Several months ago, I decided to start taking my “digital footprint” a little more seriously. Like most people these days, several parts of my job require me to be active online, and through the projects I work on, I am closely involved with web development and on the periphery of educational technology. I have also been immersed in the work being done around open educational resources and open pedagogy, which rely heavily on using new technology to enhance teaching and learning. The community (or “network”) of open educators includes prolific bloggers and hackers: they use the open web to create, connect, tell stories, and share outside of the “silo” that is the Learning Management System (or the ubiquitous social networks essential to how we experience the web now).

The first instalment in Trent Recommends is Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, a “novel” that shows the promise and emotional range of an emerging talent in Canadian literature.

The 20th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest just passed. This is the abridged version of what Infinite Jest has come to mean in my life through my trials and tribulations with the novel’s first episode. There may be mild spoilers but I try not to reveal too much. I hope you enjoy. Find me on Twitter to share your thoughts.

Twitter’s well-earned reputation as a massive time sink is not without merit. Occassionally, however, you stumble across a thought expressed so succinctly it makes all those hours of passive scrolling worth it.

Clint Lalonde’s blog is one of the inspirations for my (re)commitment to blogging, and he regularly shares perceptive commentary about the role of openly licensed content in education. As you can tell from his blog, he also knows his way around ed-tech.

In the not-so-distance past, when I was growing up and technology was growing with me, we published content to the web by messing around with free internet services. The “content editor” was a plain text box where you put HTML.