One of the things I hope to do in this project (whatever it is) is to think about federated networks from multiple angles. In fact, I’m even thinking about dipping into discussions of federalism in political science in future posts. I want to stretch the term (but not too much) to understand different ways of organizing networks and communities.
One way I attempted to think with this term was through a course I taught last semester. The course was called “Writing New Media,” and it fulfills a general education writing requirement. The actual content of the course is less important than the fact that I tried two new things: 1) I ran asynchronous course discussions using Mastodon, a federated social networking platform; 2) I started the course with sustained discussion of the course’s “Code of Conduct” and wrote that CoC along with my students. I’d never done either of these things before, but they were connected. The use of Mastodon gave us a place to have discussions that were not linked to corporate platforms (we did use Canvas for certain course business) and that allowed us to think about how we wanted to configure that places. I had full administrative control, so we were able to design the space how we wanted. We didn’t do too much customization, but we had the ability to if we wanted it.
The CoC activity gave us the opportunity to think about the rules and values that would shape our class. We essentially drafted a constitution for the course. It helped that this was a digital writing class, but I think both of these practices would be applicable in other types of courses as well. In our class, the use of Mastodon opened up questions about how social media platforms are used and abused, and we read some CoC theory to think about what should or shouldn’t be included in such a document.
Both of these practices got me thinking about how discussions of federated networks might help us think differently about teaching and learning. For one, these practices forced all of us (me included) to think carefully about the kind of space we wanted to create. One interesting thing emerged as we wrote our CoC: How would we deal with violations of the CoC? And what if one of those violations included me? We had to imagine this scenario develop a procedure for it (you can read our CoC here), which really changed the way I thought about my interactions with students. There was a certain vulnerability in these discussions, since I had to lay out how I would recuse myself from any CoC violations involving me.
This process very much relates to how I’ve been thinking about federated networks, which force us to think about how or whether we’re going to connect with one another. This is a messy and complex process, and it’s this complexity that I think leads many to call federated networks unrealistic. But rather than taking connection or relations for granted (as I probably have in most other courses I’ve taught), our class had to think through how we wanted those relations to look and how we wanted to manage the complex process of building and maintaining a community.
