again, right? And what that means and how that narrative, Dana Boyd and other folks in this conference have done that much better than me, so I'm not going to reiterate. But there are some simple things like clickbait, filter bubbles, personalization of the term of cookies, platforms that lock us in, right? And sooner or later, start looking at this, right? A political, not joke anymore, but reality. Now we can talk about how this happened or why this happened. And there are people who do that better than me, so please look for them. Audrey Waters, at least in education, Mike Caulfield, there are many. But I want to talk a little bit about these open technologies. One being RSS, the other being the API or the application programming interface. RSS was an open format. Google Reader, you'd subscribe to a few blogs, right? Those posts would come in, right? You weren't being baited, you weren't being followed, you weren't being cookied, your information was not being mined. The API, as much as for many as the future, was a completely different reality. You ever hear it, and even if you don't know what an API is, you ever hear someone say, damn, Google changed their API, right? What does that mean? Well, it means Google changed access to something without you having any control over that. When Twitter changes their API, usually it means they control your access. And so these are corporate programming interfaces that are deciding what we get and how we get it, right? We're feeding off of them. Once they shut us off, we're screwed, often. People like Orgy Waters and Kin Lane have been talking about this since 2013, 2014, talking about the idea of data, right? And data as the new gold. And we saw that recently in the Economist. Now I'm interested in this because I do think right now, at least in the US, I can't speak for Germany, although I understand Germany has now got funding. They're actually building a wall called the LMS or a school or whatever you want to call it. And I want to give you a little bit of a word of warning. Right now, EDUCAUSE is talking about this thing called the NGDLE. If we don't have enough acronyms, here's another one. The next generation digital learning environment. And the art is done by a gentleman by the name of Brian Mathers, great artist, really fun. But it's intentionally like a Lego. Why? Because as we talk more about the personalization of the web, these new platforms, these new possibilities, one of the things we all have to come to terms with is that this stuff is premised upon giving third parties complete access to our students and our faculty's information. That's what personalization effectively means as it's framed by the NGDLE. Your personalization doesn't come for nothing. The API, the experience API, the XAPI is about collecting the experience that matters. And this is in their kind of frame. Quantifiable, shareable, trackable. That's what we're doing to our faculty and students. We're making them quantifiable, shareable, and trackable. I think for me, this becomes a kind of problematic relationship. Audrey Waters says it well. How much of personalized learning is imagined and built and sold by tech companies precisely for metrics, marketing, conversion rates, customer satisfaction? They just use different words. Outcomes based, learning analytics. So as Germany heads down this road, and it's an interesting road and it's a fun road, and it's an exploration, and I can't sit back and say, you know, I had a lot of fun even when I was maybe sharing a product or an idea that was somewhat questionable. But more and more, we're moving into this question of surveillance capitalism, of how these companies and these services are monetizing. And you know what? There can be a relationship that's somewhat negotiable. There's a group working out of Finland. They call themselves MyData, and I've been following their stuff since about 2015, and I'm really interested in their framework. Their framework is basically, do we have a bill of rights for sharing data? Right? The GDPR starts to get at this point. But what if we had not a corporate API that we depended on, but a personal API? What if you decided who got access to your information, your address, your birth date, your post, and for how long? What if we kind of reinvented the notion that the service is at the center and we pay homage and give data to it, and put the individual at the center and make of a more equitable relationship? Google wants your information, Twitter wants your information, fine. They should pay you for it. They should let you know when they're using it. Right? What is a model like that look like? So let me get back to my point. The way of one's own, in my mind, and in my imagination, becomes that. It becomes your node where you build and frame your personal identity, and you share it wherever you want. It's not like the social networks are going to go away. But what does it mean for us to have a more equitable web where we decide who uses it for how long and what our relationship is to that data? Right now, there's no transparency on how this stuff is being used. For me, the first step in this relationship is reclaiming that presence and then deciding how everything works from that. So with that, I will end the talk, and I will thank you for your time. Great. Thank you.
for the university I worked at, the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Even cooler, in rethinking how we give students and faculty more power over their work, over their data. The idea Domain of One's Own is inspired by Virginia sites. Students could work together to build a application programming interface. RSS was an