Operations in Smallest Federated Wiki tend to be page-level — dashboard style site managers have been avoided for the moment. Still, the speed at which operations can be executed makes site-wide stuff pretty easy. This video shows how to copy a small fifteen page site in about a minute. If you think about how long… Continue reading

Via @roundtrip, this conversation from July: There’s actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own server (which may even be running on your laptop). That forms part of a named-content system, and if later that page disappears at… Continue reading

If you look at most treatments of wiki in the classroom, people talk about collaboration, group projects, easy publishing, revision control. All of these are important. But one important element of what makes a wiki a wiki has been underutilized. Wikis not only introduced the editable page to users, but the idea of page-creating links. (In… Continue reading

So there’s been an Ameila Bedelia Wikipedia hoax. We learn that Amelia was not inspired by a maid from Cameroon who wore sensational hats, a “fact” cited in a vandalism which survived on the site since 2009. Yawn. First, let me say in a world where Elsevier was recently discovered to have published half a dozen… Continue reading

I mentioned earlier that I’d decided to change my explanation of federated wiki from a “top-down” explanation to a “bottom-up” one. It makes a heck of a difference. I made this video below for one of our faculty, to show how even something as simple as notes becomes an integrative exercise in federated wiki. I… Continue reading

If you’ve watched the Mother of All Demos, you know that one of the aha! moments of it is when Engelbart pulls out his grocery list. The idea is pretty simple –if you put your grocery list into a computer instead of on a notepad, you could sort it, edit, clone it, categorize it, drag-and-drop… Continue reading

I’ve borrowed Jon Udell’s term (“universal canvas”) for talking about SFW. In this video I talk about a plugin my brother Ben wrote for SFW earlier this week, and try to show what that means in semi-mechanical terms. One of the things I think it starts to show is how much of a construction kit… Continue reading