By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Congrats to Paul-Olivier Dehaye: MassiveTeaching
George Siemens, elearnspace, Jul 15, 2014
I just want to weigh in with a thought on the course created and then deleted mid-session by a professor on Coursera. I'll say it in a way George Siemens doesn't: what a jerk. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ‘Making’ Does Not Equal ‘Constructionism’
Peter Skillen, The Construction Zone, Jul 15, 2014
Good post with some thoughts worth remembering. In particular, constructionism occurs "when people are actively creating artifacts in the real world," like making. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The History of "Personalization" and Teaching Machines
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, Jul 15, 2014
I'm going through my aggregator to find items I missed while writing and delivering three presentations in four days, and this one from Audrey Watters resonates. We need to be careful. As I pointed out in my own talk, there is a big difference between 'personal' (as in 'personal learning environments') and 'personalized' (as in 'personalized learning'). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Help Joy help you. On the unusability of internal systems.
Leisa Reichelt, disambiguity, Jul 25, 2014
I went through SAP training a couple of weeks ago and now I inhabit the same world Joy does - working with a software system with a paper notebook by my side (I also took extensive digital notes, which means I will have two support systems). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Responses to Personalization and Monopolies
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, Jul 25, 2014
I'm not enthusiastic about David Wiley's definition of personalization (" personalization comes down to being interesting") but I think he shares a great example of personalization done wrong: " Imagine if your only option for watching movies was to login to Netflix and watch the movies it recommended to you, in the order it recommend them. Who wants that? Who would pay for that?" Exactly. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I am a young person who solves crossword puzzles and maybe you should be one too
Boone B Gorges, Teleogistic, Jul 25, 2014
It's probably not for everyone but as Boone Georges says, crossword puzzles are great for augmenting pattern recognition skills. I don't solve nearly the number he does, but I enjoy my Sunday Times crossword - I save them and solve them on flights to Montreal or Toronto (which gives me about a two-hour window). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Submitting a doctoral thesis on online learning? Some things to keep in mind
Tony Bates, online learning and distance edcuation resources, Jul 24, 2014
I can't imagine doing a project in the manner described by Tony Bates, and was well into full-blown scepticism after reading the section on sampling and statistics when I encountered this question: is the PhD process broken. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Chapter 2. The nature of knowledge and the implications for teaching
Tony Bates, B.C. Open Textbooks, Jul 24, 2014
This is chapter two of an open textbook being developed by Tony Bates, but I confess that i would have approached the subject matter - the nature of knowledge - very differently. The debates over the yeaars concern less the classification of knowledge and are concerned more about the nature, creation and justification of knowledge. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
William Deresiewicz, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere, Jul 24, 2014
As I commented on Twitter the other day, I rarely agree with what I read in New Republic, but this article hits much more than it misses. So while you shouldn't consider this post to be a blanket endorsement of everything in the article, it is certainly recommended. More...