21 mars 2019

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Most Popular Social Network for Young People? Texting
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 2014/09/30
I can't say I'm surprised that texting would be more popular than Facebook or Twitter - it is, after all, the medium you can use to talk to your friends that doesn't leave a content trail, isn't monetized by advertisers, and won't accidentally become the next internet meme. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Online Participant Invite for 2014-15
Various authors, Gleneagle Secondary‘s Philosophy 12 class, 2014/09/29

If you want to challenge the preconceptions of high school students (well, at least some of them) this is the place to do it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How To Train Your Attention and Be Effective When Working Online
Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog, 2014/09/29
OK, I have a cat that sits on my desk right in front of my keyboard, so I know about being distracted. But then again, I'm usually playing on Facebook or Twitter, so I guess it's a wash. But I'm not sure I need to go on an Information Diet, even if Clay Johnson recommends it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Network Theorist Barry Wellman Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute
Unattributed, Oll Awards, 2014/09/29
Worth noting as University of Toronto researcher Barry Wellman receives a significant honour. "The top-cited Canadian sociologist, Wellman’s current work continues to focus on the interplay between information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, social relations and social structure." Here's a sample of his writing, from Connecting Community. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight Among the Incompetent
Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnson, M. Banner, D.Dunning, Justin Kruger, PubMedGov, 2014/09/29
It is well known that low-skilled people tend to over-estimate their performance. This is typically thought to result from their inability to recognize what poor and good performance looks like. But in this paper, the authors suggest there may be more to it than that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Learning Machine, pecking pigeons and the Sending of Being
nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, 2014/09/29
When people interact with each other, the social learning produced is not the replication of content from one mind to the next to the next. It's not even contained in any individual mind at all. Rather, society as a whole develops new learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A National Look at Student Data Privacy Legislation
Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education, 2014/09/25
This underscores the importance of data privacy in education: in the United States, "state policymakers introduced 110 bills on student data privacy in 36 states this session, with 30 of them passing both houses and 24 being signed into law, according to an analysis by the Data Quality Campaign.". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Professors on food stamps: The shocking true story of academia in 2014
Matt Saccaro, Salon, 2014/09/25
I don't know what's so shocking about this. Adjunct and sessional instructors have been abysmally underpaid since the days in the 1990s when I was caught up in that racket. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 16 reasons why this research will change how you look at news consumption
Paul Bradshaw, Onloine Journalism Blog, 2014/09/25
This is not a listicle (list-based article) even though the headline suggests it is. The '16' in the title refers to 16 different ways of using news media, and the report compares them across different dimensions: engagement, amount remembered, and the like. So we get suggestions like: "Reading is about depth; listening is barely remembered." Which may be true, but I still love the audio podcasts, because it's not about memory. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Shrinking Numbers, Changing Values
Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/09/24
In this [post it becomes clear that the values represented by university ranking initiatives count against universities reaching out to recruit the poor and disenfranchised. Which (in my view) was exactly the purpose of these rankings in the first place: not to measure the quality of universities, but to skew them toward the values espoused by the rankers. More...