By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Musings on the Economics of Commercial and Open Educational Resources
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2016/03/01
"The market for textbooks is distorted," argues Phil Hill. "There is absolutely no reason that a digital textbook rental should cost five times what a physical textbook rental costs." I would pause to observe that the use of the word 'distorted' implies there is some 'natural' state of the market, from which I guess we could infer what prices 'should' be, but of course there is no such thing. But I digress. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2016/02/29

I am in agreement with Alan Levine: " being badged is a passive act, even with blockchain secure authority, it is done to you. As important, is what you do yourself, in active tense, to demonstrate your own evidence. Get badged, yes, that’s one part of showing what you have done. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 10 reasons why 2015 is the year of the MOOC
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2016/02/29
I like this counter to the oft-spoken sentiment that MOOCs are dead. Here are Donald Clark's ten reasons: demand is massive, MOOC learners are motivated to learn, secondary school students are taking MOOCs, educators are taking MOOCs, MOOCs are a stepping stone to greater achievements, MOOC research is focusing on learner experience, the learning design of MOOCs is progressing (for example, in coding MOOCs), MOOCs respond to real needs, there are increasingly good examples such as the Dementia MOOC. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The 2 views of workplace learning: L&D and Employee
Jan Hart, Learning in the Modern Workplace, 2016/02/29

I really like the diagram that comes with this article (though it could be more readable). It focuses on the very different attitudes employees have toward learning as compared to the traditional learning and development view. Employees use Google to learn something, and they learn a job by doing the job. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Math Word Problems Fail — And How We Can Get Them Right
AK Whitney, Noodle, 2016/02/29
In school I struggled with math. My problems in math centered around applying memorized formulae to specific problems. Word problems weren't a special case for me, but even as I solved the problems here my main difficulty lay in retrieving from memory the right formula for this and that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Slavoj Žižek on Objects
Slavoj Žižek, Mariborchan, 2016/02/26
So here's a question for you: is a dog a certain type of object that has a certain set of properties? Or is a dog some object that has, among other properties, the property of 'being a dog'? In other words: do we know what properties a thing has if we know what type of thing the thing is? Or do know what type of thing we have if we know what properties the thing has? A lot hangs on this question. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cultural Resistance
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/02/26

This week's off-topic link for fun week-end reading talks about what might be called 'Underground Twitter', in other words, all those peculiar Twitter things that can be really off-putting to new users, things like weird Twitter or sea-lioning. Mike Caulfield writes, "It reminds me that Twitter, despite its problems, is truly a *community* whereas Facebook is a piece of software. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. #NRC01PL Personal Learning MOOC Week 1
Jenny Mackness, 2016/02/26

Jenny Mackness offers her thoughts on week one of my Personal Learning MOOC. I started the MOOC with a very gentle and gradual introduction, partially because I think it's easier for participants. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Tragedy of the Stream
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/02/25

So if I pushed my Personal Learning course into Facebook, would it be more popular? Should I abandon the idea of having participants do work in blogs? I ponder this after comments in Twitter that the first week of the course was "like I am in a desert". Of course, as someone who ran a radio station for years with zero listeners, I'm not overly concerned. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Experience API (xAPI): Potential for Open Educational Resources – Part 3
Classroom Aid, 2016/02/25
This is the third part of a series (part 1, part 2, part 3) on the eXperience API, and in particular, linked data. "Linked Data, frequently described as “the Semantic Web done right” by the Inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee, has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing semantic data on the web," writes the author. More...