By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs and Digital Diploma Mills: Forgetting Our History
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, February 25, 2013
David Wiley writes, "When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself 'he couldn’t be more wrong.' As it turns out he might not have been wrong – maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw." My comment is: Noble's error is the same today as it was in 1998: seeing commercialism in all online learning, instead of online learning as it is being used by commercial learning. More...
Posterous will turn off on April 30
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Posterous will turn off on April 30
Sachin Agarwal, The Official Posterous Space, February 18, 2013
From where I sit, the good people at Twitter have changed their minds about a "vision for making sharing simpler," as Posterous staff claimed when the former acquired the latter last March. Now comes the world that Twitter is shutting down Posterous. More...
B. F. Skinner on Teaching Machines (1954)
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. B. F. Skinner on Teaching Machines (1954)
Mike Caulfield, Hapgood, February 11, 2013
Mike Caulfield links to this video with the commentary, "Skinner tackles concepts of self-paced learning, the importance of quick feedback, the basics of gamification, aspects of proximal development, and mastery learning. He understands that it is not the *machine* that teaches, but the person that writes the teaching program. And he is better informed than almost the entire current educational press pool in that he states clearly that a “teaching machine” is really just a new kind of textbook." More...
Kirylo, James D. (2011) Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kirylo, James D. (2011) Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife
Rebecca Tarlau, education review, February 8, 2013
I quite enjoyed this lengthy review of Kirylo's biography and analysis of Friere's thought. What was interesting was Rebecca Tarlau's perspective, as someone who initially read Friere in college and 'felt nothing', but who began to appreciate his work while engaged in her own community organization. More...
Article: Connectionism: A Summary of the Proceedings
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Article: Connectionism: A Summary of the Proceedings
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, 2018/12/27
This paper summarizes the proceedings of the Connectionism conference held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on February 16 and 17, 1990. Participants included Geoffrey Hinton, David Rumelhart, Paul Churchland, George Lakoff. One of the commentators was Tim van Gelder, who I didn't know at the time would ten years later invite me to Australia on a three month fellowship to study the automation of critical thinking. Thanks are due to Jeff Pelletier, who put up some of the cash needed for us to attend the conference, and to Istvan Berkeley, who aided with some notes and diagrams (and who sent me this PDF to post here some 29 years later). Click here to view the paper. It's hard to believe it has only been 29 years since then.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]. More...
An obsession with computer vision shows the lopsided nature of the AI boom
A new report on global AI patents and publications has offered an interesting snapshot of the current boom—including the uneven way it is being commercialized. The report (pdf) from the World Intellectual Property Organization shows that since the field of AI was established in the 1950s, 340,000 AI-related inventions have been patented and over 1.6 million scientific papers published. More...
The humanities keep declining: the case of history
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The humanities keep declining: the case of history
Bryan Alexander, 2018/11/29
Bryan Alexander summarizes a report from the American Historical Association showing that the number of history majors in U.S. universities has dropped significantly over the last decade. The xplanations offered don't seem very plausible - the lack of jobs for history majors is one factor, but this has always been true. More...
Un peu d’histoire
Jusqu’au 31.12.2018, le Fafsea était un OPCA*- OPACIF** - OCTA***. Agréé depuis 1972 par l’Etat, administré à part égale par les organisations professionnelles et syndicales d’employeurs et les syndicats de salariés.
* OPCA : Organisme Paritaire Collecteur Agréé
**OPACIF : Organisme Paritaire Collecteur Agréé au titre du Congé Individuel de Formation
*** OCTA : Organisme collecteur de la taxe d'apprentissage. Plus...
Introduction à l'histoire contemporaine
Quelles sont les grandes étapes de l’histoire du monde depuis le XVIIIe siècle ? Ce cours est une introduction à la période qui, en occident, commence avec les grandes révolutions corse, américaine et française. Il rappelle aux étudiants les éléments les plus importants de ce passé qui structure encore nos sociétés. Plus...