The Web That Was
net artist
Professor, Merz Akademie, Stuttgart
Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, and a GIF model.
The Web That Is
Vice Provost, Teaching & Learning and Associate Professor
Educational Studies & Psychology, Brock University
The architect of Canada’s first zero textbook cost degree programs, Rajiv’s scholarship focuses on open educational practices, student-centered pedagogies, and ethical approaches to educational technology. An award-winning educator, Rajiv has served as an Ambassador for the Global Advocacy of Open Educational Resources with the International Council for Open and Distance Education, a Senior Open Education Research & Advocacy Fellow with BCcampus, an Ambassador for the Centre for Open Science, and a Faculty Workshop Facilitator for the Open Education Network, and in 2023 is serving as a Visiting Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Trent University. A co-author of three open textbooks in Psychology, his books include Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science and Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education. Together with Dr. Robin DeRosa, he is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook. You can find him online @rajiv@scholar.social or thatpsychprof.com
The Web That Will Be
Senior scholar, Georgetown University
Bryan Alexander is an award–winning, internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of higher education’s future. His research appears through many articles, the weekly Future Trends Forum video program, Georgetown University seminars, consulting and speaking engagements, and a series of books, including Academia Next and Universities on Fire. Previously, after achieving a PhD in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in 1997 he has been a literature professor and a research lead for an educational nonprofit.
Binghamton University’s community of digital scholars continues to grow and evolve. Across disciplines and schools, instructors are utilizing digital platforms and multi-modal projects in new and revised courses, and researchers are creating open-access materials and a wide variety of digital research projects. As digital scholarship librarians, we are constantly finding the balance between teaching platforms that our community finds user-friendly for new learners while also teaching sustainable web practices that frequently require more technical knowledge than scholars are ready to learn. While content management systems like WordPress, Omeka, and Google Sites are integral to our toolbox of available publishing options for digital projects, and have relatively easy user interfaces, they pose problems for sustainability. For example, constant updates break plug-ins, corporate whims affect the accessibility of platforms, and new technologies change the expectations of how websites should look and ‘feel’. However, exploring new and emerging technologies and taking advantage of their ability to make the work of our faculty and students more widely available on the web is also an essential part of our mission. We are repeatedly touting the benefits of creating digital projects while also cautioning researchers and instructors about the limits of those projects. Balancing that with an eye towards the future and ensuring that content that users and creators expect to still be available poses challenges. That is especially true when first introducing digital tools. For example, when creating a WordPress page tests the limits of a new user’s technological confidence, trying to work in conversations about migration and archiving is immediately overwhelming. Given how often this occurs across faculty and students, we have developed our own evolving best practices and resources to help ease the challenges for our digital scholarship community. In this presentation, we will talk about our experience teaching digital project management principles, the best web design practices for building accessible and sustainable projects, and digital project self-awareness.
