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Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

The Federated OER Wiki Is Up and Running

Tim Owens and I have been working off and on the past couple weeks on this Federated OER Wiki idea, and there have been times where I’ve looked at the design of what we are doing and thought maybe this was the Plan 9 from Outer Space of Edtech projects. Has an idea ever so possessed your waking thought, become so ingrained into the way you start to view things, that you lose the ability to tell whether the idea is brilliant or insane? Or worse, just plain ridiculous? As we got deeper into the coding — me on the PHP coding and Tim on the GitHub sync’d backend — I started to wonder.

We finally pulled together a kinda-sorta working model of this early today, and I’m not worried it’s insane anymore.

I’m going to share the link here, but to understand the import of what you see you have to understand that the content you are seeing during the federated search comes from entirely different server instances and dokuwiki installs. That’s really the key here — you can run, own, control, and brand your own site while still benefitting from a rich content library syndicated to you from federation members all over the world.

Here’s the five minute screencast.

Posted by:

mikecaulfield

The infolit guy.

5 responses to “The Federated OER Wiki Is Up and Running”

  1. CogDog Avatar
    CogDog

    Damn that is exciting, like the first new thing in Wikis since the 1990s. The preservation/tracking of the edit trails is so Bush like (Vannevar not W).

    So if I fork your fork, does it keep that full trail back to UMW Domains? I would expect so.

    Brilliant stuff on you and Tim’s part

    Reply
    1. mikecaulfield Avatar
      mikecaulfield

      Right now if you fork my fork you’d have to hop back to my fork to see that it originally came from UMWDomains. But it turns out that the edit history files are just associated text documents, so we’ll be able to tweak that going forward, maybe even copy over the whole *.changes file to the new folder when the file is forked.

      If that approach works, then yes, you’d have a complete history of a file from day one in the revisions tab, no matter how many forks of forks you forked. Which is mindblowing, to me at least.

      Reply
    2. mikecaulfield Avatar
      mikecaulfield

      Oh, and I forgot to mention — even before we get the whole *.changes file thing worked out, the bottom of page trail will show the original doc.

      Reply
  2. Nico Avatar
    Nico

    Terrific.

    Reply
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