Via Clay Fenlason: “Feeling like the time spent to understand WTF @holden is talking about would be well spent, but who has that kind of time?”
Fair enough. I blog mostly for myself, to try and push on my own ideas in front of a relatively small group of people I know who push back. And part of that process is a bit manic and expansive. At some point that’s followed by a more contractive process that tries to organize and summarize. Maybe it’s time to get to that phase.
So I’ll do that soon. What I’ll say in the meantime is that all of this stuff — hybrid apps, storage-neutral apps, federated wikis, etc — is interesting to me because of my obsession with hacking and reuse. Why is reuse so darn hard? Why don’t we reuse more things? What systems would support a higher degree of reuse and sharing, of hacking and recombination? What are the cultural barriers?
There are implications to this stuff far bigger than that, but reuse (and hacking, which is a type of reuse) has been a core obsession of mine for a decade now, so that ends up being the lens.
You go to an event and there’s 50 people taking pictures of it individually on their cell phones, none of whom will share those photos with one another, yet all of whom would benefit from sharing the load of picture taking. There are psychological and social reasons why that’s the case, but there’s also technological reasons for that. Likewise there are brilliant economics teachers who have built exercises and case studies that would set your class on *fire* if you used them — but you’ll never see them.
I’ve been over the several hundred reasons why reuse doesn’t happen, over a period of ten years, It’s not just about the technology, absolutely. But occasionally I see places where reuse explodes, and the technology turns out to be a pretty big piece of that. My wife is a K-3 art teacher. And Pinterest just exploded reuse in that community. Sharing went from minimal to amazing in the space of 12 months. And suddenly she was putting together a much better art curriculum than she could have ever dreamed of in half the time, in ways that had a huge impact on her students.
So — reuse, sharing, networked learning, hacking. I’m interested in the two sides of this: first, we must teach students how to work this way. We have to. And two, we have to get our colleagues to work this way.
What does that have to do with the shift to hybrid apps? With moving from a world of reference to a world of copies and forks? With storage-neutral designs? With the pull request culture of GitHub vs. the single copy culture of OER? With the move back to file-based publication systems? I’m still trying to work that out. But I think the answer is “a lot”, and a post is coming soon.
Hapgood 
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