Hapgood

Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

  • Design Patterns and the Coming Revolution in Course Design

    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

  • Gamergate

    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

  • TL521 Is Rocking it on Federated Wiki

    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

  • What Iterative Writing Looks Like (and why it’s important)

    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

  • Easier

    “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

  • Quality of Input

    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

  • Maybe the reason people don’t use LMS collaboration tools is the tools are not collaborative

    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

  • Course Management Workflow in Federated Wiki

    One of the persistent issues in using a networked learning approach to things is the workflow. I’m a couple weeks into using Federated Wiki in my edtech course, and I thought I’d share my methods. Visualizing Participation Currently, I load up students into the neighborhood by clicking on group pages, and then hit the Recent Continue reading

  • Convivial Tools and Connected Courses

    Excellent, must-read post from the Terry Elliot in the Connected Courses conversation which pulls in ideas of Christopher Alexanders’ System A (the organic, generative) and System B (the industrial, dead). Key grafs (for me at least): I have a lot of questions about whether any of the web-based tools we are using actually fit the mold Continue reading

  • The LMS in Historical Perspective

    Is it ironic that I’m posting on this topic partially to avoid the mundane process of setting up Blackboard trainings for a bit longer? Probably not. In any case, Jared Stein has a post up about the LMS and his personal perspective on why it turned out the way it did, and the crux of Continue reading