Hapgood

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

  • Gruber: “It’s all the Web”

    Tim Owens pointed me to this excellent piece by John Gruber. Gruber has been portrayed in the past as a bit too in the Apple camp; but I don’t think anyone denies he’s one of the sharper commentators out there on the direction of the Web. He’s also the inventor of Markdown, the world’s best Continue reading

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  • The First Web Browser Was a Storage-Neutral App

    ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m just toying with this idea, not asserting it at this point. But part of me is very interested in what happens when we view the rise of the app as not a betrayal of the original vision of the web, but as a potential return to it. I don’t see many Continue reading

  • Teaching the Distributed Flip [Slides & Small Rant]

    Due to a moving-related injury I was sadly unable to attend ET4Online this year. Luckily my two co-presenters for the “Teaching the Distributed Flip” presentation carried the torch forward, showing what recent research and experiementation has found regarding how MOOCs are used in blended scenarios. Here are the slides, which actually capture some interesting stuff Continue reading

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  • Unhosted

    One of the great outcomes of the storage-neutral-app firefight (besides Tom’s  lyrical comment) was Pat Lockley pointing me to the Unhosted site. As we move from an era of browser-based web apps to one that is increasingly about client-side/server-backed apps, one of the very real concerns people have is whether hackability disappears. Unhosted is very fringe, Continue reading

  • The Route To Personal Cyberinfrastructure Is Through Storage-Neutral Apps

    Jim’s got a great summary of the larger idea behind UMW Domains (written by Ryan Brazell) up on his site. The core idea — personal cyberinfrastructure — is one I buy into, but at the same time the current mechanisms for it (cPanel, personal servers, and the like) seem clunky and not poised for greater adoption Continue reading

  • Doing Big Data and Analytics Right

    From the Chronicle, a surprisingly good article on Big Data: This month Mr. Lazer published a new Science article that seemed to dump a bucket of cold water on such data-mining excitement. The paper dissected the failures of Google Flu Trends, a flu-monitoring system that became a Big Data poster child. The technology, which mines people’s flu-related search queries to Continue reading

  • Like Tumblr for Wikis (Sample Implementation. Downloadable Code.)

    I radically simplified the approach to wiki article reuse. I think for the better. I’d like you to tell me what you think: http://screencast.com/t/UScpp3Zfc0eV Keep in mind this is only the start. The idea would be to build communities around the reuse. So, for example, when your page gets rewiki’d a central system logs that, Continue reading

  • Truth, Durability, and Big Data

    Ages ago in MOOCtime there was this media think-nugget going around about the glories of Big Data in MOOCs. It reached its apex in the modestly titled BBC piece “We Can Build the Perfect Teacher“: One day, Sebastian Thrun ran a simple and surprising experiment on a class of students that changed his ideas about Continue reading

  • Goal: Make Wiki Page Reuse as Easy and Natural as Reblogging on Tumblr

    Short post, but a note at where I’m at on the wiki project. I’m a maddeningly circular developer, because I write code to help me think about problems. The Dokuwiki work is coming along well, given the amount of time I actually have to give to it, and given I took a detour to make Continue reading

  • Google Apps For Education Sued For Data-Mining Students

    Google is not supposed to be building profiles of students for advertising purposes. It’s looking like they did. The suit maintains that, because such non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail users never signed on to Google’s terms of services, they can never have given, in Google’s terms, “implied consent” to scan their email. The Continue reading