Hapgood

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

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