By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pedagogy of the Empowered
Harry C. Boyte, Edcation Week | Bridging Differences, 2016/11/25

As the blurb says, "Agency is not the same as activism. Civic agency is the capacity to work across differences on common problems and creation of common things including communities, and, broadly, democracy as a way of life. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Experts Debate the Impact of MOOCs on Education
Devon Haynie, US News & World Report, 2016/11/30

You'd think that with this result we could just shelve the stories about MOOCs for a decade. But what are the odds of that happening. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Personal learning environments and technologies
Stephen Downes, Nov 30, 2016, Impuls, Berlin, Germany

This presentation looks at the current trends in learning technology - competencies, personalization, and innovation. It casts them in a sceptical light, explaining and then challenging the presuppositions underlying them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 10 Things That Happen When Students Engage in Design Thinking
John Spencer, 2016/11/24

Scroll down past the full-page advertisement, skim though the 'ten things' and linger on the image before you get to the meat of the article. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Forms and Functions of Teaching and Learning Innovations on Blackboard: Substantial or Superficial?
Vuyisile Nkonki, Siyanda Ntlabathi, Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 2016/11/24
So here's a challenge: "In view of the institution’s objective of developing a context-driven, transformative, and innovative teaching and learning practices involving the integration of technology, the study sought to classify and evaluate the form and function of teaching and learning innovations on Blackboard." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Smart Reply: Automated response suggestion for email
Kannan, Kaufman, Karach, et al., The Morning Paper, 2016/11/24

You need to think of this paper as the first tentative explorations of a complex topic. Could your email answer itself for you? In a sense, a spam filter is the first attempt at such, where the response is 'no response, delete and block'.More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'Post-Truth' Is Just A Rip-Off Of 'Truthiness'
Stephen Colbert, YouTube, 2016/11/24

It has to be said. And who better to say it than Stephen Colbert.More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EduOpen: a new MOOC Provider Funded by the Italian Government
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2016/11/24
In the year after MOOCs were declared by experts to be a failure, the number of new MOOC providers continues to increase. "EduOpen is a network of Italian Universities, but it is also open to EU universities. At the moment it involves seventeen universities, which include a mixture of larger and smaller institutions from both northern and southern Italy. The full list of members can be found on en.eduopen.org." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Conduct a Learning Audit
AnnMarie Kuzel, Chief Learning Officer, 2016/11/23

Good article on a topic we don't discuss a lot. The idea of a learning audit is to determine the current state of affairs of learning in a company or institution, such as McDonalds. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Investigating the Key Attributes to Enhance Students’ Learning Experience in 21st Century Class Environment
Fui-Theng Leow, Mai Neo, Soon Hin Hew, Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 2016/11/23
I'll skip past the details of the survey of 300 Malaysian students (at least they're not from a small midwestern university) and get to the factors identified by the authors. More...