WP Campus 18: Playing on the Web

Playing and learning involve experimentation, getting dirty, and breaking stuff. Both on the web and IRL, I want people to test a toy or a technology or a theory in order to see what it can provide and where it will break. In one of the opening lightning talks at WordPress Campus 18, Donna Talarico challenged us to play and explore as we develop our web projects.

Apparently I’m supposed to keep my job. Play will help us keep our sanity and still do work. #WPCampus

— John Stewart (@JohnStewartPhD) July 13, 2018

In my presentation, I talked about how Domain of One’s Own initiatives encourage play and experimentation by giving faculty, staff, and students a place to build and experiment with the web. At the end of each year, we bring people together to celebrate the best new websites for the Creaties, our own version of the Webbies.

When we were developing the idea for this celebration, and as we’ve iterated it, Adam Croom, Anoop Bal, Keegan Long-Wheeler and I wanted to try to use the event to build a community that could play together. We try to draw people out to tell us about the challenges they faced as they were building them, the experiments they tried out, and the clever things that worked along with those that didn’t.

Rachel Cherry and her team did an excellent job of organizing WordPress Campus. One of the many things I liked was that they recorded many of the presentations and encouraged us to put together some sort of artifact to open the discussion for everyone was wasn’t at the conference. I built a WP site that lays out a lot of my presentation and shares some of the resources and thought that went into the Creaties. I hope you’ll take a minute to watch the presentation or play with the site, and let me know how your school can play with the concepts of DoOO and the Creaties and adapt them for your campus.