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

Today I find this story on my Twitter Feed. A government nuclear facility accidentally sent out some “excess” nuclear material. Whoops! The name of the facility rings a bell though. Haven’t I heard of government installation “Y-12” before? I’m pretty sure there’s been problems there before. I search my personal wiki: Aha! That’s right. I’d… Continue reading

Working on my 83rd idea for my dLRN keynote, because that’s “how I do”. (I’ve also been watching The Wire a lot). Today via David Jones this beautiful piece on systems theory comes to me. It’s from a new book by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi: In our brief summary of the emerging systems… Continue reading

From Times Higher Education today: Moreover, the thesis statement can actually be the enemy of critical enquiry because it straitjackets the writer into a line of argument that has to be defended to the death, blithely bulldozing – or simply ignoring – any tentative “yes, but…” that might get in the way. This is not… Continue reading

So I wasn’t as clear as I might have been yesterday with my post. The main change is not that we’re moving from a constricted notion of the subject being the Cascadia earthquake to a constricted notion of a Zombie disaster. The main change is that we’re broadening out the available options in the class… Continue reading

I had *such* nice project planned out for my class this year. I was told I had a bunch of hard science people and history people, and I came up with this subject of disasters, with this wonderful local focus. We would work with ed tech while researching the coming Cascadia earthquake. Well, I got… Continue reading

I’ve demoed federated wiki to a lot of people now, facilitated two online happenings with it, and I am in the process of teaching my second college class with it. And I would say getting started is the hardest part with it. The big problem is that for federated wiki to act like a wiki… Continue reading

I would be interested to see what would happen if someone reconfigured blog comments as follows. Don’t call them “comments” call it “related pages” or “link annotations” or “Community Links” People have 140 characters and a link box at the end of the page. The way link annotation works is this: You, the reader, read… Continue reading