edupunk
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Steal the Package / Idea Mining
One thing I’ve learned from my deep dive into wiki is that wiki is most powerful when seen as a collection of *ideas*. Those ideas might be stories, examples, software patterns, chord progressions, whatever. But when treated as a repository of ideas instead of a collection of publications wiki gains a certain type of power. Continue reading
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Blue Hampshire’s Death Spiral
Blue Hampshire, a political community I gave years of my life to, is in a death spiral. The front page is a ghost town. It’s so depressing, I won’t even link to it. It’s so depressing, that I haven’t been able to talk about it until now. It actually hurts that much. This is a Continue reading
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Reclaim Hackathon
Kin and Audrey have already written up pretty extensive summaries about the Reclaim event in Los Angeles. I won’t add much. Everything was wonderful, and I hope I don’t upset people by choosing one thing over another. But there were a few things for me that stood out. Seeing the Domain of One’s Own development Continue reading
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Napster, “All the Rave” (Notes)
I’m on a staycation of sorts, taking a few days off to do nothing. One of the nothing things I’m doing is reading a couple books, The first, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Science, I’ll talk about later. The other one All the Rave (A history of Napster) I’ve barely started, but held some surprises for me. Continue reading
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The Sieve Manufacture Continues at Udacity
From Udacity last week, regarding the phasing out of free certificates: “We owe it to you, our hard working students, that we do whatever we can to ensure your certificate is as valuable as possible.” and We have now heard from many students and employers alike that they would like to see more rigor in Continue reading
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Gruber: “It’s all the Web”
Tim Owens pointed me to this excellent piece by John Gruber. Gruber has been portrayed in the past as a bit too in the Apple camp; but I don’t think anyone denies he’s one of the sharper commentators out there on the direction of the Web. He’s also the inventor of Markdown, the world’s best Continue reading
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Teaching the Distributed Flip [Slides & Small Rant]
Due to a moving-related injury I was sadly unable to attend ET4Online this year. Luckily my two co-presenters for the “Teaching the Distributed Flip” presentation carried the torch forward, showing what recent research and experiementation has found regarding how MOOCs are used in blended scenarios. Here are the slides, which actually capture some interesting stuff Continue reading
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Why I Don’t Edit Wikis (And Why You Don’t Either, and What We Can Do About That)
Back in the heady days of 2008, I was tempted to edit a Wikipedia article. Tempted. Jim Groom had just released EDUPUNK to the world, and someone had put up a stub on Wikipedia for the term. Given I was involved with the earlier discussions on the term, I thought I’d pitch in. Of course, Continue reading
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A Plan for a $10K Degree: A Response
A new proposal is out from Third Way, authored by Anya Kamenetz. It makes an argument for a radical restructuring of higher education in pursuit of a radically cheaper degree. I plan to write a few blog posts on its proposals. This is the first. There’s many things to like about the plan. I like Continue reading
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The Myth of the All-in-one
Occasionally (well, OK, more than occassionally) I’m asked why we can’t just get a single educational tech application that would have everything our students could need — blogging, wikis, messaging, link-curation, etc. The simple answer to that is that such a tool does exist, it’s called Sharepoint, and it’s where content goes to die. The Continue reading
Hapgood 