Wikity is up. The join code is “peloton”.

I show how you can work in Wikity in the video below. In brief, the idea is other people’s investigations or explanations of things feed into what you are exploring; you add your bit to that and feed it forward for others to use. At the same time, since people work in their own space, everybody gets to keep control of their own process, built to achieve their own ends.

If you’ve seen that model before, it’s because it’s exactly the model that Downes and Siemens advanced all those years ago in the first cMOOCs: “Aggregate – Remix – Repurpose – Feed Forward“. But the tools used there — wiki, blogs, etc — were, in my opinion, not as well suited to the cycle as they might have been, at least for certain types of endeavors. Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals.

Wikity takes lessons from federated wiki, combining the individual control of blogging with the permissionless improvement of wiki. In the video above I show how a student might use this to begin an investigation into a subject, but there are multitude of uses for this technology. I am particularly excited about ways it might be used to help faculty and students to collaborate on OER across institutions. (If people want, I can show what the process of putting together class materials looks like on Wikity — it’s pretty amazing).

I’m putting together an institutional version of this too for WSU Vancouver around the OER idea. If other people wanted to run an OER site like this at their institution, we could build a federation of easily remixable content. Because when there is a network of these sorts of sites — that’s when it gets really interesting. 😉

(Oh, and thanks to Shuttleworth’s flash grant, which helped make this progress possible).