Not a Startup Guy, In a Startup World

A couple of years ago I got into startups. Not as a participant but as an observer. It was interesting to look at the systems at play in that space, to learn the dynamics and the culture and to try and interrogate how and why certain ideas seemed to dominate that world. It was definitely …

The Dynamics of Static Sites

For the last few websites I've worked on I've utilised this thing called a Static Site generator, and one in particular, Jekyll. I've wanted to post about this for a little while because it's honestly been one of the best things I've done in along time. It's forced me to deeply think about webdesign in …

A Better Academic Authoring Environment

I'm putting all this out there beause I'd love to hear from anyone with suggestions or experiences with something similar. If you've got some nifty plugins, themes or code I could use, feel free to recommend them! I'm happy to provide feedback on how it goes and share the work on this openly. Content is …

Contribution to 2016: Civitas

The start of the year sees a flurry of posts full of predictions and promises. Last year I thought that rather than do that I would post what I planned on contributing to, and I want to do that again this year. Last years contributions went a bit like this: Distributed systems - went well …

Empowering the Node & Avoiding Enclosure

This is my presentation from the dLRN15 conference - Empowering the Node & Avoiding Enclosure. Below you can watch a audio of the talk + slides or just the slides below. In this presentation I've really tried to highlight the perceived problem with current online technologies and practices, distilling it down to the concept of …

Personality in Teaching: Content, Activity & Relationships

Martin Weller’s post on the role of personality in education has stimulated a lot of really interesting conversation and dialogue (it’s particularly interesting to see so many comments on a blog post these days!). I’ve ummed and ahhed about writing a response to Martin’s post but I honestly couldn’t articulate what I was trying to …

The Quiet Page & Linking the Web

A number of recent posts and articles I've read discuss the concept of linking - Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?, Beyond Conversation, Follow-up: Reader as Link Author, How we might link and The Web We Have to Save. Each in their own way has resurfaced an idea that I had a number of …

Moving. Writing. Learning.

This blog has been a bit quiet of late. It's not for a lack of things to say or lack of things being done, but rather a lack of time to do so. In the past week and a bit I've started a new blog and re-evaluating my online presence - where things live, who …

Moving Beyond The Default

Default. According to Homer Simpson the two sweetest words in the English dictionary. https://youtu.be/RhvIISDoarU To me though, default is more insidious. It represents choices denied and the removal of control by eliminating the opportunity for discussion to occur at the place and time it should - before decisions are made. This post was triggered by …

The FedWiki Happening

Over the last month or so I've been participating in the #fedwikihappening that the amazing Mike Caulfield has been running. I'll admit I crashed the party a little, asking for an invite having seen a Twitter conversation I wasn't part of, but I've been following Mike's work for a while and was really keen to …