Werd I/O

I've been glued to the Ferguson coverage for the last week. Like many people, I've been wondering how this could be happening in a supposedly democratic, developed nation - and I've been getting all of my news via Twitter. No matter what they try and do, the traditional news media has just been late on this story, in the way that traditional publishers began to seem out of date when blogging picked up steam a decade ago.

I've been watching up-to-the-second updates of a situation that should concern everyone who lives in the US. Meanwhile, conspicuously, the story is virtually nowhere to be found on Facebook.

We're increasingly consuming information in filter bubbles. Much has been said about this over the last few years, but it's harmful: if an idea, or an event, hasn't permeated a social circle, it's less likely to than it ever was. Back in the old days, we'd all crowd around a TV for the evening news, or read a newspaper in the morning. Everyone got the same information. Now we subscribe to individuals and curate our own information streams.

Mostly this is a good thing: it's dangerous for everyone to be getting all their information from a single source. But as circles congeal online, they effectively become the same thing: a unified voice of people who more or less agree with each other. Not only is that democratically dangerous, but for networks like Twitter, there's the possibility of it atrophying the network and impeding growth. Past a certain point, introverted social spheres can't grow any further; it makes sense to add a little something to break the surface tension.

But in the democratic sense, a little more serendipity is also a good thing. I want to discover stories I might not have otherwise seen; ideas I might not otherwise have heard.

If Twitter was just a piece of software running as a service, this would be unthinkable: it's not obeying your subscription preferences! But that's not what it is. With this change, Twitter is cementing itself as a media company, just like the broadcasters of old. In its own way, it's curating an information source for you - one that can continue to scale beyond your friends and networks.

I started my career in education, writing e-learning tools for the University of Edinburgh. It was there that I met my Elgg co-founder, Dave Tosh (because they placed us together in an ex-broom closet with a window that didn't shut; a kind of gallows bonding experience). Elgg was designed as a community platform for education, that took the informal learning that was happening on the nascent social web in 2003 and applied it to the formal education space. It did well, and it's still in wide use in institutions today. Through Elgg, I've written and spoken widely about social learning environments.

The educational technology community has developed the dual concepts of the Personal Learning Environment and the eportfolio. The first is a tool that puts students at the center of their learning; the second is a way for them to represent themselves and their learning, to themselves, to their peers at their institution, and to the outside world once they graduate. In an educational setting, I think Known is very clearly both a PLE and an eportfolio:

• Known profiles allow you to post to a space that represents you, using a variety of media, from any device
• Known's syndication feature lets you post to your own profile, while syndicating to external sites and applications - like your campus's Learning Management System.
  

Educators agree. The Reclaim Your Domain project is a particular evolution of eportfolio thinking, where members of a campus's community own the domains that represent them (just like indieweb!), and we've developed a good relationship with this community. And we're discovering that more and more institutions around the world are coming to us, because they see how Known can help them to empower their students.

Universities have discovered that providing a social space that allows for personal reflection allows for deeper learning than a Learning Management System can provide. Known provides a layer for this that can either work with a campus's LMS or as a stand-alone product. It's easier for teachers to administer, and because it uses the latest modern web technologies, it works with the mobile devices that students are using to access the Internet more than 50% of the time.

Known works well as an educational product. Our experience building awesome social tools for education over the last decade allows us to more quickly understand the challenges involved, and to provide something that fits in with the culture of education. We're also aware that there are startups whose aim is to own a part of the education stack, and our grounding in indieweb and open source means that we reject that entirely. We have an open project that we have designed to empower; the intention is to provide more control, not remove it.

I couldn't be more excited to work deeply with educators to help them make electronic learning a more personal experience - and we want to hear from you. Software is a collaborative experience, and we couldn't think of better collaborators than the people who are helping to make the world a more informed and educated place.

Here's how I post from my Known site.

When I log in, Known gives me the option to post lots of different kinds of things: status updates, photos, streaming media, and so on. Because it's what's called a "responsive interface", it adapts to whichever device you're looking at it on: it works just as well on a phone as on a desktop browser. These buttons work great on a touch-based interface, and I post on my phone at least as often as I post from my computer.

This morning, I decided to write a status update:

I decided to post it to my friends on the traditional social media sites too. Above, I've selected Twitter - after I took the picture, I decided to post to Facebook as well.

Known posts the status update to my own site:

But because I selected Twitter, it posts it there too:

And because I selected Facebook, another copy ends up there:

My friends can interact with me over on those sites:

And those replies - whether they're from Facebook, Twitter, or my friends' own websites (running Known or something else) - will show up on my site too, thanks to great indieweb technologies like brid.gy:

This way, I have all of my interactions around that content in one place.

If I want to reply to my friends on the silos, I can do that too. I can just do that from my site using the bank of buttons you've already seen, but if I'm using Firefox, I can use a direct "reply" button integrated with my browser:

Or there's a "bookmarklet" - a button that I drag to my browser's bookmarks toolbar - that makes it easier, which works with every browser.

Either way, those replies will show up on the site my friends replied from, as well as on my own site.

Because I post everything from my own site, I have an archive of everything I've ever written to social media. That means I can look to see everything I've written about "Wimbledon", for example:

And I can filter my search to particular kinds of content:

Because this archive is hosted on my own site, people are likely to find it when they search for me. That means I have more control over how I'm represented on the web. One of the ways I can customize my appearance online is through themes:

But if I'm a developer (and I am!) I can build my own themes and plugins to integrate Known into my existing site, create new kinds of content or radically change the look and feel. It's a pretty great toolbox.

My archive of everything I've posted and all my replies lets me analyze my data in all kinds of ways, that let me post better and participate more directly with my community. I'll be talking more about that another time.

In the meantime, you should sign up to our beta list.