The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral. Opening keynote for dLRN 2015. Delivered October 16th @ Stanford. Mike Caulfield. post 
Without going to much into what my federated wiki journal is, just imagine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew.
The first thing I do is “de-stream” the article. The article is about Oregon, but I want to extract a reusable piece out of it in a way that it can be connected to many different things eventually. I want to make a home page for this idea or fact.
[Mike tells a step-by-step story]
Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. More importantly note how meaning changes here....Instead of building an argument about the issue this attempts to build a model of the issue that can generate new understandings.
Together these things have meaning far more subtle and rich than one could get from a post or paper, a knowledge keeps its fluidity and continues to generate new insights.
And weirdly, these links were compiled over the space of a year, just by noting things I learned or heard and linking them to things I’d heard before or that others had written. I created a wiki on issues of found art without even knowing it.
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Mike goes on to explain how a stream of news misses the important thinking and linking parts which yields what he has dubbed the garden. Mike says this talk's twitter response was the best of any. Of course that will be gone soon, which is his point.
Mike's best presentation a year ago focused on the mechanics of federation which is a starting point but not the big picture. post