A weird thing happened to me on Wikipedia the other day: I was thanked. I wasn’t expecting. Far from it. I ressurected my Wikipedia account a couple months ago, with the idea I’d walk the talk and start fixing inclusivity problems on Wikipedia: everything from women tech pioneers with underdeveloped articles, to black Americans in… Continue reading

I’ve been explaining federated wiki to people for over a year now, sometimes sucessfully and sometimes not. But the thing I find the hardest to explain is the simple beauty of the system. As exhibit A, this is something that happened today: In case you can’t see that, this is what is going on. I’m… Continue reading

The first wiki was described by Ward Cunningham as the “simplest database that could possibly work.” Over the next couple of years, many different functions were built on top of that simple database. Categories (and to some extent, the first web notions of tagging) were built using the “What links here?” functionality. The recent changes… Continue reading

I’ve known about the Berners-Lee Poster Session for a while, but in case you all don’t, here’s the skinny: as late as December 1991 belief in Tim-Berners Lee’s World Wide Web idea was low enough that a paper he submitted on the subject to the Hypermedia ’91 conference in San Antonio, TX was bumped down… Continue reading

I’m just back from some time off, and I’m feeling too lazy to finish reading the McGraw-Hill/Microsoft Open Learning announcement. Maybe someone could read it for me? I can tell you where I stopped reading though. It was where I saw that the software was implemented as a “PowerPoint Plugin”. Now, I think that the… Continue reading

Maybe I’m just not connected to the edublogosphere the way I used to be, but the story of Matt Rognlie should be on every person’s front page right now, and it’s not. So let’s fix that, and talk a bit about remix along the way. (Let me admit the title is a bit of hyperbole,… Continue reading

David Wiley’s Remix Hypothesis[1] is that we won’t see the full impact of digital culture on education until we embrace the central affordance of digital media — its remixability, by which he means the ability of others to directly manipulate the media for reuse, revision, or adaptation to local circumstance. I think this is an important… Continue reading

David Wiley has an excellent post out today on a subject dear to my heart — the failure to take advantage of the peculiar affordances of digital objects. Yeah, I know. Jargon. But here’s a phrase from Bret Victor that gets at what I mean: “We’re computer users thinking paper thoughts”  – Bret Victor You… Continue reading

After the western invention of movable type not much changed for a very long time. It took many many years for people to realize the peculiar possibilities of cheap, printed texts. Gutenberg invents the Western version of movable type in the 1440s, and it’s in use by 1450. He thinks of it in terms of… Continue reading

I was watching Star Trek — the early episodes — with the family a couple weeks ago when it occurred to me: Silicon Valley has got the lesson of the Star Trek computer all wrong. Here’s the Silicon Valley mythology of it, from Google, but it could be from any company there really: So I… Continue reading