19 avril 2016

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “My grief lies all within” — PhD students, depression & attrition
Melonie Fullick, University Affairs, 2016/03/25

University Affairs has run a series of articles on student mental health over the last year or two, a worthwhile endeavor and one I'll note here by offering links to the entire series:

• Universities step up mental-health efforts
• Helping students with mental health issues
• Dealing with student mental health: an undergrad's guide for professors
• Dealing with anxiety as a professor
• Outsourcing mental health counselling
• The rise of Mad Studies

It made me wonder whether there was any work relating learning technology and mental health. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What the heck is interesting research?
Daniel Lemire, Daniel Lemire's Blog, 2016/03/24
We read a lot about innovation these days, and the focus of the literature is on the need to create value through invention. In other words, a discovery isn't 'innovation' until it has been applied to something (some people would say: it isn't 'innovation' until it has been commercialized, but I'm not an ideologue in that way). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'I Love My Label': Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/03/23
Audrey Watters on #indieweb in education: "“Indie ed-tech” offers a model whereby students, faculty, staff, and independent scholars alike can use the “real-world” tools of the Web – not simply those built for and sanctioned by and then siloed off by schools or departments." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sci-Hub, LibGen, and Total Information Awareness
Eric Hellman, Go To Hellman, 2016/03/22

A couple of good articles on SciHub, the service that allows you tom download any academic paper for free (and which is not on the publishers' best-wishes-list). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Communicating Through the Entire Student Lifecycle with Apps
Jordan McArthur, Higher Ed Live, 2016/03/22

It has always been difficult to communicate with an entire audience because of changing technology. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Philosophy Lost Its Way
Robert Frodeman, Adam Briggle, New York Times, 2016/03/22
My central disappointment with philosophy was with what it had become as an academic enterprise. "Philosophic activity devolved into a contest to prove just how clever one can be in creating or destroying arguments." I can think of more than a few such people - Jerry Fodor, David K. Lewis - who seem to think of it as some sort of scholarly gamesmanship. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. To build a sustainable world, academics need to tear down the Ivory Tower
Anthony D. Barnosky, Elizabeth A. Hadly, Paul R. Ehrlich, Ensia, 2016/03/21

I am in agreement with the sentiment expressed in this article - indeed, they have defined my career. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From Individual to Community: The Learning Is in the Doing
Stephen Downes, Mar 19, 2016, World Congress on Continuing Professional Development, San Diego, California

In this presentation I begin with the assertion that learning is personal, distinguish 'personal' from 'personalized' as being based in personal practice, describe practice in a learning network, and show how progress and evaluation through practice is based on performance in authentic communities. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why I Love the Open Learning XML Format and XBlocks
George Kroner, edutechnica, 2016/03/16
There's a bit of a sense in which I feel this is a post from ten years ago, but I am faced with the inescapable fact that learning management systems (LMSs) haven't really changed in that time. And they've been emplying the same disjointed design all that time:

• learning tools separated from learning content
• links everywhere with several clicks before actually reaching learning material
• new tools just added to the bottom of ever-increasing dropdowns. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Towards a New Pedagogy
Contact North, 2016/03/16
MOOCs are impacting learning in many ways, says the author (11 page PDF), and the overall result is that we're looking at pedagogy differently. Interestingly, though, "MOOCs showcase the developments which online learning and other innovations have been encouraging for some time: they are not so much initiating these developments as acting as an accelerant for them," according to the author. More...