June 2014
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Explaining Federation Through Family Movie Night, Part I
I’ve been struggling to explain to people why federation is necessary. In practice, federation doesn’t get you much until there are people around to federate with. Worse, it doesn’t get you anywhere until there is valuable material in your federation. Valuable material takes time to produce, and people aren’t going to spend that time making Continue reading
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NeoVictorian Computing, and the Cult of the Lowest Common Denominator
M. C. Morgan (my first friend met through federated wiki) pointed me to this series on NeoVictorian Computing by the guy who wrote Tinderbox, a Mac-only hypertext computing tool. The primary point he makes throughout the series is how our fetish for “transparent computing” is making both users and programmers miserable. What do I mean Continue reading
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Two Minute Federated Wiki: Sharing Across Unrelated Wikis
With Federated Wiki you can benefit from the work people are doing on completely unrelated sites, and use their work to pull together a site of your own very quickly. Continue reading
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Personalized Learning, 1700s Style
I’ll throw this into the discussion. This customized level of challenge idea has been around a long time. The sociological implications are far from neutral. See below for a circa 1800 example from Gregor Girard’s school: (from The Mother Tongue, English translation published 1848) “Providence does not give to all alike” — call me cynical, but Continue reading
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Why Personalized Learning Fails
There’s a great discussion going on about the myth of personalized learning, both at Dan Meyer’s blog and at Benjiman Riley’s. Michael Feldstein has also stepped into the conversation, pointing out the two (or more) definitions that seem to be in play here. I’ve covered this area more fully before (see last year’s Are Conversation Continue reading
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Smallest Federated Wiki as a Universal JSON Canvas
Watching Alan Kay talk today about early Xerox PARC days was enjoyable, but also reminded me how much good ideas need advocating. As Kay pointed out repeatedly, explaining truly new ways of doing things is hard. People looked at the PARC stuff, and many saw a solution to this problem or that problem. But that Continue reading
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One Minute Smallest Federated Wiki: Understanding Recent Changes
A whirlwind tour of how to read the Recent Changes, and how to include the sites you want in it. We don’t touch on the icons much here, or how to get to specific version of pages, or what “people who touched that page” means (hint: it means they have a copy of the page). Continue reading
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One Minute Federated Wiki: Link Resolution From Journal History
Link resolution in Smallest Federated Wiki can be confusing — depending on the page you are linked from links can go different places. This video shows simple link resolution from journal history. A second video showing slightly more complex scenarios where pages not in the journal are suggested as alternatives is forthcoming. Continue reading
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Name-Based Approaches to Networks, and Why They are Crucial to the Personal Web
Alan Levine made a great comment on a previous post — the frustration in Smallest Federated Wiki is that “you never know where you are.” This got me thinking about some foundational issues that need to be explained — issues bigger than any directed how-to. One of the reasons people feel lost on SFW is Continue reading
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Minimally Invasive Assessment and the New Canvas Suite
Instructure has a new announcement about Canvas, and it’s in an area close to my heart. They are rolling out a suite of tools that allow instructors to capture learning data from in-class activities. But Mike, you say, the LMS is evil, and more LMS is eviler. Why you gotta be Satan’s Cheerleader? Well, here’s Continue reading
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