By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open peer review finds more takers
Ewen Callaway, Nature, 2016/11/25
A step forward for open peer review. "Nature Communications announced that around 60% of its authors in 2016 had agreed to have their reviews published, and that it would therefore continue to offer scientists the option — although would not make it mandatory." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.Open education and the Unenlightenment
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2016/09/23
"This desire for knowledge, the very belief that acquiring knowledge was a worthwhile pursuit, underpinned much of cultural development through to the 20th century. And although it started out as a privileged pursuit, the basic premise, which we can summarise as 'knowing stuff is good'... " writes Martin Weller. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Choral Explanations and OER: A Summary of Thinking to Date
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2016/09/16
I missed this when it came out in July but happily quality bubbles to the surface more than once. This is a terrific article from Michael Caulfield on the topic of 'choral explanations'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What is Open Learning Analytics?
Mohamed Amine Chatti, Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Knowledge, Learning, 2016/09/16

This is a short post that could benefit from much more detail. After describing various aspects of open learning (open practice, open access, open standards, open participation, etc.) the author says "the concept of open learning analytics covers all the aspects of ”openness” outlined above. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ALT2016 Presentation – EdShare & OER Discoverability
Kelly Terrell, 2016/09/14
Kelly Terrell shares her Alt-C presentation, which took place last week in Britain, and in so doing shares the "latest information on my work with the open source OER repository platform 'EdShare' as well as some of the key findings from my MSc thesis "Discoverability Strategies for Open Educational Resources". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Overselling of Open
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2016/09/14
Jim Groom revisits a post from Michael Caulfield and points to "that first sentence 'but institutions, they are what make these things last” that I deeply question." He asks, "who, when all was said and done, saved more than a decade of web history in the form of Geocities from deletion at the hands of Yahoo! in 2010? Was it other corporations? Higher ed? The government. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Open Research Agenda
OERhub, 2016/09/26
Passing this along: "The Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) is conducting a global survey of OER ahead of the 2nd World OER Congress....You can find out more and take the survey at http://rcoer.col.org/surveys.html. If you’re feeling in a mood to contribute to a survey, please also consider sharing some thoughts on our open research consultation at http://tinyurl.com/2016ora.". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Institutions And Openness
noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes), Half an Hour, 2016/09/16

People do not value education not because we have educational institutions. Rather, we have educational institutions because people value education. And educational institutions are only one of many ways people support their own education, because what people value is the education, not the institution. More...