More fascinating research out of China on social media, this time directly related to my obsession with the Garden and Stream models of social media. Roughly, the finding of the study is this: when readers have the option to retweet a message their comprehension of the message falls significantly. The researchers found that: …“repost” did… Continue reading

Leigh Blackall, who was an early advocate of using wiki in education and proponent of projects like WikiEducator, asks the million dollar question: You started out describing a project where you are setting up a WordPress wiki template, to host what I’m presuming to be student-generated-content activity. Without knowing any of the details that led to… Continue reading

I disabled my Facebook account yesterday. Don’t worry, this isn’t quitlit: I’m sure I will return to Facebook sometime in the future, and I’m not going to go off on some long self-righteous rant that I will have to walk back in a month. But the reason I disabled Facebook, roughly, was because in this… Continue reading

I write a lot of things in wiki nowadays, and it’s good. I think better in there, and get away from the web’s echo chamber of endless reactions to reactions. But occasionally wiki is a bit too under the radar. About a year ago I started following a thread of stories on opioid addiction in… Continue reading

Weird things happen when you go from thinking of your website as self expression to thinking about it as a model of your emerging thought — that memex-like collection of things you’ve read and thought and agreed with and disagreed with. One of the things I do periodically is throw search terms at my Wikity… Continue reading

I’ve been thinking a lot about our non-traditional students at Washington State University, especially since seeing Marcia Devlin’s excellent presentation on this demographic at DLRN. Broadly, what the research says is that the students who do best in college are not the brightest and the most creative, but the students that know “How to College”.… Continue reading

Imagine you hired someone on your campus to approach every student on campus who had a full credit load (let’s say 15 credits under the semester system). The job of this person would be this: go up to the student a couple times a day and say “I will pay you $150 to drop one… Continue reading

Yesterday, Roger Schank (famous cognitive scientist and learning theorist) released some of the work he and his team did for Trump University back in 2005 or so. You didn’t know that Roger Schank was involved in Trump University? Well, he was. Trump University’s online materials were designed by the artificial intelligence pioneer and learning theorist… Continue reading

Courtesy of Floyd’s coffee shop in downtown Portland, which hasn’t kicked me out yet, we bring you the latest Wikity Weekend Code update. This weekend’s addition is pretty cool actually. So you know the wiki syntax within Wikity is to use double brackets around the page title to create a link, right, like so: [[Poor… Continue reading

Ari Bader-Natal suggests an excellent idea for bootstrapping a Wikity library. What if you could import the bookmarks you’ve been saving for years in Pinboard, Pocket, or Google Bookmarks? This is actually pretty genius. Initially I worried that it would get people to engage in bookmarking behavior in Wikity, which is what we are trying… Continue reading