By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graphics, Streaming, Reflection
From the time I was about 12 years old I delivered newspapers. There was one occasion I was delivering a paper to a red-brick house on Brentwood, with an aluminum screen door, and as I reached to deposit the paper between the doors a young blond boy of about four years old opened the door, and I gave the paper to him. "This is something he might remember the rest of his life," I thought. Then I paused. "No," I decided, "this is something I will remember for the rest of my life." So periodically thereafter, I have replayed the scene in my mind - the door opening, me handing the paper to the kid. And I still remember it, a lifetime later, a small, inconsequential memory reinforced through nothing other than reflection. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learn Yourself
My presentation online to SMOOT Finland yesterday. Not the greatest video in the world (the quality is OK, but it's just me sitting at my desk and speaking) but it represents a full day's worth of production, as I struggled with my MacBook Pro, Parallels, Windows XP running on Parallels, Adobe Premiere Elements, and various other drivers and support applications, to get the video from the camera to the Google Video site where it now resides. The talk itself is a familiar message, as I talk about how teachers should take control of their own learning and the principles they should use to select technology. Near the end is my latest take on an answer to the old question about whether students need instruction - I know I could answer that question forever and not convince everyone, but I still think it's worth trying to frame that answer in different ways, if only to understand the issue. Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web November 22, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Video, Google, Quality, Microsoft, YouTube]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OUNL Learning and Working Environment (Final)
I find it very positive that the Open University of the Netherlands is working on a PLWE (personal learning and working environment). Five posts: VLE of the future, Part 1, Continuing Debate, Part 2, Final. It's still very early in their process, but I think this does signal a bit of a change of direction, and a good one. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Will Richardson and Gary Stager - Live: The Bootleg Video
Funny. Will Richardson and Gary Stager took the main stage - sans technology - at the NYSCATE Conference in Rochester, NY. There was a professional video recorded, and it may one day appear on some website. But David Jakes turned his webcam around and recorded the session using his computer, streaming the session live using UStream.tv. Here is Will Richardspn's response. This is exactly what web 2.0 - and e-learning 2.0 - is about. The sound isn't perfect (and you can hear dishes clacking) but we can easily undersatnd what they're saying, see the video just fine, and enjoy the interesting discussion. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Airplane Tracking in Second Life
I've got to pass along this video. The authors created a large floor-map of southern California in a room on Second Life. They then wrote an application that tapped into a web service providing the (time-delayed) locations of every airplane in the skies over southern California. This information was fed into Second Life as a formatted text file, and translated to become little tiny aircraft flying over the map, in the air. You can walk around the map and look at them, even reach out and touch them. As you watch, the map continues to update, so the planes move (in 60 second jumps). Fabulous. What a way to teach people how air traffic control works. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RepositoryMan
Leslie Carr of RepositoryMan is asking whether anyone has a list of blogs relevant to repositories. I know of no such list, and there probably isn't one - Technorati reveals four blogs (of course, Technorati has been very sick recently). If you know of a repository blog, or run one yourself, why not drop a comment onto his blog. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. HumanBrainCloud
Um, hm. It pretty clearly works, even if it hasn't reached full-blown meme scale yet (I am only the 330,000th or so to play). The association bubbles it sprouts are spot on, and will only be more refined over time. The most prolific player is appropriately named 'I_have_no_life'. What do you do with the results of what amounts to a planetary scale word association test. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World
This is a good post, up to the point where it becomes jingoistic. This much seems true: "if the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things 'by accident,' outside the original plan. Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I
Michael Feldstein does a nice job introducing Desire2Learn's approach to competences. The main point is, "Every competency has at least one learning objective under it. In turn, every learning objective has at least one assessment which is the actual instrument for checking to see if students have met the learning objective." The key to this formulation is flexibility, since competencies depend on the goals of the learning in the first place, abot which there is often no agreement. It is also worth noting that for each learning objective there ought (in principle) to be a learning object, not just an assessment. But can the objectives of learning be reduced (for that's what this is, a reductive process) to competences? I have my doubts, for a variety of reason. More...