By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rangatiratanga: How Tapping Into New Zealand’s Indigenous Concepts Sparked New Educational Gains
Patrick Snedden, EdSurge, 2016/10/20

Rangatiratanga is a Maori concept for taking personal and collective control over your own future. It formed the basis for the treaty creating New Zealand's unique society. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why is Twitter no longer No 1 on the Top Tools for Learning list?
Jane Hart, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, 2016/10/20

I was watching a item on the news this morning tracking Twitter reaction to some televised events and I thought to myself, "why track this if all the traffic is bots?" And that's part of the answer to the question in the title of this article. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Use of Technologies at #IWMW16
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, 2016/10/20

If you haven't been watching it must seem like the entire world has changed. Here's the list of technologies used as described by Brian Kelly: Slack, Lanyard, Whova. The last is completely new to me. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peter Thiel and the Future (and Funding) of Education Technology
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/10/20
Audrey Watters on Peter Thiel: "At the core of the companies that Thiel has founded and funded is surveillance. Palantir. Facebook. AltSchool. The regime of data collection and analysis is framed as 'personalization.' But that’s a cover for compliance and control." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coursera’s superheroes: Meet the Mentor team
Kapeesh Saraf, Coursera Blog, 2016/10/05

Coursera is now - and a bit surprisingly - drawing on volunteer labour. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Citizen scientists now do more than collect data
Layne Cameron, Futurity, 2016/10/05

I've always felt that there is a huge learning opportunity here. "The nature of citizen science is changing; citizens aren’t simply used solely for data collection,” says Steven Gray. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Contextual Cognition in Social Simulation
Bruce Edmonds, Context in Computing, 2016/10/04

I have mentioned context a lot over the years and never taken the time to discuss it properly. This chapter (22 page PDF) is far from a complete discussion but offers a good first look. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Initial xAPI/Caliper Comparison
IMS Global, 2016/10/04

xAPI and Caliper are systems for recording student activities, offered by ADL and IMS respectively. There are ongoing discussions between the two organizations regarding how the overlap and/or interoperate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
Jose Aguinaga, HackerNoon, 2016/10/04

Sadly, it really is like this. "Wait, I learned OOP in college, I thought that was good? -So was Java before being bought by Oracle. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism
Sara M. Watson, Columbia Journalism Review, 2016/10/04

This is a long and detailed report that blows through tech journalism like a breath of fresh air. It had me thinking about what it is that i do with this newsletter - not journalism, not curation - is it tech criticism? Maybe. More...