By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Logo As a Symbol of Constructionist Learning
Documents the Logo computing language, famous for being developed by Seymour Papert as a teaching tool. The wiki contains a number of photos videos describing the language and showing students learning using it. Some of the material is quite old (from the 1970s and 80s), making this a valuable and rare resource. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity
This article is worth reading on a number of levels. In a nutshell, 3M - the company behind things like Scotch Tape and PostIt Notes - applied the Six Sigma program to increase efficiency. Dave Snowden summarizes, "DMAIC, the Sig Sigma equivalent of the Ten Commandments, says it all. Define, measure, analyze, improve, control." And it appears to have worked - 3M was a lot more efficient. But it was also a company that thrives on innovation and creativity. And it appears that Six Sigma may have engineered that right out of the system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Systemic Scandal
I guess I'll just say I'm not surprised. Indeed, why wouldn't we expect widespread abuses in the student loan system? Students have utterly nobody representing their interests at the corporate or political level, and have long been a ripe target for exploitation. When you wonder why students receive loans, and not grants, as financial aid, ask yourself who really benefits. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Intel .V. OLPC?
The undercurrent of discussion around the conflict between Inter and the OLPC project just won't go away. And the more I see of this, the more I think that the design changes which could allow the OLPC to run Windows are a response to the competition. I'm sympathetic with Negroponte - but to a point. Because, in a way, what Intel is doing to him, he did to the Simputer project. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Radical Impossibility of Teaching
I take thi as a serious question: "Is the whole process of teaching a paradox? When teachers teach and learners learn, what is the nature of the causal link between the two, if any? How does teaching produce learning? Does teaching produce learning?" I think the causal relationship between teaching and learning is much less direct than popular wisdom suggests. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Are the Big Problems in Ed-Tech?
I echo Tim Lauer's reaction to Tom Hoffman's statement: "We've got a situation akin to letting the clerks in the purchasing department decide whether or not the books ordered by teachers and librarians are acceptable." This also strikes me as worth citing: "Utter chaos around privacy, safety and liability. The 'practical' advice being promoted seems out of sync with empirical evidence... the problems are driven by anxious parents, who aren't exactly rational actors." Hoffman is right. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Another Tough Gig - I Enter the Lion'S Den
I don't post conference announcements but I can't resist passing along this session description )because it captures so many of my own predispositions): "Our keynote speaker has been working closely with UBC's IT professionals for years, and has consistently vexed them with his unorthodox demands and unwillingness to specify use cases. Brian will attempt to defend his shockingly lax approach to planning as a grounded philosophy intended to foster user autonomy and innovation. He will also review some approaches to web strategy that are emerging outside of campus environments, such as open access to content and open APIs, and attempt to make a case why we need to learn from these efforts and apply them within our educational institutions." He remarks, 'I see that the organizers deleted my concluding sentence, which was: "Attendees are responsible for bringing their own projectiles.' I guess that means suitable throwables will be provided in the conference loot bag." Read the rest of this post - Brian Lamb is tapping into some important trends. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Democracy 2.0
I haven't said much about democracy and governance in these pages, not directly at least, because my attention has been directed elsewhere. But it has always struck me that attempts to implement e-democracy have been stuck in a 19th century model of governance, one that enshrines the representative function as the almost definitive of democracy. What is democracy, after all, without votes for your representatives? And yet - embodied in this epitome is the very idea of disempowerment, the idea (straight from Hobbes) that we surrender our own liberty in exchange for security and safety (and the other elements of 'good government'). The idea that we could govern ourselves is not merely rejected as wrongheaded, but as dangerous. As though we - who, after all, elect our (mostly untrustworthy) representatives, cannot be entrusted with our own governance. And so we have evolved into a system of government that is mostly about wresting power and control from each other, and not about the collective safety and security - a model that leads us chaotically lurching from Iraq to global warming to Darfur to Enron. I believe that we, as a people, could do a better job governing ourselves than could our elected representatives (especially those more interested in looting us than leading us) and that internet communication technologies make self-governance possible. More...