By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Asilomar Convention for Learning Research in Higher Education
Mitchell L. Stevens, Susan S. Silbey, Asilomar 2014, Jul 16, 2014
Worth noting: "On 1-4 June, 2014, a group of educators, scientists, and legal/ethical scholars assembled at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. Their task was to develop a framework to inform decisions about appropriate use of data and technology in learning research for higher education. A modified Chatham House Rule guided their deliberations, which produced the convention presented here." Via Inside Higher Ed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Advertising or Education? Sometimes It's Hard To Tell
Lisa Neal wrote a blog post and asked me to comment. I commented, she said "show me", I did, and then with a little writing back and forth, this article in eLearn Magazine was born. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. URLs Are People, Too
So he's how social network portability (take one) works: "we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people's accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they've said they're friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site." It depends on sites publishing FOAF or XFN. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What You Know, and How It's Different From What You Remember
I have said before that what you know is distinct from what you remember (and therefore that 'learning' is not the same as 'remembering'). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Revolt Against Outsourced Courses
Another instance of the trend toward the separation of teaching and assessment, as colleges are awarding credit for outsourced courses. Not surprisingly, there are people questioning whether a college should be giving credit for a course it does not supervise. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. fMRI of Learning Styles: Confirmation of Visual and Verbal Learners
I have my doubts about brain imaging (it just feels like 21st century phrenology) but I thought I'd pass along this confirmation of differing learning styles. I think that the idea that there are different learning styles feels right to most people, which raises the question, what to do about research saying that educational outcomes are not improved by adapting to differing learning styles. It seems to me that, if learning styles exist, and education cannot adapt to them, so much the worse for education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Long Live Instructor-Led Learning
For the record, I agree with Saul Carliner: instructor-led training is not on the verge of disappearing, and will still be around in 2019. But not for the reasons he cites. He suggests that informal learning will remain weak because (a) it is sparodic, and (b) it might be inaccurate. So, at best, we'll see a sift to online classrooms, not informal learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Don't Boycott Amazon's Over-$9.99 Kindle E-Books!
Claude Almansi writes, "Don't boycott Amazon's over-$9.99 Kindle e-books. Boycott Amazon's Kindle e-book reader." I disagree. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Sydney, Australia
I'm in Sydney. If you're trying to reach me, be patient - email is blocked in my hotel, a restriction triggered probably because I use SSH redirect to send email; I can get NRC email using web access, but have to read downes.ca email over my Blackberry. Yesterday I walked from my hotel in Darling Harbour out to Bondi each. I got to see the results of an explosion at Bondi Junction and a big blackout in downtown Sydney. Exciting day. I'll be adding to this photo set for a few days, so b sure to check back. Stephen Downews, Flickr, March 30, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Flickr, Australia] [Comment]. More...