Bit of discussion on Twitter today about whether the decentralized web is a pipe dream or a near-term possibility. My response to that is longer than a tweet, so I put it here. Many things about the decentralized web are hard. IPFS, the torrent-like file system that makes servers irrelevant, is pretty geeky right now.… Continue reading

Readers here will have been following my discussion of the use of the Stream as a guiding metaphor for the web. The Stream has its roots in conversation. It organizes communication as a string of sequential events. This is opposed to the Garden, which has its roots in literary culture, and organizes knowledge spatially, as… Continue reading

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be the new (volunteer) EDUCAUSE Review New Horizons editor, starting in January. This is a one year appointment where I get to work with a variety of authors to make sure the New Horizons section of the print magazine continues to give its readers the best possible sense of emerging opportunities… Continue reading

The newest release of Wikity is up on GitHub. There are a few bugs knocked out, but the major change is a shift from “Path” functionality to “Cardbox” functionality. This shift is partial — mostly about terminology at the moment — but will eventually work a bit different as well. Paths in Wikity were sort… Continue reading

This is a proposal on how an approach to community resource building called  “Choral Explanations” could be used to increase retention, based on recent research into the relationship of “belonging” and “mindset”. But we need to cover some background first. Mindset, Motivation, and Belonging We’ve long known that a sense of belonging is crucial to student… Continue reading

All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi! Jim Groom has a sort-of-reply to my post on bringing student-produced OER into the heart of the institution, and Stephen Downes has a reply as well. Neither seems to buy the idea that open practice should be institutionalized. I find this very odd, frankly, and wonder if… Continue reading

I’ve mentioned the Persona Project a few times in passing here. It was for me a major turning point in my life. I had been on a track to get a PhD. in linguistics, and, it being 1996, I ended getting an assistantship as a web developer, building the college’s first web site. At the… Continue reading

From FiveThirtyEight, Arvind Narayanan on the expansion of Internet tracking and fingerprinting (h/t @hypervisible): There is research that shows that when people know they are being tracked and surveilled, they change their behavior. We lose our intellectual freedom. A variety of things we consider important for our civil liberties — say, marriage equality — are things that would… Continue reading

This is a short note — the second I suppose — that follows up on a conversation I had yesterday with George Siemens and David Kernohan. In that conversation I stated I had a technique of using the web that helped to overcome bias rather than push us further back into it. It has, at… Continue reading

This is a story about cognition and social media. But it begins with a bird. Our family has a bird, a green-cheek conure named Derp. His brain is about the size of an M & M (original, not peanut). Derp is a quick learner. You can say “Tidy up, Derp” and he’ll gather all the bottle… Continue reading