My parents supported me by driving me to rehearsal, providing me with books about web development, and giving me the tools I needed to develop websites (hardware & access). Other members of the community theater company gave me the opportunity to design the theater company’s website.
(You can still browse the site at the Wayback Machine.)
That opportunity set me on a path that led to my getting a job as a Public Communications Specialist twelve years later.
Connected Learning, as an experience, is easier to attain if you have privilege and access. Connected Learning, as a design agenda, is equity-oriented and aimed at providing these experiences to nondominant youth.
My goal in giving you this introduction to Connected Learning today is to ask you to consider in your sessions today and as you build tomorrow what we can do to put the Connected Learning experience in the hands of the learner not just in choice of interests and choice of medium, but in ownership of data and learning products.
Creative fan practices and the communities that engage in them are excellent examples of connected learning, and also a source of what seems like endless itches for IndieWeb community members to scratch. Historically, fandom will find a platform not developed for it and create its own ways of using it. Often, the silos fans have leveraged change their terms of service, making the silo then inhospitable to fandom; fans then have to figure out where to go next and what to do.
Most recently, Tumblr changed its terms of service in December 2018, and fandom still hasn’t settled on where it will go next. (Dreamwidth and Pillowfort seem to be likely contenders, but each has its own idiosyncrasies that make it less than ideal.) There seems to be a pie-in-the-sky dream of a perfect platform for fandom.
Is it possible the IndieWeb is already that platform? IndieWeb tools developed to scratch fandom itches have the potential to be applied in many other affinity spaces, as well. Here are some places to find those itches:
Marianne: disconnected thoughts on fandom and the IndieWeb (August 29, 2017)
pearwaldorf: Fandom platform of the future - specs and features (December 5, 2018)
Greg McVerry: Gonna take a community to hold that backscratcher (December 7, 2018)
Chris Aldrich: Read disconnected thoughts on fandom and the IndieWeb (December 10, 2018)
Taking fandom as just one connected learning environment, we can find many ways to build IndieWeb functionality that could serve connected learners with other interests, as well.
I acknowledge that I live and work on unceded Lumbee, Skaruhreh/Tuscarora, Cheraw, Catawba, Saponi, Occaneechi, and Shakori land. I give respect and reverence to those who came before me. I thank Holisticism for the text of this land acknowledgement.
We must acknowledge that much of what we know of this country today, including its culture, economic growth, and development throughout history and across time, has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their ascendants who suffered the horror of the transatlantic trafficking of their people, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow. We are indebted to their labor and their sacrifice, and we must acknowledge the tremors of that violence throughout the generations and the resulting impact that can still be felt and witnessed today. I thank Dr. Terah βTJβ Stewart for the text of this labor acknowledgement.