By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Extending a little thought experiment
David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, 2016/02/05

At what point does something personal - like writing a nice note to congratulate someone - become something impersonal - like writing a script that automatically selects and congratulates people. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Slow or Sophisticated? Squandered or Sustainable?
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2016/02/16

David Wiley takes publishers to task for not comprehending the threat of open educational resources. And with $3 billion of financial aid money in the U.S. spent on textbooks and proprietary learning materials, publishers have a lot to worry about. But I'm not sure I agree with his exact argument. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Proceedings of the European Stakeholder Summit on experiences and best practices in and around MOOCs (EMOOCS 2016)
Mohammad Khalil, Martin Ebner, Michael Kopp, Anja Lorenz, Marco Kalz, ResearchGate, 2016/02/16
This is the full collection of papers from the European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit. If it had been up to me, I probably wouldn't have crammed all these papers into one single PDF, since you're faced with an all-or-nothing download. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LearningStudio and OpenClass End-Of-Life: Pearson is getting out of LMS market
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2016/02/05
With Pearson getting out of the LMS market, writes Hill, " there will now be more than 100 LMS changes triggered by this announcement... there are still some very large online programs that now have to select a new LMS." But maybe this is a good point for them to pause and think about whether they need to run a learning management system at all. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Giant Zero
Doc Searles, Doc Searls Weblog, 2016/02/04

Doc Searles has come up with a new metaphor to say many of the same things he's been saying for a number of years now. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Workplace Learning-and-Performance -- Four Responsibilities Initiative!
Will Thalheimer, Will at Work Learning, 2016/02/04

The concept of the 'four responsibilities' is intuitively right and I think serves as a good corrective against approaches that focus exclusively on the client (at the expense of the learner) and vice versa. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The only way is ethics
Miles Berry, An Open Mind, 2016/02/04

I agree that we need to pay attention to ethics when we teach. But as someone who has taught ethics in college and university, I am acutely aware of the fact that there is not one, but many, approaches to ethics. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Limits of Open
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/02/01

At a certain point they should be required to drop the word 'open' from their offering, right? Coursera has now started charging op front for students to take some of their courses. More...