Renewable assignments, as defined by David Wiley, are assignments that don’t get thrown away at the end of the semester (disposable assignments), but rather live on because they engage in real-world problems. Christina Hendricks, in her treatment of this practice, provides some helpful examples: Some instructors ask their students to write or edit articles on Continue reading

Edit: What I describe here is not meant to imply you should write on the web one way or another. Different styles serve different purposes. But I think sometimes people are confused as to why we need wiki, or OER, or other such things when we “have the web”. And the answer is that the Continue reading

Or maybe it’s the Federated Learning Project? We’re going to try to construct some federated wiki-ish stuff in WordPress. I explained what I need to do to get WordPress to act in the way we want it to to Boone Gorges, and he said it would be relatively easy, which means it should take me Continue reading

My wife Nicole was trying to make a short video for her fifth grade art class, but found it hard to get up the requisite on-camera energy for that sort of thing. So my 12 year-old daughter stepped in as pinch hitter and delivered the lesson. I think she did pretty good, and if you Continue reading

I was watching Jesse Stommel at NWeLearn this past week give an excellent presentation on grading. In it he suggested a number of alternatives to traditional grading, and outlined some of the ways that traditional grading is baked into the system. And the end of the talk, the inevitable hand: “Your presentation seems so BINARY,” Continue reading

At the heart of wiki is a simple idea that names matter. Page names in wiki are not locations. They aren’t a place where a document lives. Names identify ideas, patterns, theories, and data in wiki that can be recombined with other ideas, patterns, theories, and data to make complex meaning not expressible in a Continue reading

Ted Nelson on the invention of hypertext. And perhaps relevant to annotation today? But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in – make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move Continue reading