Category: Uncategorized

While it’s useful to break down ideas into fine-grained units, collecting the dots, you have to connect them back together again to make sense of them. A collection of dots alone isn’t much use (although just navigating around them can be fun).

People often get carried away when they discover the original vision of hypertext, which involves a network of documents, portions of which are “transcluded” (included via hypertext) into one another. The implication is that readers could follow any reference and see the source material—and granted, this would be transformative. However, there’s a limit to the effectiveness of the knowledge network as a reading experience. “Hypertext books,” online books which are made up of an abundance of interlinked HTML pages, are mostly unpopular.

– Open Transclude

Reading CJ Eller’s quick thought on a community of gardens. The idea is that to a small degree we might be responsible for the upkeep of others’ sites, such that our digital gardens are not quite so fenced off from each other. It sounds like something more than simply commenting on others’ posts. It’s a nice phrase, kind of a form of networked learning.

The garden metaphor is a compelling vision for what a blog can be. It implies that our thoughts can grow over time with the right kind of nurturing care.

[…] But sometimes it feels as though these gardens are enclosed. Sure, a blog might allow comments, but this feels as though we are operating on a layer above the soil. Are others planting anything new, tending to the weeds in our garden, or are they talking to us from the fence that separates our garden from them?

– Community of Gardens — CJ Eller