This is just the beginning of an idea, but as I dig deep into the IndieWeb and think about social media, Silicon Valley’s entry into education, critical technical practice, and other words that I will try to come back and find good links for later, I’m having a little brainstorm.

Information literacy curricula tend to focus, from what I’ve seen, on consuming information and evaluating the information other people produce: is this a reliable source? What’s the purpose and audience of this communication?

But as libraries transition from having consumption as their central purpose to places where creation takes centerstage and consumption primarily serves creation, we need to teach youth to think about other things. Who is going to own the content they create? Who can see it? What rights do they have as creators and artists? What benefits accrue to them from the different possible ways they might share their work? If we’re looking to create a generation that makes stuff, we need to ask them to think about the impact of the stuff they’re making as well as the amount of control they have over that impact.

Again, it’s a little brainstorm that I wanted to just jot down, but I hope to come back with more thoughts on this later.

You can’t really see it here but Tropical Diver is a gorgeous reef exhibit at the @georgiaaquarium and I kind of want to live there. Beautiful coral AND a Skeletor Moray? Sign me up!

I use this blog as my home on the web, so in addition to traditional blog posts, you’ll find here all the types of things you might find on social media. I know that can be overwhelming, so feel free to only look at long posts, short notes, shared links, photos, social media interactions, or what I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing.

Austin Kleon’s meditations on retail spaces for community building and creativity have me thinking about how libraries can learn from these experiences to create spaces that meet patrons’ needs.

I watched the first eight minutes or so of this and got major X-Files/BtVS vibes and I’m into it.

Hey spring!

Eli Mellen makes some excellent points here. I’ve been slowly chipping away at going full Indieweb for about a year. Only this weekend did I really get all the way there, and it took a lot of advice from Chris Aldrich, some assistance from David Shanske in the IndieWeb chat, and the judicious use of Chrome developer tools (especially the web inspector) and Google to get to where I am today, which is pretty much where I want to be.

I have WordPress and I installed all the appropriate plug-ins. I followed all of the directions in the Getting Started with WordPress parts of the Wiki. But these were the pieces that were missing that only recently did I get together:

• Sharing links in a POSSE way and having them actually look good
• Posting notes to Facebook and Twitter without weird link previews or my Gravatar popping up
• Sharing on mobile

I wouldn’t ask your average social media user to do all the things I had to do to make this happen. As Eli says,

...the IndieWeb is at an exciting inflection point.

I’m immensely grateful for all the help I’ve received getting started, but I do hope that over time people won’t have to be as dev-headed as me to jump in. I am a far cry from any sort of developer, but I do have a lot more knowledge of how the web works than I think most people do. If it was tricky and took me a year to get it to do what I wanted, I can’t imagine what a challenge it will be for them.