[IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated into global Sugar update [pr mockup]

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Carol Lerche <cafl at msbit.com> wrote:
> Martin, we have keepers of the wiki.  Most successful social software aroung
> -- facebook.  Arguably a CMS.  But as to the wiki, I say ... delicious. :-)

I use Facebook at the request of others, but I don't like it. LinkedIn
works much better for me. I particularly like the variety of ways of
contacting people, and of asking questions of one's network. YMMV.

You can get software suites that include Wiki, social networking,
forums, and lots more features. I don't know enough about any of them
to recommend one over the others, but I expect that there are people
here with experience as users and implementors so that we could have a
useful discussion about them.

Moodle is one of them. I didn't like its Wiki when I was using it last
year. It did a terrible job of handling simultaneous edits, making one
of the editors lose data. The workaround was to copy a page to a text
editor before making changes, and then copy the whole page back.

> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 5:41 PM, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Carol Lerche <cafl at msbit.com> wrote:
>> > The reactions to my post remind me of the story of the lumberjacks
>>
>> Fantastic story. However, in practice a CMS is often inferior to a
>> wiki in that it appoints "keepers".

I find them neither superior nor inferior to each other, but suited to
entirely different purposes.

>> The cook amongst the lumberjacks
>> has to cook daily and cannot decide not to feed a particular
>> lumberjack. The keepers of the CMS can get antagonistic, or just
>> ignore their duties, and that just kills community collaboration.
>>
>> Same with CVS and SVN - the centralisation spawns politics.
>> Distributed control is the right thing -- for all its flaws, the wiki
>> *social dynamic* rules -- you get lots of contnet, perhaps a bit
>> disorganised, and a thriving community around it. CMSs are
>> hierarchical and mere observation shows what they do to community.
>>
>> All the observations that Linus Torvalds (in various flamerwars :-) )
>> has made on the social and political flaws of CVS and SVN apply
>> squarely to classic CMSs. Clay Shirky's "Designing social software"
>> essay is also relevant here.
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>>
>> m
>> --
>>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>>  - ask interesting questions
>>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
>>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>
>
>
> --
> "The water won't clear up 'til we get the hogs out of the creek." -- Jim
> Hightower
>
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