By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Learning
University Business, 2017/03/01
This is a special report from University Business. It's interesting in its own right, but readers may be interested in the full-length interview with me on MOOC and the future of online learning. A couple of notes: first, there's a really bad typo on page 6, where it says MOOCs were invented in 2005. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Topics That Are "Forbidden" to Science
Paul Ratner, Big Think, 2017/03/01
This article lists five areas that are 'forbidden to science'. I find it interesting that I am in some way implicated in all five. Here they are (and how I'm implicated):

• messing with nature (yet I wear glasses, use a CPAP, and take various drugs)
• engineering the climate (yet I do it every time I get in my car)
• robot ethics (yet I envision and work on ethical robot tutors)
• secure communication technology (yet I encrypt my email and work at a secure lab)
• universal access to science (yet I work on that every day)

Now, yes, my involvement isn't exactly what they're talking about. But that's a technical limit, not an administrative limit. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ResearchGate announces $52m investment
Research Information, 2017/03/01
Many of my papers can be found in ResearchGate as the company harvested them from various open access repositories. It also sends me regular appears to upload more, which I resist, because it's hard to search and use unless you're logged in. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Visual Explanation of Gerrymandering
Randy Krum, Cool Infographics, 2017/03/01
The diagram depicted here has been out for quite some time, but it has always bothered me in a way. The central message is correct - you can gerrymander electoral districts to produce a win based on a minority vote. But how can you have 'compact but unfair' distribution? It came back to me today. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Towards insertables: Devices inside the human body
Kayla J. Heffernan, Frank Vetere, Shanton Chang, First Monday, 2017/03/01
I think I would choose some other term than 'insertable' but I would certainly agree that this represents a new device classification. An 'insertable' is a piece of technology one inserts inside one's body. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MéxicoX: Meet the MOOC Platform Funded by the Mexican Government
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2017/03/14

As Class Central reports, "MéxicoX, which has over one million registered learners (is) a MOOC platform backed by Mexican government. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coursera’s Rick Levin On the Evolution of MOOCs and Microcredentials
Jeffry R. Young, EdSurge, 2017/03/31

Interview-style article. Coursera CEO  Rick Levin really does sometimes sound like he's from another culture. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.  Analytics isn’t a thing
Mike Sharkey, Blackboard Blog, 2017/03/14

By this headline Mike Sharkey doesn't mean that analytics doesn't exist, nor does he mean it isn't something important. Rather, he says, software is defined by the problem it solves, and 'analytics' isn't a type of problem. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.  The OA interviews: Philip Cohen, founder of SocArXiv
Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?, 2017/03/14

Interview with Philip Cohen, founder of the new social sciences preprint server SocArXiv. More...