By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Introduction to Open Educational Resources
An open educational resource (in the form of an online course) on the use of open educational resources. It feels weird reading the content as a course (it feels a bit like reading Shakespeare or some other script from a play, not like ordinary reading). Some of the content is very U.S.-focused (like the stuff on copyright) - a broader focus would have been useful, as most target users of OERs are not Americans. This is very introductory material - if you are new to the idea of OERs this is a good resource. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning Design and Open Source Teaching
The first part of this post is a very good summary of the concept of 'leaning design' (clip and save). James Dalziel then looks at the analogy of learning design as the (open) source code of teaching. But this then raises issues between Creative Commons, which is in a sense a limited open source, and open source proper. It's the same debate - whether we can call something 'open source' if it is licensed under a 'noncommercial' restriction. I see both sides of this debate. But there is another wrinkle. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with 'learning designs' per se being licensed at all. What's the difference between, say, 'business methods' and 'teaching methods'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CaImAn an open source tool for scalable calcium imaging data analysis
Andrea Giovannucci, et.al., eLife, 2019/03/06
During the discussion on connectivism Monday someone asked whether we could obtain data to demonstrate the principles at the neural level alongside the social and conceptual level. The consensus was that this wasn't feasible. But here we have, first of all, data that reports neural-level data, so we can see whether a neuron is activated or not, and second, a computer program that can interpret these images in order to compile data sets without massive human effort. So - one step closer, though it may be some time before we can put the data to the purpose of testing the theory. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Quick Look at the Future of OER
Stephen Downes, Mar 05, 2019, Open Education Week: 24-Hour Global CC Network Web-a-thon, Online, via Uberconference
This talk looks at the impact of new technologies – specifically, open data, cloud technologies, AI and distributed ledgers (blockchain) – on the future shape of OER – what they will look like, how they will be used, and what skills and knowledge will be needed to develop and use them. [Link] [Slides]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Emerald Open Research
Emerald Publishing, 2019/02/25
I will give Emerald Publishing props for trying this. It's an open post-publication review process - the author submits the paper, which is openly published right away, and then reviewed, with the reviews also being posted. The author can then comment on the review. The business model is driven by an 'article processing charge' (APC) starting at $US 1200. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada OER Group – 2019 update
BC Campus, 2019/02/19
This is a quick set of short updates from the Canada OER Group, a collection of higher education institutions from across the country. It's nice to hear from Grande Prairie Regional College, where I used to teach: " Currently, 37 courses at Grande Prairie Regional College are taught using OERs, but Ed Tech is working toward growing that number. 'We’ve partnered with the Students’ Association to organize events and advertise our services and resources,' said Anna Gillis. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Encyclopodia - the Encyclopedia On Your iPod
"Encyclopodia is a free software project that brings the Wikipedia, which is one of the largest encyclopedias in the world, to the Apple iPod. Encyclopodia can be installed on iPod genarations one to four, as well as on iPod Minis and Photo iPods." Too cool. Via Open Culture. Speaking of which, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a podcast. And Open Culture keeps its on list of academic podcasts. Also, My own podcast hassn't been updated for a while, but now that I have the whole presentations side cleaned up I am updating it again. Open Culture also links to "vast collections" of Frenc culture podcasts, which makes me wonder whether we are seeing the rebirth of the French Encyclopodiasts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Letter to Linden Lab
This post reports on an open letter from Second Life users to the company that runs it, Linden Labs. Second Life is beginning to show some strains. People are concerned about their inventories disappearing. There are frequent search outages. The grid itself isn't stable, meaning that teleports routinely fail. The build tools are not working properly. And there are even questions about transactions and Linden dollar balances. These are, in my view, just the sort of problems to be expected from an overly centralized system. More...