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The Original Factory Education Was a Personalized Learning Experiment
“From the perpetual agency of this System, idleness cannot exist… [T]he whole is a beautiful picture of the most animated industry, and resembles the various machinery of a cloth manufactory, completely executing their different offices, and all set in motion by one active engine.” — Rev. Cordiner, describing the popular Madras System of education in Continue reading
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Interface, and the First Sixty Minutes
I’ve been struggling to explain SFW interface to people. Which is weird. Because I actually think the interface is one of the stronger features. I have come to wish I could surf the web in SFW instead of say Chrome. It solves a bunch of issues Ted Nelson tried to solve but more elegantly and Continue reading
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#indiewebcamp
The first surprise about IndieWebCamp were the people. This is going to sound like I was expecting Really Bad Things, but you have to remember this is Portland. What’s “indie” in most cities is considered corporate in Portland. I don’t know how to explain this, except to say when I went out to dinner with Continue reading
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Explaining Federation Through Family Movie Night, Part I
I’ve been struggling to explain to people why federation is necessary. In practice, federation doesn’t get you much until there are people around to federate with. Worse, it doesn’t get you anywhere until there is valuable material in your federation. Valuable material takes time to produce, and people aren’t going to spend that time making Continue reading
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NeoVictorian Computing, and the Cult of the Lowest Common Denominator
M. C. Morgan (my first friend met through federated wiki) pointed me to this series on NeoVictorian Computing by the guy who wrote Tinderbox, a Mac-only hypertext computing tool. The primary point he makes throughout the series is how our fetish for “transparent computing” is making both users and programmers miserable. What do I mean Continue reading
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Two Minute Federated Wiki: Sharing Across Unrelated Wikis
With Federated Wiki you can benefit from the work people are doing on completely unrelated sites, and use their work to pull together a site of your own very quickly. Continue reading
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Personalized Learning, 1700s Style
I’ll throw this into the discussion. This customized level of challenge idea has been around a long time. The sociological implications are far from neutral. See below for a circa 1800 example from Gregor Girard’s school: (from The Mother Tongue, English translation published 1848) “Providence does not give to all alike” — call me cynical, but Continue reading
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Why Personalized Learning Fails
There’s a great discussion going on about the myth of personalized learning, both at Dan Meyer’s blog and at Benjiman Riley’s. Michael Feldstein has also stepped into the conversation, pointing out the two (or more) definitions that seem to be in play here. I’ve covered this area more fully before (see last year’s Are Conversation Continue reading
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Smallest Federated Wiki as a Universal JSON Canvas
Watching Alan Kay talk today about early Xerox PARC days was enjoyable, but also reminded me how much good ideas need advocating. As Kay pointed out repeatedly, explaining truly new ways of doing things is hard. People looked at the PARC stuff, and many saw a solution to this problem or that problem. But that Continue reading
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One Minute Smallest Federated Wiki: Understanding Recent Changes
A whirlwind tour of how to read the Recent Changes, and how to include the sites you want in it. We don’t touch on the icons much here, or how to get to specific version of pages, or what “people who touched that page” means (hint: it means they have a copy of the page). Continue reading
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