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What, again? Yes, again. Today I'm working on creating and saving a reusable Docker image of gRSShopper. I have the benefit of some previous work on this set-up, and so it might work today, so I'm documenting my process. Note : I'm doing all this so you don't have to. MORE
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
[ source ] "We should pause and ask the question," says David Wiley, "is more open always better?" The answer, of course, is "it depends". I don't keep my house open for just anyone to drop by. I keep my bank account PIN a secret. MORE
Dear Boss, Thank you for your email about e-learning , titled 'A message about learning from the C-suite' which was reprinted in Chief Learning Officer. You asked some questions and made some comments, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to reply. MORE
Introduction There were times when no one would have expected this, but as we enter the 2040s the school remains the centre of education and development in the community. In retrospect, we should have expected no other outcome. 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
Published as Change in Education and What Needs to be Done , 15 pages, 2020, Maysan Center for Future Studies. In recent months we as a global community have experienced a hard lesson about the nature of change. MORE
I'm going to take Daniel Goldsmith's excellent post Praxis and the Indieweb as a point of departure for this post. Like Goldsmith, I am a fan of the Indieweb, or at least, the concept of the Indieweb. And I've been involved, at least around the periphery, in its development for many years. MORE
Responding to Donald Clark's excellent article, Let's move on from 'Unintelligible Intelligences' - IQ, Multiple Intelligences, Emotional Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence. Let’s take this idea further. Koch (2014) claimed that ALL networks are, to some degree ‘intelligent’." Not just Koch. 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
On the Futures This post is a series of short comments on the just-released document from the Canadian UNESCO chairs on the future of education. MORE
Note: this is an unedited audio transcript generated by the Google sound recorder app on my Pixel 4. In the future I may edit it (or if you want to, feel free). For now, I provide it as is for your enjoyment. 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. But we can't make a statement about an individual person based on their age; this work applies only to the macro level. Used slido.com code #genz ) 'Entitled' and 'creative' are the most popular terms. 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
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
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. Weller is writing in response to a specific statement I made in a recent post on another topic, which I'll quote here: One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other. MORE
Unedited Automated Transcript, December 14,2020 All right, um, so hello everyone. MORE
This is an edited transcript of my presentation 'Reimaging Open Educational Resources' presented November 10 2020 to the Open Education 2020 Conferemce. link] So what I want to talk to you today talked about with you today is open education resources. 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
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
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. Unfortunately I don't have the full text of the remarks, but I have a detailed abstract and slides, which is enough to work from. Morrison's argument is straightforward and effective. Not all instances of 'open' are virtuous. MORE
This is an edited text transcript from my presentation from April 27, 2020. Presentation page (audio, video, slides): [link] This talk is about change. It's about the change we see individually in our homes and in our workplaces and it's about the larger changes sweeping through society. MORE
Thanks to Jeff Rubenstein for a thoughtful comment. I agree that the division between 'content' and 'paper + ink' isn't always the best way to approach the discussion, and should note here that it was generated as a metaphor to frame a response to a commonly raised issue. MORE
Webinars for the new year. I did the first one last week and the rest are upcoming. All in cooperation with Maskwacis Cultural College. See [link] January 18, 8:30-9 am MT Edmonton Description Join the National Research Council's Stephen Downes, a specialist in online learning technology and new media, for an interactive session to assist faculty and instructors on how to help students succeed by using new tech tools and apps. 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. Table discussions - what are you doing in digital learning, what have been your biggest successes and challenges). Table summary: Successes: one was using different modalities. Challenge: making sure students have complted all of the personal study before they attend the face-to-face session. 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. But today we have an information glut. If we are passionate about something we can learn. This information flow changes the world from 2D flat to a world that is changing. Changing all the time. 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 an unedited auto-generated transcript from my talk today to Creative Commons Lightning Talks. Hi everyone, it's Stephen Downes here from Casselman Ontario Canada. 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
This is an unedited automated transcript produced by my Pixel 4 from this presentation: [link] Hi everyone. I'm Stephen Downs and I bring you greetings from my home office in Castleman, Ontario, Canada. Thank you for taking the time to watch my presentation today. MORE
Someone asked me by email, do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? MORE
Just a quite note I sent to Feedly about it's AI tool Leo and my OLDaily workflow. I've been a Feedly Pro user for many years and moved to Pro+ for the AI and Twitter support. I have two major comments: - first, it's too expensive. MORE
I just read a post from Mitch Resnick on the seeds that Seymour Papert sowed, and highlighted for myself this most important statement: "Seymour rejected the computer-aided instruction approach in which 'the computer is being used to program the child' and argued for an alternative approach in which 'the child programs the computer.'" 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. I was just wondering that since learning a foreign language is basically mastering some language skills practically rather than acquiring knowledge, to what extent it can be taught and learnt in a connectivistic manner. 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 an unedited auto-transcript of the talk delivered November 3, 2020. Hello. Hello everyone pleasure to be here today. This presentation will be in English. I'm going to be talking about open learning open networks and. Just a few just a few notes to begin our presentation. 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
This is an unedited auto-generated transcript of my talk for LINC home learning professional development, November 28, 2020. 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. This will be true for everyone, even me. But the course is structured so you can focus on what's interesting and accessible for you, and you can ignore the rest. Read on. you'll see what I mean. What's the Course About? MORE
Hi, I'm Stephen Downes videoing in from Casselman in Ontario, Canada. My talk today is called What's Next for MOOCs. Now that might be a bit of a surprise for you because you probably read last year or maybe the year before or five years ago, that moocs are dead. MORE
I've had an idea in the back of my mind for a long time now, and as I get closer to a real-world gRSShopper other people can actually use I began to ask around is anyone had seen an implementation. In a word, the response was "no". 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
MARCH 2, 2021
[ source ] "We should pause and ask the question," says David Wiley, "is more open always better?" The answer, of course, is "it depends". I don't keep my house open for just anyone to drop by. I keep my bank account PIN a secret.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 22, 2021
Dear Boss, Thank you for your email about e-learning , titled 'A message about learning from the C-suite' which was reprinted in Chief Learning Officer. You asked some questions and made some comments, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to reply.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
NOVEMBER 24, 2020
On the Futures This post is a series of short comments on the just-released document from the Canadian UNESCO chairs on the future of education.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 31, 2020
This is an edited text transcript from my presentation from April 27, 2020. Presentation page (audio, video, slides): [link] This talk is about change. It's about the change we see individually in our homes and in our workplaces and it's about the larger changes sweeping through society.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MARCH 21, 2021
Published as Change in Education and What Needs to be Done , 15 pages, 2020, Maysan Center for Future Studies. In recent months we as a global community have experienced a hard lesson about the nature of change.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
DECEMBER 12, 2020
Hi, I'm Stephen Downes videoing in from Casselman in Ontario, Canada. My talk today is called What's Next for MOOCs. Now that might be a bit of a surprise for you because you probably read last year or maybe the year before or five years ago, that moocs are dead.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
NOVEMBER 28, 2020
This is an unedited auto-generated transcript of my talk for LINC home learning professional development, November 28, 2020.
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
JANUARY 30, 2021
I've had an idea in the back of my mind for a long time now, and as I get closer to a real-world gRSShopper other people can actually use I began to ask around is anyone had seen an implementation. In a word, the response was "no".
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
FEBRUARY 11, 2021
I'm going to take Daniel Goldsmith's excellent post Praxis and the Indieweb as a point of departure for this post. Like Goldsmith, I am a fan of the Indieweb, or at least, the concept of the Indieweb. And I've been involved, at least around the periphery, in its development for many years.
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
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.
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
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
FEBRUARY 26, 2021
Thanks to Jeff Rubenstein for a thoughtful comment. I agree that the division between 'content' and 'paper + ink' isn't always the best way to approach the discussion, and should note here that it was generated as a metaphor to frame a response to a commonly raised issue.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
DECEMBER 8, 2020
Introduction There were times when no one would have expected this, but as we enter the 2040s the school remains the centre of education and development in the community. In retrospect, we should have expected no other outcome.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
AUGUST 31, 2020
Note: this is an unedited audio transcript generated by the Google sound recorder app on my Pixel 4. In the future I may edit it (or if you want to, feel free). For now, I provide it as is for your enjoyment.
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
NOVEMBER 10, 2020
This is an edited transcript of my presentation 'Reimaging Open Educational Resources' presented November 10 2020 to the Open Education 2020 Conferemce. link] So what I want to talk to you today talked about with you today is open education resources.
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
DECEMBER 14, 2020
Unedited Automated Transcript, December 14,2020 All right, um, so hello everyone.
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
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
This is an unedited automated transcript produced by my Pixel 4 from this presentation: [link] Hi everyone. I'm Stephen Downs and I bring you greetings from my home office in Castleman, Ontario, Canada. Thank you for taking the time to watch my presentation today.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 19, 2020
Responding to Donald Clark's excellent article, Let's move on from 'Unintelligible Intelligences' - IQ, Multiple Intelligences, Emotional Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence. Let’s take this idea further. Koch (2014) claimed that ALL networks are, to some degree ‘intelligent’." Not just Koch.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 17, 2020
What, again? Yes, again. Today I'm working on creating and saving a reusable Docker image of gRSShopper. I have the benefit of some previous work on this set-up, and so it might work today, so I'm documenting my process. Note : I'm doing all this so you don't have to.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
NOVEMBER 3, 2020
This is an unedited auto-transcript of the talk delivered November 3, 2020. Hello. Hello everyone pleasure to be here today. This presentation will be in English. I'm going to be talking about open learning open networks and. Just a few just a few notes to begin our presentation.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 8, 2020
Just a quite note I sent to Feedly about it's AI tool Leo and my OLDaily workflow. I've been a Feedly Pro user for many years and moved to Pro+ for the AI and Twitter support. I have two major comments: - first, it's too expensive.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JANUARY 27, 2021
Webinars for the new year. I did the first one last week and the rest are upcoming. All in cooperation with Maskwacis Cultural College. See [link] January 18, 8:30-9 am MT Edmonton Description Join the National Research Council's Stephen Downes, a specialist in online learning technology and new media, for an interactive session to assist faculty and instructors on how to help students succeed by using new tech tools and apps.
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
NOVEMBER 7, 2020
I just read a post from Mitch Resnick on the seeds that Seymour Papert sowed, and highlighted for myself this most important statement: "Seymour rejected the computer-aided instruction approach in which 'the computer is being used to program the child' and argued for an alternative approach in which 'the child programs the computer.'"
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. Unfortunately I don't have the full text of the remarks, but I have a detailed abstract and slides, which is enough to work from. Morrison's argument is straightforward and effective. Not all instances of 'open' are virtuous.
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. Table discussions - what are you doing in digital learning, what have been your biggest successes and challenges). Table summary: Successes: one was using different modalities. Challenge: making sure students have complted all of the personal study before they attend the face-to-face session.
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 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. But today we have an information glut. If we are passionate about something we can learn. This information flow changes the world from 2D flat to a world that is changing. Changing all the time.
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. This will be true for everyone, even me. But the course is structured so you can focus on what's interesting and accessible for you, and you can ignore the rest. Read on. you'll see what I mean. What's the Course About?
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
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. Weller is writing in response to a specific statement I made in a recent post on another topic, which I'll quote here: One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other.
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
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
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. I was just wondering that since learning a foreign language is basically mastering some language skills practically rather than acquiring knowledge, to what extent it can be taught and learnt in a connectivistic manner.
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. But we can't make a statement about an individual person based on their age; this work applies only to the macro level. Used slido.com code #genz ) 'Entitled' and 'creative' are the most popular terms.
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.
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