Histoire

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Computing Education Lessons Learned from the 2010’s: What I Got Wrong
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Research Blog, 2020/01/14
The bulk of this post is devoted to the question of whether constructionism is the way to use computing in education. Mark Guzdial, like so many others, has followed the thinking of Seymour Papert in this. " The idea of building as a way of learning makes sense.," he writes. But as described by Papert, it may not make sense. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Platforms and big data in ELT – a look back at the last decade
Philip Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2020/01/07
This post mostly looks at the sad saga of Knewton. "It was clear, from very early on (see, for example, my posts from 2014 here and here) that Knewton’s product was little more than what Michael Feldstein called ‘snake oil’. Why and how could so many people fall for it for so long? Why and how will so many people fall for it again in the coming decade, although this time it won’t be ‘big data’ that does the seduction, but AI (which kind of boils down to the same thing)?" The real impact of data and AI, in my opinion, will come when it supports creativity, and not mere content consumption. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EduSpaces Shutting Down
Elgg (aka EduSpaces) is shutting down as of January 10. An email was just sent to all members. Users will be able to export their blogs in RSS or HTML. No explanation for the shutdown was given. There is no notice posted on the site yet (though I did check to see and the options to save all posts were there). Update (thanks to Tim): The notice is here. And we learn that "Elgg development is still continuing however, under a new community driven model. v0.9 is due to be released within a couple of weeks. You can see the latest at http://elgg.org." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. HASTAC
As described by Academic Commons, "HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Few Months Back...
The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina's Everyday video, a montage of photos of his face, one taken each day. But what makes the video work is the haunting background music by Carly Comando, and it's not so nice to see a report that she was not compensated for this work. I guess it's piracy only if students do it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Didactics of Microlearning
I agree with George Siemens: "I find informal publishing in blogs and online articles more rewarding than traditional publishing processes. The feedback on what I write informally is more immediate and, as a result, plays a greater role in the subsequent formation of ideas. Writing a journal article, book, or book chapter, is concerned with presenting what one knows. Writing in informal spaces (such as a blog) is concerned with inviting others to join in an exploration of understanding a phenomenon not yet fully known." My interest in formal publication is, to be honest, pretty minimal. Not because I don't think my work stands up to scrutiny; I'm quite sure it does. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. More Thoughts On Eduspaces
The impending closure of EduSpaces is still top-of-mind for many people. "The big issue for me," writes Graham Attwell, "is whether when a small company develops such a product and service, it should be supported by the publicly funded education community." And an explanation for the closure has finally been posted: "we need to pay our bills, and it has become clear that the educational community is not the best way for us to do that." Well and good, but on the opposite site of the world James Farmer, doing pretty much the same thing, is doing so well he quit his job at the Age and is working on Edublogs full time. He writes that EduBlogs is ready to pick up EduSpaces accounts and points to a tutorial by Alicia Wyatt explaining how to move your content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Future School: Reshaping Learning From the Ground Up
I read Future Shock and (more importantly) The Third Wave when I was a lot younger, and consequently, Alvin Toffler was an important intellectual influence on my thinking. I still have notes from those days I refer to. So it is of interest to see Toffler's recommendations regarding the American school system (and presumably, his remarks would apply elsewhere as well): "Shut down the public education system." Well and good, but I don't agree that we should, instead, ramp up the charter school system. We will not move forward simply by replacing the current school administration with unqualified and politically motivated alternative administrations. This is the thing about charter schools: they are not 'fundamental radical changes'. They're the same old thing, except run by people who don't know what they're doing. More...