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). But we do show you how to find new pages and changes in your chosen neighborhood.
Link resolution in Smallest Federated Wiki can be confusing — depending on the page you are linked from links can go different places.
This video shows simple link resolution from journal history. A second video showing slightly more complex scenarios where pages not in the journal are suggested as alternatives is forthcoming.
When you click a link to go to a page, sometimes it’s not from the site you want to see. Here’s how to look at a specific site’s version of a page. (Hint: it’s all about the favicons!)
I’m going to start documenting how to do various things in Smallest Federated Wiki. These little tidbits will be helpful to people who have already started using SFW but may not know some of its less obvious features.
In this video, I deal with the problem of getting SFW pages you found through Twitter and other means onto your site. Often when you find a site in SFW your “left-most” context is your site, because that’s where you came from. When coming from Twitter, or a link in an email, or while browsing a site you “collapsed” (more on that later) you need a way to get another site’s page into your site’s context so you can fork it. It sounds complex; it’s easy in practice. Check out the video.
In general I describe myself as a blogger, partially because my work title (Director of Blended and Networked Learning) just leads to too many questions, and partially because it ties together some experiences I’ve had over the past decade or so. Blogger is not quite accurate even there — the work I did with Blue Hampshire was technically more about running a pretty volatile online community than blogging, but it’s good enough description most days, even if blogging consumes only 20 or so minutes a day.
The other reason I describe myself as a blogger, though, is that after you blog for a while, you start “thinking in blog”. Your mind is writing blog posts everywhere, constantly trying to synthesize new experience into a meaningful blend of narrative and exposition. It changes you, mostly for the better.
I can’t find the reference now, but I read something recently that argued that the difference between the way a botanist looks at a flower and the way a layperson does is that the botanist looks at the flower with a question. And the point the person was making is when you write every day you start to look at everything with a question. In a way, daily writing defamiliarizes the world to you and makes it more difficult, because thoughts must be reconstructed for others who do not have reference to your experience or share your dispositions.
That said, however, different forms accomplish this in different ways, and are suited to different sorts of things. Blogging is a great tool in that it pushes you to see posts as steps in a journey to a current (and future) understanding. You link to past posts. You watch your thinking evolve. It also places you into a conversation with other bloggers, so that you understand how your conceptions map on to a larger communal consensus or disagreement. I could go on, but you get the point: the reverse-chronology structure of blogging combined with trackbacks, comments, blogrolls, and RSS pushes us to see knowledge in a certain way.
It’s been interesting playing with wiki the past few months, because what I’ve realized is that while I’ve used wikis (and taught with wikis) I’ve seldom *thought* in wikis.
As a simple example, I’ve done stuff with TV Tropes before. In TV Tropes you give certain tropes (repeated conventions) names, for instance Incredibly Obvious Bomb. Over time this library builds up to where many scenes in movies can be quickly analyzed with these ideas. You remember, for instance, the scene in Casablanca where the Jerk With a Heart of Gold makes an Iconic Song Request of his Black Best Friend?
If that seems silly, it’s not. Not in the least. By “chunking” large, complex observations and histories into terms and pages you make it possible for people to see patterns that would otherwise be invisible. The fact is, you’ll find that Jerks With a Heart of Gold tend to make a *lot* of Iconic Song Requests. That’s kind of interesting, right? It may be even more interesting that Jerks With a Heart of Gold often have Black Best Friends in a bizarre (and racist) form of Pet the Dog.
What’s Pet the Dog? Pet the Dog is another nexus of ideas. Here’s a snippet of that page:
This term was coined by cynical screenwriters, basically meaning: show the nasty old crank petting a dog, and you show the audience, aw shucks, he’s all right after all. Often used to demonstrate that a Jerkass is really a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, or, if more limited, that the character is goal oriented rather than sadistic and/or thoroughly evil. If used as an Establishing Character Moment then you skip right past the jerkass phase. Of course, this doesn’t mean specifically petting a cute animal, but any sign of nobility within a morally ambiguous character.
Sub Tropes include Photo Op With The Dog, Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas, Morality Pet (a character’s entire relationship with a villain is one long Pet the Dog moment), andAndrocles Lion (where the dog would later reward the one who petted him/her).
Now you can ask a meaningful question — to what extent is having a Black Best Friend in a film an instance (or non-instance) of Pet the Dog. Does that change over time? That’s a question in a simple sentence that as complex as any cultural studies article abstract, but rather than being established through a specialized jargon that implicitly references certain touchstone works it accomplishes the same density of meaning through simple parts well connected.
So here’s the thing — I’ve known this is the point of much wiki when reading things like TV Tropes. But I’ve never made use of it when running a class wiki (or co-designing a wiki with an instructor for a class). We’ve sat down and written encyclopedias, collaborative class notes, community resource mapping sites — all of which are excellent uses of wiki.
But we’ve never asked the class to develop a new language in the study of a subject, or to extend an old one. Instead, we gravitate to more traditional modes of academic production, but wikified.
Does anyone have examples of a class producing their *own* analytical language through wiki, TV Tropes style? If you do, can you share links in the comments?
I’ve been writing a short two or three paragraph article a day on the Hidden History of Online Learning federated wiki. Usually I’ll start by dropping something I kinda-sorta know about educational technology into Google, do ten minutes research, and write it up.
It’s amazing what you find in that short amount of time. The subject I chose today was Pressey’s Automatic Teacher, invented in the 1920s and considered by some to be the first modern “teaching machine”. I had heard about it, but knew almost nothing. But the internet is a lovely thing: in short order, I came across this adverstisement in a journal article on the subject:
I’m fascinated by how much this echoes our current rhetoric, right down to the fact the advertisement can’t settle on whether it’s a tool for teaching, testing, or educational research. Of course, it can serve all three purposes, but the stuff I’ve read about Pressey seems to indicate that he really wanted it to be seen as a teaching and research machine, not a testing one, and it was economic necessity that pushed the testing frame to the forefront. It’s not too difficult to find history repeating itself in this regard (Are ePortfolios a teaching or assessment tool? Both! Sure. But as time goes on, however, the teaching mission gets buried under assessment needs…).
I’ll also take this opportunity to ask you to join the Hidden History of Online Learning project. It’s a great way to have an excuse to do enjoyable research for fifteen or twenty minutes a day while working on a federated wiki. Federation is the future, and you get to learn about it while studying the past. Mind blown? Leave me a comment below and I’ll get you set up. I’m including a video on “Your First Five Minutes in Smallest Federated Wiki” below, so you see how easy it is once I give you an account.
The video below shows what the process of collaboration looks like from the student end of SFW. Note that in many ways it seems like pretty standard collaboration, with two major differences.
First, the student edits their own copy of pages instead of editing communal pages. This solves an awful lot of problems that I’ll ennumerate at a later time.
Second, the student collaborates with people not by virtue of some externally or internally defined group membership, but rather by the ever expanding and sometimes shrinking “neighborhood” which adds sites to the reading/workspace based on the authors and curators of pages the student has viewed/edited.
The take-away? As a person that has written something close to 2,000 blog posts over the past decade or so, for me the best description is that it is some combination of blogging and wiki. The stuff you do is very wiki-like: recursive writing/editing, collaborative knowledge building, etc. But the way you do it is to build out your own site. You are engaged in building the sort of personal site you want, and you don’t need to get anyone’s permission for that.
The combination allows for some of the personal vibrancy (and diversity) of blogging while engaged in very un-bloglike, recursive, news-peg-less activities. And just as with blogging communities, the sum here ends up being much greater than it’s parts, over time taking on a life of its own.
P.S. I know Rolin Moe will *love* my use of the work curation here, but we lack another word for the process of collecting web materials into our own spaces and annotating them. So there you go. FWIW, web surfing isn’t really surfing either. 😉
Just now I clicked on link to an article on Jef Raskin (designer of the Macintosh interface) and received the above result. The article was an interview with him just before he died in 2005, and I was interested on his take on modern interface.
Instead it’s just more link rot.
Of course, my head goes straight to the idea of federated wiki. In federated wiki people are encouraged to fork your stuff to their own server. Read something you like? Fork it.
Getting your stuff forked is a good recipe for for making it more durable over time. If you disappear, your articles won’t. It’s kind of like 1960s psychedelic pop singles — all these bands that made just a record or two disappeared, but their music is still accessible to us because hundreds of people bought those albums and stored them in their record collection. Later on, 1980s compilations such as Rubble pulled those yard sale records together, and published compilation records that went out, again, to thousands of houses into their personal collections.
And it’s that reason why we haven’t lost short-run 45 rpm gems like The Factory’s “Red Chalk Hill”:
Whereas on the other hand an interview written up a few years ago and posted on the internet is gone forever.
Ephemerality can be cool. It’s not always a bad thing. But in general I’d like my blog articles to have a life after I shut down the server, and my music to have a life after last.fm goes under. If either thing happens it’s likely to be the people who copied them who made that happen, not me.
Matt Crosslin, who’s a pretty smart guy, has an article in the EduGeek Journal about dual-layer MOOCs. This is an idea I’ve been pursuing for quite some time, and studied for a bit but never quite was able to pull together.
What even readers of this blog may not realize is that its been this chain of failure and partial success that’s got me to the idea of federation as a model for coursework instead of syndication. It seemed zig-zaggy at the time, but in hindsight there’s been a pretty clear trajectory in my thought from the idea of the “xMOOC as the chewy center of the cMOOC” through the “Feed-Forward” Psych MOOC we launched at Keene State College to the research on non-communication in blended xMOOCs, to the ultimately aborted Water106 project (a failed project which strangely seems to be inspiring more people than projects of mine that have launched successfully — weird what a mockup can do).
Anyway, Matt identifies the right problem around authentic PBL work in MOOCs and comes up with a good analogy, but I think selects the wrong implementation model. First, let me restate his analogy, because I think it’s worthwhile:
In order to do this, we would have to stop thinking about group work in the typical ways we usually do: instructor assigns groups, forces all people in groups, and groups never change the whole course. We need to think of these groups in a different paradigm. If you are familiar with river tubing, think of how groups form in that activity. For those who are not familiar, here is a visual:
As individual tubers float down the river, they drift in and out of groupings as needed. Maybe they stick with people they knew the whole time. Maybe they make new friends as they go and the group grows. Maybe one group wants to go look at something that the others don’t. But the groupings of tubes are constantly changing, growing, and morphing. Some stay solo, some stay in the same group. But as the river (the course) flows, the structure is flexible enough to change over time. (I wish I could find an animated gif of river tubers to better illustrate).
But then Matt veers toward a Reddit-style solution:
So, layer this flexible grouping system on top of a Reddit system that allows learners to create and up-vote learner content (that can then be used as the problems in PBL), and allow the groups to form around these ideas. It would kind of be like tubers that discuss what drinks to bring, then putting the ones that won the vote into coolers, and those various coolers end up being what draws in the groups of tubers (which would of course change and morph as they float down the river).
I haven’t tubed much, so maybe I’m mis-reading the metaphor. But it seems to me the hard part of the problem is not the initial organization of groups here, but that behavior in the last parenthetical clause:
(which would of course change and morph as they float down the river).
Solve that, and work backwards. And what you need for that to happen is not a centralized voting and sorting mechanism, but a way that people can easily be exposed to second and third order nodes, and move easily through those networks.
How does federated content solve this? In the case of federated wiki it’s simple — when I pull someone else’s work into my own space, I become connected to the people who have worked on that document. They enter my “neighborhood”. Now search, link resolution, recent changes and other features include products from them — writing, data, visualizations, problem sets, whatever. As good and useful products travel through the network they create connections which can be further explored. Move off that content, and on to different content and my neighborhood morphs, automatically.
Note the difference — people don’t vote on content around which to create groups — rather they *use* the content, and for each person that use connects them to the creators of that content in specific ways.
Let me show you how this might work — check out the five minute screencast below.
http://screencast.com/t/fRlahVd0EK5
If you haven’t watched the screencast and you are interested in technology to support self-organizing groups, I can’t emphasize enough that you really need to watch the screencast now.
Federation is hard to get in theory, but relatively easy to get in practice. But getting it is essential. Just as syndication formed the basis for the explosion of creativity in online pedagogy over the past ten years, federation is likely to provide the basis for the next decade of experimentation if we’re willing to spend the time to wrap our head around it.
I’m starting up a federated wiki on the “Hidden History of Online Learning” to attempt to demonstrate to what the experience is like.
If any readers of his blog would like to participate, I’m willing to set up a federated wiki for you on my S3 instance. I’ve already set sites up for Audrey Watters and Jim Groom.
The site URL will look like audrey.hapgood.net:3000 where “audrey” is your name. Leave a comment below if you would like to participate, indicating your preferred URL.
You will be obligated to write a 1 to 2 paragraph article on the wiki, or to substantially revise another 1 to 2 paragraph article on the wiki. That’s it. Ten minutes work.
Leave a comment below!
Hapgood 