By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. London

Photos from London. Stephen Downes, Flickr May 14, 2007 [Link]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CADE/AMTEC - Connections in the Global Village
I'm in Winnipeg where I presented 'The Meaning is the Message' today. It wasn't very good. I didn't feel comfortable or confident going into the talk and though the audience was generous with comments and questions I don't feel like I came across as knowing what I was talking about. So I'll have to think about that. I don't mind failing - that's why I am willing to stretch myself - but I don't like having failed. Slides and audio, of course, will be posted when I get back home (Friday). Dave Cormier, meanwhile, blogs what was a lacklustre keynote from Derrek de Kerckhove. "Giantly long quotes on the front screen of a room filled with… oh… 500 hundred people." At least I had nice slides. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners
Jessica Roy, LA Times, 2019/03/08
I've spent many happy hourse playing Sim City and Cities Skylines and so I understand both the appeal of the games and how they could inspire people to want to make city planning their career (indeed, it's one of my many 'alternate careers' I could easily have fallen into). This article is the story of such people. Of course Sim City embodied a very naive understanding of civic planning. Nonetheless, " the SimCity games are a good introduction to the field. Those people will go on to understand what the game gets right and wrong. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kids' relationships and learning with social robots
Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund, MIT Media Lab, 2019/03/08
One of the things MIT and Media Lab do really well is to get their reserachers to communicate their work in straighforward and engaging narrative. I wish more institutes (including our own) did this. Anyhow, this article describes how children forming relationships with robots demonstrates greater learning outcomes. The relationships are created by having the robot itself engage in relationship-behaviour: "interacting multiple times, changing in response to those interactions, referencing experiences shared together, being responsive, showing rapport (e.g., with mirroring and entrainment), and reciprocating behaviors." Children responsed with similar behaviours, and those that did had the higher scores. There's a lot still to unpack here, and this work is worth watching with interest. More...