In getting ready to present federated wiki at OpenEd and I’ve edited  the “Arthur Clarke” scenario down to seven minutes and fifteen seconds, and crunched it all together. The set up for this video is this: Arthur Clarke has some insights in 1950 about global positioning systems. He doesn’t realize that other people are working… Continue reading

by Mike Caulfield. Keynote delivered at NWACC 11/6/2014. Part 1: Sputnik I’m going to start this keynote by stealing a story from Steven Johnson, a historian of technology. Johnson uses the invention of GPS as a case study in how innovation happens. It’s his favorite story and he’s told it everywhere from a TED Talk… Continue reading

I should be prepping for the NWACC keynote. — it’s in a couple hours. But of course in going over my notes and reading some recent posts (particularly this one by Bonnie Powers) I suddenly doubt the route I’ve chosen into my subject (which is, of course, federated wiki). Why? Because I talk about the… Continue reading

Keynote given at NWeLearn, 10/23/14. Originally titled “Taking Education Out of Airplane Mode” Speaker’s note: I write unique pieces for presentations I give. I’ve not yet learned to economize and give set presentations to multiple audiences. And I approach presentation as articles, revising them mercilessly over months and months. So word of warning, the early… Continue reading

I mentioned a couple times that I don’t know what to do when something like GamerGate comes up. It’s horrific, absolutely. It’s corrosive to a general faith in humanity and a reminder that INTERNET FREE-ANCE!!1!™ is only as useful as people’s ability to use the Internet without having to endure trauma-inducing levels of terrorism. I… Continue reading

TL 521 has had a lot of struggles as a class. It’s a hybrid class, with half of it at observations at far flung schools, many of them scheduled overlapping other student commitments. The wiki we are using has crashed multiple times, lost student work, and dropped authentication without warning. All the same, the students… Continue reading

I’ve been talking a lot about our fascination with “StreamMode”, the current dominant mode of social media. StreamMode is the approach to organizing your thoughts as a history, integrated primarily as a sequence of events. You know that you are in StreamMode if you never return to edit the things you are posting on the… Continue reading

“It is important to me, for example, that as a body of work grows it becomes even more easy to contribute to it, not less. Wikipedia, for all its accomplishments, has not achieved this dynamic.” A line from an email discussion I was involved in earlier today. Not my line: someone else’s.  Made me think.… Continue reading

In technosolutionist circles, the belief is that given the right algorithm we can make use of the massive amounts of information on the web to predict and solve problems. To the technosolutionist, the recent failure of advanced epidemic detecting tools to spot an ebola outbreak until a day after it had been announced by Guinea’s… Continue reading

The video below, entitled “Why the Blackboard Wiki Is Not a Wiki”, shows how amazingly boneheaded Blackboard’s wiki tool design is. At the heart of the boneheadedness? The core idea of a wiki is that collaboration happens by way of making things quick, and seeing error and omission as community-creating opportunities, and encouraging iteration Blackboard, on… Continue reading