21 février 2019

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Coming Social Economy
Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, 2018/11/14
According to this article, "More than a third of the American workforce participates in the freelance economy." and "The majority of current high school students will spend at least part of their careers freelancing." They are thus becoming increasingly dependent on platforms like Craigslist, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Upwork that "match buyers and sellers". This leads the author to predict "a social economy of people helping people." There are ways this can be done well and ways (as we have seen with Uber) this can be done very poorly. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ‘The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril’
Evan Goldstein, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/11/14
This is an excellent interview with historian Jill Lepore, who has just released These Truths, a sweeping history of the United States from Columbus to Trump "asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them" (of course one truth would have been to start a few centuries earlier, but I digress). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sure, Third Party Service, I Will Give You Permission to Delete My Calendar (?)
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2018/11/14
Alan Levine was not happy with my selection of a calendar service for E-Learning 3.0. "I will also be vigilant and asking you, as well, to give some thought about the permissions you just give. It’s not that I think they are doing anything evil; I want transparency about their needs for these permissions." Makes sense. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LinkedIn Becomes a Serious Open Learning Platform
Josh Bersin, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/11/15
It's true that LinkedIn has been a learning platform for some time now, but open? It depends on how you define it - "it’s now announcing it has completely opened up its learning platform to external content partners." That is, it is open in the sense that "customers who have purchased multiple content sources can offer their employees a single place to discover and access all of their organization’s learning content." That puts LinkedIn (and by extension, Microsoft) squarely in the LMS and Learning platform marketplace. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Get The Research: Impactstory Announces a New Science-Finding Tool for the General Public
Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/11/15
According to this article, "Impactstory recently announced a new tool in development. Called, Get The Research and aimed at serving the general public rather than an audience of scholars and specialists, it promises to provide a new level of accessibility (in multiple senses of the term) to published scholarship." Now to be clear, this tool doesn't actually exist yet; you can only sign up to be notified when the pre-release version is available (which I've done). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Much Do You Rely on Research About Teaching?
Dan Berrett, Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/11/15
In this article Dan Berrett and Beckie Supiano respond to readers "asking us to cite research more often, and lean a little less on anecdotal classroom experiences." It's a good discussion, but I would want to shift the perspective. Consider this: "if journalism is already several degrees removed from scholarship, the newsletter is further still." It's a world view where research is the foundation, and everything flows from that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Canada needs five new digital learning universities
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2018/11/15
The main reason, writes Tony Bates, is that "no higher education system, including Canada’s, is moving fast enough to cope adequately with the challenges of a digital society. Universities and colleges in Canada are changing, but not fast enough." So we should "establish five new regional universities-colleges that are designed from scratch as possible prototypes for the higher education institution of the future, but also designed to maximise the impact they have on existing institutions." But he intends them to be blended institutions with physical campuses; for example, Ontario's would be in Waterloo and Toronto. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can The Feedback Of A Community Propel Sustainable Innovation? The Case Of Moodle
Moodle News, 2018/11/16
I've always been wary of using community feedback as a guide to software design. I know, this goes against the basic principles of the design process. But in my mind I'm after something pretty specific, and it feels to me like the community would lead me back to creating yet another LMS. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wars of Conflicting Webs
Kicks Condor, 2018/11/16
This is an interesting article (from an unusual and interesting website) showing how many of the leading edge technologies for developing a distributed and decentralized web are at odds with each other. If I had to break it down, I'd say the conflict is between static (think HTML web pages, microformats, and RSS) and dynamic (think wiki and Activity Pub) online content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Statewide Data on OER Savings
Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/11/16
According to this article, " North Dakota students saved more than $1 million on textbooks after the state invested just $110,000 to help instructors use open educational resources. Audit identifies successes and ongoing challenges." It's based on a report (62 page PDF) from the State Auditor's office. More...