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.