Most educators interested in technology are too young to have been influenced by the era of innovation that made possible both the positive and negative uses of technology we experience today. Unless you were involved in the middle 1980s to the mid-1990s you missed out. This was a time of idealism and personal involvement that is mostly lacking today. Most folks are now willing to rely on existing platforms or the simplicity of coding without actual making. If you haven’t run your own server, you don’t understand. If you haven’t experienced the excitement of connecting your computer to a bulletin board for the excitement of connecting with individuals very different from yourself, you wouldn’t understand.
As an educational investment, coding without making misses the point. There are far more efficient and existing ways to practice problem-solving and a thoughtful methodological approach. Becoming part of a participatory technological enabled culture offers the opportunities of computational thinking and other opportunities that are far more important. Learn enough to install a service on a server that sits on your own desk and you have acquired more than the supposed benefits of computational thinking. You have created the opportunity to offer your ideas to the world and to engage with others. You have become a contributing part of a complex culture and made an investment in this culture.
I have had the opportunity to benefit from these experiences because at the time the investment in learning to code and learning the basics of operating a server were the price of admission. This is no longer the case. You need to know very little about technology itself to use Facebook or Twitter. I really don’t know if the problems now associated with how these services are used have anything to do with missing out on the original culture of the personal computer and the Internet. I blame the loss of that culture and the present problems on the take over of technology by commercial interests and what these interests have resorted to in order to make the money they make. In so many ways, it has become a race to the bottom. We want free, but we are unwilling to understand who free allows the investment and profit margin of the tech companies that dominate public technology use today.
Anyway, there are still ways to experience the educational benefits of the original PC and Internet culture. You and your students can still rent your own server space and install services that allow you to explore, communicate, and contribute. What I have in mind others have called the indieweb and there are some attempting to show the relevance of the indieweb for education.
My own efforts – I had the advantage of working at a university when I started my exploration in this area. This meant that I had access to a static IP for running a server. A static IP means that that the Interest address associated with your connection to the Internet The dotted quad or numerical representation of your web address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx does not change each time you connect. A consistent online location is necessary for others to find you. I do admit that as the importance of the Internet became obvious the security types at the university regarded my activity with increasing skepticism. I had the advantage at the time of having accumulated a lot of experience and building a research program on software I wrote that could not be easily installed on university servers. All that aside, renting server space is now easy and fairly inexpensive. This is what I do now and this is the host for the content you are reading here.
Some examples of services I run on this server.
Blogs that make use of WordPress. This software can be installed using a script and embellished for different types of application (e.g., a blog versus an online book).
A wiki using the MediaWiki software (pretty much the same software as you would be accessing when you make use of Wikipedia). I used the software in a grad class I taught to have ed tech students create tutorials that were offered to educators.
A bookmarking tool – Shaarli
An RSS reader – FreshRSS
A Drupal install that I used for a while with my students, but that I decided to deactivate when I taught less frequently in retirement and got tired of migrating to updated and more secure versions of Drupal.
HTML web content created with commercial web development software (DreamWeaver)
Are these services/content as sophisticated as one might find using services such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Of course not, but I understand how they work and I operate them myself. They offer the content I have created. This is a very different experience than adding my creative work to Facebook, Diigo, Instagram, or Twitter. I think it has been worth the effort in deepening my understanding and in being part of a different culture than most technology users experience. Just to be clear, I have never taken a computer science course. I taught myself to program and the other tech skills I needed. I am a psychologist, not a computer scientist or trained programmer. Doing it yourself offers a diversity of experiences that go far beyond writing code. How does the Internet work? What is a DNS? How do bad actors mess with your site? What does it take to attract others to your work? I believe that at least some of the experiences I have had are there at a low cost and offer students the opportunity to develop a depth of understanding that few now experience. If you want to be an innovator, consider indieweb experiences for your students. Encourage them to create something that is truly theirs.
