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23 octobre 2019

Content Mixing Desk: WOOT!

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Content Mixing Desk: WOOT!
Oh this is interesting - a 'slider' type control that allows users to control the amount of types of stories that are presented to them. Of course, like any slider, it allows only for a very rough characterization - you can't really work with more than a dozen sliders, which means I can choose more or les 'sports' but not more or less 'hockey' (not that this lets you chose for sports at all - it is devoted completely (and interestingly) to stories about your friends - their calendars, their notes, their photos, etc. More...

23 octobre 2019

The Ignorance of Crowds

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Ignorance of Crowds
Well I'm not sure I agree with this but it's a message that I think will resonate with many readers. In a nutshell, the argument is that while open source programming methodology works well with small, predefined tasks (such as bug-checking) it is not as appropriate for innovative projects - which generally develop from the mind of a 'lone wizard' - or for major development work - which generally requires coordination, teams and hierarchies. Open source projects themselves recognize this, argues the author, from Linux - which is top-down from Linus Torvalds - to Wikipedia - which is slowly building a contact management hierarchy. More...

23 octobre 2019

How to Prevent Another Leonardo Da Vinci

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Prevent Another Leonardo Da Vinci
Ah I like this. Listing through the seven ideas featured in the book "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci", Kris ("Coffee-addicted, wanderlust-afflicted, existential teen writer/debater seeks an intellectual escape and the complete works of Voltaire. Static characters and stilted dialogue need not apply. Ratpack fan a plus.") demonstrates how to kill each one of them in contenporary classrooms, thus ensuring we never suffer through such insufferable genius again. More...

23 octobre 2019

CLI Composite Learning Index

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CLI Composite Learning Index
"Canada scores 76." So proclaim the authors of this CCL report on learning achievement in Canada an elsewhere, thereby propagating a completely useless and misleading piece of non-information. There's a lot of room for criticism of this report, but I'll just take on its major problem. The authors argue, "by using an objective, statistical method, the CLI effectively and reliably connects the dots between a community's learning conditions on the one side, and its social and economic well-being, or outcomes, on the other." Objective? Just what is objective about including a measure such as "average distance to the nearest religious organization" as an indicator of learning? Or "amount spent on charitable donations?" Or "amount spent on print publications?" Even a measure such as "percentage of people who have completed a university program" reflects a certain bias, one that supporters of trades and technology have worked for years to attempt to counteract. More...

23 octobre 2019

Museums and Misleading Copyright

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Museums and Misleading Copyright
On one of my recent visits to Ottawa I has a sustained argument with the curators at the National Gallery over their refusal to allow photographs to be taken in the 'Canadian Wing' due - I was told - to copyright concerns. My protestations that th majority of the art in the wing was now in the public domain fell on deaf ears. So much for my intent to create a 'Canadian Art' collection on Flickr. Michael Geist raises the issue of such misleading claims to own copyright in a current column. "Many institutions," he writes, "go much further charging 'surrogate copyright fees' or 'user's fees' for public domain works or deploy technology to limit the potential uses of digitized versions of those works." They claim that their reproductions are copyright protected. yt th Supreme Court states, "For a work to be "original" within the meaning of the Copyright Act, it must be more than a mere copy of another work." I'm sympathetic with the museums' need for more funding. More...

23 octobre 2019

Making Assessment Personally Relevant

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Making Assessment Personally Relevant
There are many things I like about this post, but I'll highlight two: first, assessments are conducted by the students themselves, not some arbiter of learning achievement. Second, the scales use no numbers. They're not needed, not unless you want to portray (inaccurately) learning as some sort of contest. More...

23 octobre 2019

And the Big News Is...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. And the Big News Is...
James farmer is giving up his day job. Yup, the founder of Edublogs is quitting his job at The Age (an Australian newspaper) and devoting himself full-time to Edublogs. "There are currently over 76,000 blogs on the sites and over 1100 new ones every week," he writes. I think this is fantastic. More...

23 octobre 2019

Is a Network a Community?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is a Network a Community?
Dave Snowden writes, "All communities are networks, but not all networks are communities." And also, importantly, "Systems thinking has reached the limits of its contribution to our understanding of human systems, it is now inhibiting development and the confusion with complexity theory is dangerous." Meanwhile, Terry Anderson contributes this to the groups vs networks discussion: "one could also argue that an educational experience is not complete unless it exploits the affordances of groups, networks and collectives." One could. More...

23 octobre 2019

Knowledge Should Be Free

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Knowledge Should Be Free
John Connell discusses this CERI-OECD paper Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, which is the summation of recent discussions in that organization on open educational resources. I read it over the weekend and while it's not bad I can't say I really felt it grasped the possibilities. For example, I really dislike the title, as it perpetuates the consumer-producer mentality I argued against throughout the process (why couldn't they have titled it 'Creating Free Knowledge' or something like that?) and demonstrates that the final authors didn't - or wouldn't - accept the whole concept of user-generated concept. Open Learning' continues for them to be the stuff produced by big universities or institutions. From where I sit, the concept of 'free learning' is not a charity. More...

23 octobre 2019

Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube
Hm. I have a general scepticism of attempts to create a cultural theory of anything, much less of something so ephemeral (and branded) as YouTube. The article says, in essence, that youTube is a hybrid media space that serves as a meeting place for amateur curators and creators. YouTube is valuable because you can embed and distribute videos in social networking sites. With Flikr, it allows people to record the world using devices they carry around with them; this transforms them from passive observers at an event to active participants. Users capture media, remix media, and exchange media in social networks (the nature of which, unfortunately, resists diversity). More...

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