By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. UC Drops Elsevier
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/03/01
I found this to be a nice juxtaposition of stories: on the one hand, the University of California cancels it's Elsevier subscription, and on the other hand, Springer Nature is contributing articles to ResearchGate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. DFINITY is the Cloud 3.0 that Marries Crypto Valley with Silicon Valley
Michael K. Spencer, Medium, 2019/02/01
First there was blockchain, characterized by digital coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then there were smart contracts and distributed applications (dApps) that could represent and manipulate more than just money. What this article portends is a third wave of distributed computing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Browse state-of-the-art Papers with Code
Papers With Code, 2019/02/01
This website is daunting, to say the least. It's a branch of Papers With Code, a challenge in its own right. The idea here is to collect papers that are accompanied with computer code (which is freely accessible on GitHub). But more, the papers are grouped into categories, and each category is subgrouped into tasks, and then the papers are sorted by their approach to that task, and 'state-of-the-art' is defined as the most successful approach currently. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Matching Instruction with Modality-Specific Learning Style: Effects on Immediate Recall and Working Memory Performance
Karoline Aslaksen, Håvard Lorås, Education Sciences, 2019/02/01
This is one for the learning styles sceptics. According to this small (22 students) study, the aim of which was "to examine the association between modality-specific learning style, immediate recall, and working memory performance," "the results failed to support the matching hypothesis or any association between modality-specific learning style and working memory." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Finding Open Content Tutorial
OER Africa, 2019/02/01
As the website says, "The tutorial is designed to offer a simple, quick way to acquire skills necessary to search for open content, decipher Creative Commons rights and permissions and evaluate the usefulness of open content." It provides search strategies for finding open materials on Google, YouTube and Creative Commons. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems
Interestimng article in many parts (follow the links) about the history and esign of Drupal, a content management system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ESJ: A Strategy for Personal Knowledge Management
Exploration of PKM - 'personal knowledge management' - and its relatyion to e-portfolios. Mostly a summary by Jack Vinson on James McGee's presentation, which has been reproduced on McGee's blog (took me a bit to figure that out, as Bloglines killed the blockquote). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wikipedia, Authority, and Astroturf
Interesting ditty about one person's attempt to create a little spin for himself and his product by creating a Wikipedia article and submitting a Slashdot post, then boasting aboiut the resulting traffic. So, anyhow, I thought about this a bit and decided to add my own Wikipedia page about, naturally, me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. E-Learning 2.0 - Alberta Cut
The latest - and last, for the next six months or so - version of this presentation surveying what I have been recently calling e-learning 2.0, delivered at ADETA's 2005 conference in Edmonton. Like my presentation a few days ago, i survey trends, explain what I mean by e-learning 2.0, and project into the future. Some new slides and resources are added. The MP3 audio is also available, which is worth more than the slides as the actual talk came out very differently. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, June 10, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wikipedia Live!
If you are ever talking about Wikipedia in a presentation, keep this page in mind to add some punch to your words. It is a live feed of Wikipedia updates as they occur. More...