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

I had a major realization this morning. But first, some background. The Background As you know, I’m making the case that we need to start using websites not just to *talk* but to *think*. This somewhat overstates my case, of course — to talk is to think, and I wouldn’t claim differently. But talking via… Continue reading

The way I use Wikity is to use hypertext to connect and evaluate existing ideas as well as generate new ones. The video below shows what starting your day with this process looks like, and hints (I think) how it could help students of all skill levels to dig deeper into analysis than typical “reader reaction”… Continue reading

Fuzzy Notepad posted Twitter’s Missing Manual today, noting that obscure UI interactions in Twitter often drive people away. Reading through the list they have compiled, however, I don’t think this stuff has much to do with lack of Twitter uptake. If the worst thing users have to deal with is the difference between “@” and… Continue reading

I think on my most popular day on this blog I got about 14,000 hits on a post. Most posts get less than that, but getting 600-800 visitors over the first week is pretty usual, and the visitors are generally pretty knowledgeable people. Yesterday I got a lot of hits on my post asking for… Continue reading

We’re making a push here on both blog and wiki use in classes, but finding that while there’s many posts on this and that blog/wiki project in higher education, that There’s not many lists compiled that show a variety of examples across many disciplines and institutions. Many of the examples we continue to use are… Continue reading

I’ve been thinking lately about the architecture underlying blogs and wiki, how different these architectural choices are (RSS, revision histories, title-as-slug, etc), and whether it’s worthwhile to imagine a world where data flows seamlessly across them. It might not be. They are very different things, with different needs. Wiki and blogs have two different cultures,… Continue reading