By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing
Katie Notopoulos, BuzzFeed.News, 2020/01/02
In 1998 I was posting on discussion boards (like the old HotWired Threads) and on mailing lists (like WWW-Dev) and seen some of these early forums come and go. So I decided that I should copy and preserve these posts on my own website, just in case the boards and lists disappeared. Which, in fact, they did. And that's how today I ended up with a huge archive of more than 1600 articles on my web site. But most people, as the author of this article suggests, "did nothing", and so we are now in the situation where a lot of the web's original content has been lost. Indeed, this article is a relatively recent listing of sites that wen't down - MySpace, Froendster, Xanga and Webshots. There's so much more - the venerated (and verifiably ugly) GeoCities, for example, Blip.tv and Google Videos (which between them lost about half my videos), and of course almost all of the aforementioned discussion board and mailing list contents. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Apps that protect your digital rights
Blockstack, 2020/01/01
I'm still exploring Blockstack, which appears to have developed a fairly large ecosystem of applications and services (which it won't let you see until you create an identity). But the idea is that it provides access to applications that allow you to create data and store it wherever you want, all connected and protected by a blockchain. As the website says, "Blockstack ID provides user-controlled login and storage that enable you to take back control of your identity and data." There's a blogging app, Sigle, that takes you step by step through the process. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Negativity in Massive Online Open Courses: Impacts on Learning and Teaching and How Instructional Teams May Be Able to Address It
Denise Comer, Ryan Baker, Yuan Wang, InSight : A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, Paperity, 2020/01/01
There is "a considerable amount of negativity in MOOCs," write the authors, "emerging from learners on discussion forums and through peer assessment, from disciplinary colleagues and from public discourse around MOOCs." This article (22 page PDF) looks to analyze it and maybe quantify it a bit. There are two case studies, and these help identify types of negativity (eg., toward the instructor, toward the platform). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Exploring Minds: Modes of Modelling and Simulation in Artificial Intelligence
Hajo Greif, Perspectives on Science, 2020/01/01
Ignoring the title and main purpose of the paper (29 page PDF) for a moment, I encourage people to look at the first section for a really useful discussion of the various types of models that have been proposed through the years. Models might "bear observable and pre-theoretic similarities to their target systems." Or maybe they "are structures that express interpretations of a formal theory." Or maybe they " are structures that bear a formally defined relation of isomorphism to their target system," as Bas van Fraassen suggested in 1980. Whatever your definition (semantic, syntactic, or other) "models are epistemically more central to science than theories."
All of this becomes really important if you think of minds as being (or containing) models of knowledge, the world, or whatever, whether they are representations, reflections or whatever. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online learning in 2020: perfect vision in the Year of the Rat
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/01/01
Tony Bates offers three major prediction sets: first, that we may begin to see more online program managers (OPM) in Canada as the companies begin to lobby provincial governments; second, "we will certainly see a push from several right-leaning provincial governments in 2020 for better ‘metrics’ from universities and colleges, such as measures of ‘output’ (e.g. degree completion rates, graduate employment) as well as ‘input’ (finances, etc.)"; and third, while we may see more moves toward the use of learning analytics, the main issue here is measurement. More...