My daughters get frustrated with trying to explain to friends what I do for a job. On a daily basis it looks a bit like faculty development, a bit like instructional design, a bit like strategic IT management. But of course, that’s not the part I talk about, despite it being the majority of my… Continue reading

You can now upload and embed images in Wikity from the “catalog view”. The functionality puts the image file on your site and creates appropriate Markdown code for the embed. Captioning is enabled through the “title” functionality in Markdown. Continue reading

In Wikity we use Markdown as our primary way of formatting things. There’s a number of reasons for that, but the summary of the “why” is that it reduces dependency on mouse use and complex editors which in turn makes things quicker and simpler in the long run. But enough about the why. Here’s what… Continue reading

I put Wikity on GitHub a while ago, but I’m not sure if I announced that here. In any case, Wikity is now on GitHub. In the past couple weeks I have also removed the reliance on WordPress’s “multisite” functionality. It was making installation more complex than it needed to be. To install Wikity now,… Continue reading

Once you start to see this “choral explanations” pattern, you start seeing it everywhere. I’ve mentioned before how you see it on sites such as Stack Exchange, and in the dialogue of accomplished tutors. In all these situations, people are not given the “one best explanation”, but rather, they are provided with an array of… Continue reading

For the past few months I have been talking about “choral explanations” and how they might transform our approach to OER. This is an outgrowth of my work on federated wiki and Wikity, but is a much more specific and immediately applicable idea. In fact, as I will show below, choral explanations are already in… Continue reading

There’s a lot wrong in this statement from Mark Zuckerberg on machine telepathy: While some of these ideas might seem more like the stuff of sci-fi, Zuckerberg says there is scientific research going on in these fields right now. Telepathy is one such area. “You’re going to be able to capture a thought in its… Continue reading

Recently, a slogan I created went viral. Since my area of (day job) expertise is how we use networks to learn and collaborate, I thought I might talk about how that happened, and what its path to fame can tell us about information flow in networks. Today, I want to just set the story up.… Continue reading

In instructional design “gating items” are items on tests which, if not answered or performed correctly, cause failure of the test as a whole. As a simple example, imagine a driving test that starts in a parking lot with the car parked. The driving test has a lot of elements — stopping at stop signs,… Continue reading

From an interview on the World Economic Forum site (which is surprisingly good). A description of how a small change to an invitation email increased pass rates on police recruitment exam: Small, contextual factors can have impacts on people’s performance. In this particular case, there is literature to suggest that exams for particular groups might… Continue reading