Hapgood

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

I’ve talked a bit about federated wiki in terms of the way it enables collaboration with others across institutional boundaries. But as we go into Happening #2, I’m gaining more appreciation with the way that it allows for collaboration with ourselves across temporal boundaries. That may sound really muddled. But consider the scenario I demonstrate Continue reading

[T]he problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt. So the bad writers tend to go on and on writing crap and giving as many readings as possible to sparse audiences. These sparse audiences consist mostly of other bad writers waiting their turn to go Continue reading

As we plan for our second fedwiki happening the differences between federated wiki and wiki become, well, stranger. If you’ve been following the story thus far, you know that federated wiki is pretty radical already. As with wiki, people converse through making, linking, and editing documents. But because each person has a seperate wiki, there Continue reading

So I’m super excited to announce we’ll be doing a Fedwiki Happening on Teaching Machines with Audrey Watters helping to facilitate. If you don’t know what federated wiki is yet, the short answer is its a form of wiki where everyone has  personal wiki that magically links to other wikis to form a federation. People Continue reading