By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Nigeria: How Policy Somersaults, Corruption, Indiscipline Plague Public Schools, By Educationists
Ujunwa Atueyi, allAfrica, 2014/10/10
I can't reconcile the hadline with the story, which is about Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Oppen Online Courses (MOOCs) in Nigeria. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. View From Nowhere
Nathan Jurgenson, The New Inquiry, 2014/10/10
Interesting article commenting on Dataclysm, "a new book-length expansion of OkCupid president Christian Rudder's earlier blog-posted observations about the anomalies of his dating service’s data set." OkCupid is a matching site which posed questions to men and women and pairs them with their best matches. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can Scientists Speak?
Karen Magnuson-Ford, Katie Gibbs, Evidence for Democracy, Simon Fraser University, 2014/10/10
I'm not sure what I can say about this report. :) Just kidding. I can say what I want about it (though I can't issue a press release about it, which I can't say surprises me). This report co-sponsored by an organization called 'Evidence for Democracy' and Simon Fraser University criticizes the Canadian government for imposing speech limitations on its scientists. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries
Nate Hoffelder, The Digital Reader, 2014/10/10
Another company joins the ignoble ranks of those spying on its users. "Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text." Here's a timeline. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Constructivist Ship In A Bottle
Matthias Melcher, x28’s new Blog, 2014/10/08
I think Matthias Melcher quite rightly points to the constructivists' objectivist problem. Quoting Potter: "Constructivists, analogously, do not realize the extent to which they work with objectivist ideals in objectivist contexts." But he then suggests that connectivism has the same problem. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Definition 2.0 released
Timothy Vollmer, Creative Commons, 2014/10/08
I think that the 'Open Definition' people are doing a lot of harm to the open content movement by defining 'open' in such a way as to exclude non-commercial license (and hence, most of the open content in the world).
The new revised open definition is: "Any content released under an Open Definition-conformant license means that anyone can 'freely access, use, modify, and share that content, for any purpose, subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness.'" When I actually look at the definition, though, I see it still needs work. It's the usual problem. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A special issue of First Monday on the 15–year anniversary of Napster — Digital music as boundary object
Raphaël Nowak, Andrew Whelan, First Monday, 2014/10/08
It has been fifteen years since Napster - it seems like yesterday to me, it was such a defining moment, yet now it's history. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microsoft and Other Firms Pledge to Protect Student Data
Natasha Singer, New York Times, 2014/10/08
It may be too early to say that vendors have gone into panic mode, but the idea of large-scale learning analytics is taking a (well-deserved) hit this week as the idea founders on the rocks of individual privacy. The California student privacy statute was signed into law last week by Governor Jerry Brown. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating a Learning Network
Stephen Downes, Oct 07, 2014, ABED (Brazilian Association of Distance educationP), Curitiba, Brazil
In this presentation I describe in detail how I created Ed Radio, OLDaily, the first MOOCs, and how I am taking the same distributed and networked approach to develop a personal learning network known as LPSS.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Marriott fined $600,000 by FCC for blocking guests' Wi-Fi
Katia Hetter, CNN, 2014/10/06
What a lot of people do, including me, is use their mobile phone as a wireless access point. Mobile LTE sppeeds are good enough now to support at least minimal internet access. But hotels, who have historically overcharged for internet access, find this to be unreasonable competition. So they've been blocking the signals. More...