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

Michael Feldstein has a must-read post on interoperability and learning management systems, the sort of writing we used to call nuanced and detailed but are now contractually obligated to call a “long-read”.  It’s probably an “explainer” too, for that matter, from one of the best explainers of what-the-real-roadblocks-are around. This post is primarily a nudge… Continue reading

It’s quite possible that 2015 is to annotations what 2004 was to self-publishing. As annotations move mainstream, wiki can make them better. Take Pinboard, which can be seen as a rudimentary annotation system. In Pinboard you read a page and write a summary, or disagreement, or whatever. It looks like this: Pinboard as it stands.… Continue reading

We have developed this new feature in federated wiki called Rosters. I think the implications of it are pretty big for how fedwiki develops. I want to tell you about it. So let’s start at the beginning. People have had trouble connecting with one another on federated wiki in the happenings. The architecture of federated wiki… Continue reading

I used to think the main problem with Blackboard was that it applied an enterprise solution to a consumer software problem. I increasingly think the main problem is that it’s just lousy enterprise software. Case in point: today we learned that all of the YouTube videos that all of our professors had embedded in Blackboard using… Continue reading

I talk a lot about the open pedagogy case for federated wiki, but not much about the OER/OCW case for it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good fit for the problems one hits in open materials reuse. Here’s how you currently reuse something in WordPress, for example. It’s a pretty horrific process. Log into… Continue reading

My daughter, who is amazing by the way, introduced me to John Green a couple years ago. Her face was always in her phone, and I thought geez, Katie, get off Facebook. And I think I actually said that. To which she replied “Why would I be on Facebook? I’m watching John and Hank Green… Continue reading