Fuzzy Notepad posted Twitter’s Missing Manual today, noting that obscure UI interactions in Twitter often drive people away. Reading through the list they have compiled, however, I don’t think this stuff has much to do with lack of Twitter uptake. If the worst thing users have to deal with is the difference between “@” and Continue reading

I think on my most popular day on this blog I got about 14,000 hits on a post. Most posts get less than that, but getting 600-800 visitors over the first week is pretty usual, and the visitors are generally pretty knowledgeable people. Yesterday I got a lot of hits on my post asking for Continue reading

We’re making a push here on both blog and wiki use in classes, but finding that while there’s many posts on this and that blog/wiki project in higher education, that There’s not many lists compiled that show a variety of examples across many disciplines and institutions. Many of the examples we continue to use are Continue reading

I’ve been thinking lately about the architecture underlying blogs and wiki, how different these architectural choices are (RSS, revision histories, title-as-slug, etc), and whether it’s worthwhile to imagine a world where data flows seamlessly across them. It might not be. They are very different things, with different needs. Wiki and blogs have two different cultures, Continue reading

One of the projects I’m working on with French colonial history scholar Susan Peabody this semester at WSU is building a virtual, wiki-based museum with her students in a history course. We’re using a Wikity-based WordPress template to do it, and while we’re not utilizing the forking elements in it, we’re actually finding the Markdown Continue reading

This is a series of posts I’ve finally decided to write on the subject of what I call “connected copies”, an old pattern in software that is solving a lot of current problems. Part one of the series is here. It’s really a bit of a brain dump. But it’s my first attempt to explain Continue reading

So Amazon is getting into the Open Educational Resources market. What do we think about that? If you read these pages regularly, you can probably predict what I’ll say. It’s the wrong model. For over a decade and a half we’ve focused on getting OER into central sites that everyone can find. Or developing “registries” to index Continue reading

This is a series of posts I’ve finally decided to write on the subject of what I call “connected copies”, an old pattern in software that is solving a lot of current problems. It’s really a bit of a brain dump. But it’s my first attempt to explain these concepts starting at a point most Continue reading

SoundCloud, a music publishing site which holds millions of original works not held elsewhere (and over a hundred million works total), may be in trouble. And if it is in trouble, we’ll lose much of that music, forever. The situation is, of course, ridiculous. I know I sound like a broken, um, MP3 file on Continue reading

As you doubtless know by now, in 2010 I went and gave a plenary at UMW on the Liberal Arts in an era of Just-In-Time Learning, drank more than any human really should at the various parade of after-events, predicted the coming onslaught of xMOOCs in a drunken vision, and ended up going back to Continue reading