Hapgood

A couple years back, in 2014, Ward Cunningham wrote a piece on wiki called “Internet of Broken Things”. After dealing with the failure of a home sensor network he wrote: This is how the internet of things will work. All the things will be interesting. We will think we own them because we will have Continue reading

The National Academies were incorporated by the government at various times — I think the Sciences (NAS) was incorporated by President Lincoln, and the other academies sometime after that. (I know, a deep history here). They serve the public interest in a number of ways, but one of the more prominent is they gather experts Continue reading

A short note about something that occurred to me today, one that will only make sense to people who have been following my Wikity project. When I first started to play around with Wikity as a PLE (Personal Learning Environment), I would usually follow this pattern: I’d set aside time for a writing session.  I’d Continue reading

Keynote given at Metropolitan State’s TLTS conference in Denver, CO.  A Sense of Audience I’m going to start by telling a story about how I got here. I’ve mentioned this on my blog once or twice, but this is the first time I’ve told this end to end in this way. I got here because Continue reading

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