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In this post I discuss the nature (and weaknesses) of research in our field. I am broadly sympathetic with the arguments offered by Philip J. MORE
Martin Weller has released his book 25 Years of Ed Tech today. It's a nice read; you are encouraged to check it out. But I have to confess, on having looked at the table of contents, I thought that it captured my career pretty well. Of course, that was not Weller's objective. MORE
Short response to a questionnaire. What is Digital Literacy Digital literacy is a type of literacy, specifically, the type of literacy that arises in the digital context. By 'the digital context' we mean the multimedia and inter-networked context enabled by digital technology. MORE
Alex Usher points out quite correctly that universities will need to be online by the fall. We're not likely to be out of the Covid woods by then, and in-person classes will likely be limited and few. So he proposes this: for each of the (say) 100 courses with the highest enrolment taught across Canadian universities is to create, in common, a large basket of very good online resources which each institution could then incorporate into its own learning platforms. MORE
In my post referencing the ICDE's Global Guidelines: Ethics in Learning Analytics yesterday I said: This document summarizes the considerations of an ICDE working group on learning analytics. MORE
OER stands for 'Open Educational Resources' and as readers know I have been a long-time proponent of free and open learning resources. So why would I call them a fabrication in the title of this post? It's a response to OER @ 16, "Where are You?" MORE
Summary of the talk "Hearables" by Rory McGreal Photo: Nobuko Fujita - What are they – Hunn 2014 – speaker-microphone in-ear with AI - Progressive development from earphones, hearing aids, etc - Can monitor: Blood pressure – stress, excitement Etc. MORE
Summary of talk by Martin Dougiamas at e_learning Africa. I'm just going to focus on open ed-tech. We had a conference about Moodle in this room yesterday. Our mission at Moodle is to improve the world, and we're doing this by making an open source platform. The values drive the project. MORE
Summary of a presentation: The Gen Z Learning Journey From Higher Education To The Workplace Giselle Kovary, M.A., President n-gen People Performance Inc. I want to cover research on Gen Z, especially from a Canadian context. They're more 1996 than 2012. MORE
Summary of the presentation The 2019 National Survey of Online Learning in Canadian Post-secondary Education: Preliminary Results and Implications. Moderated by Tony Bates. This is a follow-up from the first survey from 2017. MORE
This is a really interesting project that allows you to write posts in markdown, MS Word or Jupyter notebooks and publish them in a blog using GitHub pages. No website needed! But the instructions are far from clear, so here's a step-by-step version. Login to GitHub. MORE
Image: Sui Fai John Mak - [link] Martin Weller makes some excellent points in his recent post on connectivism and scale, and they merit a short response. MORE
Note: I received a request for responses to some questions in my email. The questions were quite involved and it would take me quite a while to type answers. But also, in relation to a work-related question, I had been looking at AI-based transcription. MORE
Joanne Jacobs links to an article titled Why I Wish I Hadn’t Gone to College by Keri Savoca. Savoca writes that she would have been a lot better off had she spent the 11 years doing something else. "I MORE
Continuing from Part 1 The story so far In Part 1 I covered the basics of Electron up to and including building executable applications from the Node.js application. MORE
If you expect change, what do you think the “new normal” will be for the average person in 2025? What will have changed most? What will not change much at all? MORE
Summary of a talk by Alan Bostakian, Senior Analyst, TD Bank - Future Ready project Why? The field is moving extremely fast and very soon all professionals will need to have some level of understanding about them. These areas help is in upskilling, instructional design, instructon, coaching, more. MORE
I just want to take a few moments to consider Bryan Alexander's comments about flying to conferences. As most readers know, I have flown to hundreds of academic conferences over the years. So I guess I would be considered a prime offender in this regard. MORE
Summary notes from the Tony Bates presentation at the World Conference on Online Learning , Toronto. Building an Effective Learning Environment What is knowledge, and how does learning occur. Analogy: coal. MORE
Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Saint-Jean-de-Luz, photo by the author. Prompted by a sketch on CBC radio, I was curious this morning to see how Google would answer the question, "Does God exist?" To my mild surprise, the first page of results consisted of statements that God does, in fact, exist. MORE
Summary of 'From Anxiety to Opportunity - The next 20 years of learning innovation', John Baker, CEO, D2L. To look at the future it's helpful to understand the present and where we've been in the past. It's 20 years since D2L started - it has been a bit of a blur. MORE
Getting Ready Connectivism is based on the idea that knowledge is essentially the set of connections in a network, and that learning therefore is the process of creating and shaping those networks. MORE
Responding to an enquiry about assessment. what about the practical work that must be done in the laboratory? It depends on the laboratory, but mostly, students will not be able to reproduce the laboratory at home. During our current crisis, both practice and assessment in the laboratory will have to be postponed. For the future, I have argued that laboratory facilities should be distributed across the community. MORE
The word 'whence' means " from what place, source, or cause", and that is the question I would like to address with respect to the virtue of 'open'. The question is raised in the context of Heather Morrison's recent comments on The Dialectic of Open. MORE
Steve Wheeler posted a nice article called 12 Tips for Great Speaking today.He's s had a lot of experience on the public speaking circuit and there's no doubt his tips hit the mark. I've also had some experience on the circuit, so I thought it would be useful to add to his remarks. MORE
A week ago, by way of a post in the Creative Commons Open Education Platform discussion list, I became aware of the Creative Commons Certificate course, "an in-depth course about CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of the Commons." MORE
Summary of: Digital Learning 4.0: How to Guarantee Measurable Learner Impact Where Others Have Failed Paul Hunter Director Digital Learning, IMD Business School IMD is a business school based in Switzerland. MORE
Summary of a talk at eLearning Africa given by Jef Staes. I'm going to tell a story of why education is failing. We have a design error. This is a battle of two groups of people. There was an information shortage. So industry started schools. But today everything has changed. MORE
I have a lot of sympathy for those working in educational technology positions at schools and universities today because they have been thrust into the unenviable position of converting a recalcitrant faculty of teachers and professors into overnight online instructors. Such a conversion would never have happened without an external force such as Covid-19. MORE
This is the result of a quick survey I did today on the Canadian governments' stance on cryptocurrency, responding to an internal request. This is a policy-neutal document; that is, I don't advocate one way or another for any of the items described below. MORE
This is an unedited transcript created by the Google Sound Recording on the Pixel 4 (the main reason I bought this phone in fact) of the webinar I gave July 30, 2020. Thank you very much Sarah and I'm still waiting for that invitation to speak in Antarctica. Any time you're ready? I'm on a plane. MORE
Someone asked me by email, do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? MORE
Learning with technology is different from learning with textbooks or learning with classroom instruction. In these, the focus is on understanding and remembering. It is content based. The learning objective is defined as mastery of this body of knowledge. MORE
This is in response to the following question from a student in Iran: I am going to start an academic project on the application of connectivism in the context of foreign language acquisition. MORE
With even the World Economic Forum embracing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) I thought it would be an appropriate time to check my own activity and see whether I'm supporting the goals in what I do. MORE
So I don't have an original bone in my body, as proven by this blatant rip-off of Ken Bauer's post of the same title and theme. Three Decade Mark I will turn 60 in April and so far things have turned out pretty well. MORE
Jane Hart has issued her annual call for our top ten e-learning tools, and here's mine. I've named my list 'personal learning tools' because I think of learning as an activity that blends my own activities as a 'student' with those as a 'teacher'. MORE
This is the analysis of the UNESCO OER resolution I provided to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO prior to the discussion and vote on the resolution concerning Open Educational Resources It is now a matter of historical record that the resolution did pass. Here is the final resolution. MORE
Summary of 'Educating the Next Generation Workforce: Preparing Students to Meet Employers’ Expectations' by Susan Aldridge, President (ret), Drexel University There are new types of jobs for students gradauating today, and new learning opportunities in igital labs, etc. MORE
Who is this course for? If you're reading this, then this course is for you. You've demonstrated the main criterion: some degree of interest in the subject matter of the course. You might be thinking: this course looks too difficult, too technical, or too high level. MORE
This is part two of a series. If you haven't read part one, you should do so now. Click here to read part one. OK them welcome back. Let's begin by reviewing what we've done in part one, because it's not obvious. First , we created a repository on GitHub. MORE
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
AUGUST 11, 2020
Jane Hart has issued her annual call for our top ten e-learning tools, and here's mine. I've named my list 'personal learning tools' because I think of learning as an activity that blends my own activities as a 'student' with those as a 'teacher'.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JULY 30, 2020
This is an unedited transcript created by the Google Sound Recording on the Pixel 4 (the main reason I bought this phone in fact) of the webinar I gave July 30, 2020. Thank you very much Sarah and I'm still waiting for that invitation to speak in Antarctica. Any time you're ready? I'm on a plane.
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Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 9, 2020
I just want to take a few moments to consider Bryan Alexander's comments about flying to conferences. As most readers know, I have flown to hundreds of academic conferences over the years. So I guess I would be considered a prime offender in this regard.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 13, 2020
Learning with technology is different from learning with textbooks or learning with classroom instruction. In these, the focus is on understanding and remembering. It is content based. The learning objective is defined as mastery of this body of knowledge.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 11, 2020
In this post I discuss the nature (and weaknesses) of research in our field. I am broadly sympathetic with the arguments offered by Philip J.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
APRIL 5, 2020
I have a lot of sympathy for those working in educational technology positions at schools and universities today because they have been thrust into the unenviable position of converting a recalcitrant faculty of teachers and professors into overnight online instructors. Such a conversion would never have happened without an external force such as Covid-19.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JUNE 1, 2020
Someone asked me by email, do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas?
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MARCH 1, 2020
Martin Weller has released his book 25 Years of Ed Tech today. It's a nice read; you are encouraged to check it out. But I have to confess, on having looked at the table of contents, I thought that it captured my career pretty well. Of course, that was not Weller's objective.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JULY 5, 2020
If you expect change, what do you think the “new normal” will be for the average person in 2025? What will have changed most? What will not change much at all?
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JUNE 19, 2019
The word 'whence' means " from what place, source, or cause", and that is the question I would like to address with respect to the virtue of 'open'. The question is raised in the context of Heather Morrison's recent comments on The Dialectic of Open.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 9, 2019
Summary of: Digital Learning 4.0: How to Guarantee Measurable Learner Impact Where Others Have Failed Paul Hunter Director Digital Learning, IMD Business School IMD is a business school based in Switzerland.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 25, 2019
Summary of a talk at eLearning Africa given by Jef Staes. I'm going to tell a story of why education is failing. We have a design error. This is a battle of two groups of people. There was an information shortage. So industry started schools. But today everything has changed.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 9, 2019
Summary of a presentation: The Gen Z Learning Journey From Higher Education To The Workplace Giselle Kovary, M.A., President n-gen People Performance Inc. I want to cover research on Gen Z, especially from a Canadian context. They're more 1996 than 2012.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 18, 2018
Who is this course for? If you're reading this, then this course is for you. You've demonstrated the main criterion: some degree of interest in the subject matter of the course. You might be thinking: this course looks too difficult, too technical, or too high level.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
APRIL 26, 2019
Image: Sui Fai John Mak - [link] Martin Weller makes some excellent points in his recent post on connectivism and scale, and they merit a short response.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 9, 2019
Summary of the presentation The 2019 National Survey of Online Learning in Canadian Post-secondary Education: Preliminary Results and Implications. Moderated by Tony Bates. This is a follow-up from the first survey from 2017.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
NOVEMBER 26, 2018
This is in response to the following question from a student in Iran: I am going to start an academic project on the application of connectivism in the context of foreign language acquisition.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
APRIL 14, 2019
You sometimes hear me stumble over the word 'value', the way I did in a recent interview. Let me explain why. The word 'value' is widely used in our field and elsewhere.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MAY 15, 2020
Note: I received a request for responses to some questions in my email. The questions were quite involved and it would take me quite a while to type answers. But also, in relation to a work-related question, I had been looking at AI-based transcription.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JANUARY 15, 2019
Continuing from Part 1 The story so far In Part 1 I covered the basics of Electron up to and including building executable applications from the Node.js application.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JANUARY 4, 2019
Short response to a questionnaire. What is Digital Literacy Digital literacy is a type of literacy, specifically, the type of literacy that arises in the digital context. By 'the digital context' we mean the multimedia and inter-networked context enabled by digital technology.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 8, 2019
Summary of the talk "Hearables" by Rory McGreal Photo: Nobuko Fujita - What are they – Hunn 2014 – speaker-microphone in-ear with AI - Progressive development from earphones, hearing aids, etc - Can monitor: Blood pressure – stress, excitement Etc.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 24, 2019
Summary of talk by Martin Dougiamas at e_learning Africa. I'm just going to focus on open ed-tech. We had a conference about Moodle in this room yesterday. Our mission at Moodle is to improve the world, and we're doing this by making an open source platform. The values drive the project.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
APRIL 23, 2019
A week ago, by way of a post in the Creative Commons Open Education Platform discussion list, I became aware of the Creative Commons Certificate course, "an in-depth course about CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of the Commons."
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 25, 2020
This is a really interesting project that allows you to write posts in markdown, MS Word or Jupyter notebooks and publish them in a blog using GitHub pages. No website needed! But the instructions are far from clear, so here's a step-by-step version. Login to GitHub.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 8, 2019
Summary of a talk by Alan Bostakian, Senior Analyst, TD Bank - Future Ready project Why? The field is moving extremely fast and very soon all professionals will need to have some level of understanding about them. These areas help is in upskilling, instructional design, instructon, coaching, more.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 8, 2019
Summary of 'Educating the Next Generation Workforce: Preparing Students to Meet Employers’ Expectations' by Susan Aldridge, President (ret), Drexel University There are new types of jobs for students gradauating today, and new learning opportunities in igital labs, etc.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
APRIL 7, 2020
Alex Usher points out quite correctly that universities will need to be online by the fall. We're not likely to be out of the Covid woods by then, and in-person classes will likely be limited and few. So he proposes this: for each of the (say) 100 courses with the highest enrolment taught across Canadian universities is to create, in common, a large basket of very good online resources which each institution could then incorporate into its own learning platforms.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 16, 2017
Summary notes from the Tony Bates presentation at the World Conference on Online Learning , Toronto. Building an Effective Learning Environment What is knowledge, and how does learning occur. Analogy: coal.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 28, 2020
This is part two of a series. If you haven't read part one, you should do so now. Click here to read part one. OK them welcome back. Let's begin by reviewing what we've done in part one, because it's not obvious. First , we created a repository on GitHub.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 19, 2020
With even the World Economic Forum embracing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) I thought it would be an appropriate time to check my own activity and see whether I'm supporting the goals in what I do.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
DECEMBER 5, 2019
This is the analysis of the UNESCO OER resolution I provided to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO prior to the discussion and vote on the resolution concerning Open Educational Resources It is now a matter of historical record that the resolution did pass. Here is the final resolution.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 8, 2019
Summary of 'From Anxiety to Opportunity - The next 20 years of learning innovation', John Baker, CEO, D2L. To look at the future it's helpful to understand the present and where we've been in the past. It's 20 years since D2L started - it has been a bit of a blur.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JULY 13, 2018
OER stands for 'Open Educational Resources' and as readers know I have been a long-time proponent of free and open learning resources. So why would I call them a fabrication in the title of this post? It's a response to OER @ 16, "Where are You?"
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
DECEMBER 30, 2018
Joanne Jacobs links to an article titled Why I Wish I Hadn’t Gone to College by Keri Savoca. Savoca writes that she would have been a lot better off had she spent the 11 years doing something else. "I
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
This is the result of a quick survey I did today on the Canadian governments' stance on cryptocurrency, responding to an internal request. This is a policy-neutal document; that is, I don't advocate one way or another for any of the items described below.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 9, 2019
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MARCH 23, 2019
Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Saint-Jean-de-Luz, photo by the author. Prompted by a sketch on CBC radio, I was curious this morning to see how Google would answer the question, "Does God exist?" To my mild surprise, the first page of results consisted of statements that God does, in fact, exist.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MAY 21, 2018
Steve Wheeler posted a nice article called 12 Tips for Great Speaking today.He's s had a lot of experience on the public speaking circuit and there's no doubt his tips hit the mark. I've also had some experience on the circuit, so I thought it would be useful to add to his remarks.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 8, 2018
Getting Ready Connectivism is based on the idea that knowledge is essentially the set of connections in a network, and that learning therefore is the process of creating and shaping those networks.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MARCH 30, 2019
So I don't have an original bone in my body, as proven by this blatant rip-off of Ken Bauer's post of the same title and theme. Three Decade Mark I will turn 60 in April and so far things have turned out pretty well.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MARCH 13, 2019
In my post referencing the ICDE's Global Guidelines: Ethics in Learning Analytics yesterday I said: This document summarizes the considerations of an ICDE working group on learning analytics.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
APRIL 17, 2020
Responding to an enquiry about assessment. what about the practical work that must be done in the laboratory? It depends on the laboratory, but mostly, students will not be able to reproduce the laboratory at home. During our current crisis, both practice and assessment in the laboratory will have to be postponed. For the future, I have argued that laboratory facilities should be distributed across the community.
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