People say “unbundling” is going to happen in education, and I’m here to say that, yeah, it probably is. But far from solving student problems, my guess is it will create a whole new set of student problems, most of them resulting from the fact that making unbundling easy for the student is likely to… Continue reading

So I’m running a course this fall, and those on fedwiki are welcome to participate. The way the course works is this. For the first half of the class my educational technology students will be investigating the nature and impact of the coming Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. They come from multiple disciplines so they will… Continue reading

A post on Skift introduces a new term: “hate-selling”. You see it in travel where “conversion managers have run amok” and you are charged absurd combinations of little charges at the precise amounts analytics says you will tolerate. Some examples of hate-selling in the travel industry from the article: Car rental sites with crazy surcharges… Continue reading

Brad DeLong has a perceptive take on what is missing from websites today. He is inspired I think by Vox.com’s approach to news, but his advice is also an excellent guide to some things we we are trying to do with the federated wiki project. In a mock Socratic dialogue, DeLong has Socrates identify the… Continue reading

I’ve referred in the past to the phenomenon of “affinity posting”. The idea of affinity posting is you post not to spread information or start a discussion, but to demonstrate your membership in certain affinity groups. You’re a fan of Doctor Who or Twilight. You’re a beer drinker. You’re a teacher who belives the lecture… Continue reading

Yesterday I published one of those unholy been-in-the-drafts-forever posts on issues of linking. Here I see if I can make the point a bit more cleanly. When we started getting people to use federated wiki in December, I thought the default sort of editing would be of the main article. You write a piece on… Continue reading

There’s a follow-up to this article, now, which explains the federated wiki angle to this more clearly.. “Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did.” – Ted Nelson, eulogizing Doug… Continue reading

I have a present for you hackers out there. I spent the last couple weekends coding up a standalone federated wiki reader that operates purely in javascript. Here it is: reader.htm. Now here’s what you can do if you know how to program. You can download that file, and and start to play around with… Continue reading

It’s become trivial to find these examples, I suppose, but here’s some snapshots from today, around 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Twitter Facebook (snapshot via @eliparser, I use Facebook maybe once a month myself). I’m curious why this happens (and maybe I should read Eli’s book?). In this case it’s not a Friendly Web issue —… Continue reading

Hoisted from the journal: David Graeber has a far too long essay in The Baffler, which is not worth reading in full. In the end, though, it comes to a common but worthwhile point: the structure of research today can’t be open-ended in any real way, due to creeping managerialism, and this kills any possibility… Continue reading