By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From Dabbling to Doing: 6 Tools That Excite Kids About Coding
Tanner Higgin, Mind/Shift, 2016/10/06
This is a bit of a listicle, but I liked the way the six items selected progress from very simple stuff (Scratch, Puzzlets) to more involved coding platforms (Google CS First, Vidcode). Computer science today gets pretty deep in a hurry and developing a basic aptitude for formalization at an early age is probably essential. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Crafting Connected Courses: How The Web Is Won at DML2016
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2016/10/06

I wish people would listen to old time radio westerns. Not the kid shows from the 40s, but the so-called 'adult' westerns like GunSmoke, Fort Laramie, Frontier Gentleman, and others. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Institutional Repositories: Response to comments
Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?, 2016/10/06

Today's new word is 'Quasitory' and I believe it is invented (in this use) in Stevan Harnad's response to Richard Poynder on the role of institutional repositories. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. For Tim Cook and Apple, the Future is AR
Emory Craig, Digital Bodies, 2016/10/06
AR stands for 'augmented reality' and it's the idea that we can overlay the real world with digital objects. The first instance of mass-AR is probably Pokemon Go, though people have been trying with things like QR codes for decades, it seems. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Scaling Learning in an Exponential World
John Hagel, Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, 2016/10/06
You've been reading a lot of the same stuff by writers featured in these pages over the years. In this article, John Hagel argues that scaling learning "means developing new shared practices that can increase impact in a world of mounting performance pressure." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bots are the new apps, only they suck (for now)
Max Willens, Digiday, 2016/10/06

I have resisted the urge (so far) to blast OLDaily to subscribers through What's App and Messenger. But I could - and I could even make it interactive - send me some indication of what you're interested in, and I could keep you up to date. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How user comments got ruined—and what to do about it
Steven Waldman, Columbia Journalism Review, 2016/10/06
I took the test and discovered I would have rejected all five of the comments (they would have allowed three). Of course I've never really had the fine-line judgements to make on my own site. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Speak, Memory
Casey Newton, The Verge, 2016/10/10
I'm not sure whether I have enough data collected to achieve the same result, but I have a lot, especially if we include all the paper notes from the first half of my life still collected in cardboard boxes in the basement. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Diversity And Diversity Training
, noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes), CC BY-NC-ND, Half an Hour, 2016/10/10

I get that Clark is trying to be cute, layering the objections to diversity into a series of objections to diversity training. Had he given his writing a bit more effort and thought this intent may have shone through. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Directions in Open Education
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/10/10
Transcript of an excellent talk by Michael Caulfield. He begins with a historical perspective, first with a description of some of his own projects from the 90s, then a more general account of web history, leading ultimately to MOOCs and open learning. More...