decentralists

There has been some noise on the web because I’ve kept the password for posting to this weblog a “secret”, and that may go against a decentralist philosophy.

The initial plan was to have this weblog used by the “in person” folks at the conference, and for those who couldn’t attend personally to contribute via their own weblogs (hence decentralism). But such is life. This frankensession took on a life of its own long, long ago. So, let’s adapt a little…

OK. We’re going to try an experiment here, folks. I’m going to temporarily make the password public, and let y’all go nuts with this weblog. I’ve backed it up as of the last post before this one, and will restore that at a moment’s notice if things go awry.

I’m taking advantage of this as a teachable moment. Best case scenario: this weblog takes off and becomes something useful to the community as a whole. Worst case scenario: human nature takes over, and the password is yanked and the weblog restored to its pre-open state. Either way, it will hopefully provide some valuable lessons and information on how a collaborative weblog can(‘t) work.

Some things to know before going ahead and editing:

• Posts are entered in raw HTML. No wikiformatting for now. So if you’re not comfortable entering HTML, and/or aren’t OK with your posts appearing as unformatted text, then you might want to hold off for now.
• Please behave. This is a public forum, as part of a “real” conference session.
• Review the brief instructions before posting.
• Since it’s wide open, I’m leaving it up to you to obey copyright and laws. It might also be a Good Idea to give yourself attribution on any posts you make so we know who did what.

And, if you have any questions, please email me.

Thanks.

– D’Arcy

ps. the password (for now) is “nmc2004″ without the quotes. and I reserve the right to change it at will. complaints will be filed in /dev/null – if you don’t like that, feel free to use your own decentralized hunk of the ‘net.

RC: Someone had to add a line to this… just to prove it works… guess that’s me.

Thanks, RC. Works like a charm… -DLN

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This blog is for the purposes of the "Small Technologies Loosely Joined" presentation at the June 2004 NMC Summer Conference.

This is the place to publish the support (or the lack thereof) for the "Decentralists" in terms of maximizing effectiveness through the use of small, organized, and distributed resources.

In this presentation, we have created three groups who will use a collection of "small" discrete, loosely joined technologies, to argue positions of Centralized, Decentralized, and Mixed implementations of instructional technologies. Participants include those present at our session June 15 as well as other edubloggers who can join us in blogs, wiki, and chat space. Follow the coverage via the EDU_RSS feed.

This weblog is itself a marvel of decentralization. There is no database or abstract content management system used to drive this weblog. It is simply a set of text files in folders on a server, with a single small (less than 15K) perl script figuring out what to do with the text files. Blosxom is beautiful in its simplicity.

Compare this with more centralized weblog solutions, which use dozens of perl modules, external databases, and thousands of lines of code. Blosxom does one thing, really well. It serves text files as a weblog. It doesn’t do image thumbnail generation. It doesn’t do photo galleries. It doesn’t do content management. It just serves text. And it does it quite well. There are plugins available to add on the extra functionality, but they aren’t necessary.

NOTE! This blog is for demonstration purposes only of this presentation– it is about the process of using these technologies– It does not necessarily reflect my philosophy.

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