By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. NRC: Better Value Than the Average Superhero
Promotional video for my own organization, the National Research Council (of Canada). OK, so the humour won't appeal to everyone. But I'll give props to the people who tried it anyways, and who put it up on YouTube for everyone to see. There's also a French version. It's rather more appealing than the typical press release web page - even when the page says that research from our institute, the Institute for Information Technology, "has helped Canadian high-tech firms earn almost a quarter of a billion dollars in estimated sales since 1990." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Well, If They'Re Already Using It ...
This article begins by posing the question fo whether universities should attempt to block students' use of Web 2.0 services or whether it should embrace them. It them answers its own question by looking in more detail at the way Northwestern University outsources its student email account handling to Google Mail. It's an interesting arrangement, and the marketing (with a captive audience) is obviously very effective. We are given assurances about privacy and security and informed that students just forward their email anyways. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Celebrating Failure
I always want things to go perfectly. They don't, always. Trying new things creates the possibility of failure. "These same students, who are hiding and embarrassed by their "failure" with certain concepts (again, I see this mostly in Math), have no problem when they come in and fail at some computer game in the lab, or when they play XBox, Nintendo, Playstation at home." I need to embrace the idea that life is like a video game. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Evidence?
This is a nice post and gets at some of the themes I tried to bring out yesterday. "Multi-ontology sense-making... argues that different ontologies (defined as the nature of systems based on the relationship between cause and effect) require different approaches to evidence, analysis and action... evidence, as data, in the sense that Tom uses it is a feature and a requirement of ordered systems, but it is inappropriate in any complex system; not only inappropriate but down right dangerous." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Setting the Dial On Rationality
This post begins by summarizing M. Mitchell Waldrop's "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos," a worthy objuective in itself, and then proceeds through an interesting discussion of modernism and technology. Doug Noon's definition of modernism will do: "progress, reason, technology, and a new world order all seem to be bundled together in it." And as Tom Hoffman says, "One thing that drives me crazy about our favorite ed-tech K-12 Web 2.0 rhetoricians is the exclusion of modernity and modernism from the discourse." Well I think I understand modernism all right; I am old enough that I was positively steeped in it when I was growing up. But, you know, I've read kalle Lan too. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do Not Localize - Make Your Own
I am working on articulating my differences with David Wiley, and if I could, I would want to put this post right in the middle of it somewhere. Oh, it has nothing to do with open licenses. But it points to the distinction between creating one version, which you localize 9essentialism) and the creation of many versions, each by and for people in a particular context (pragmaticism). Which reminds me, in turn, that essentialism is kind of a modernist doctrine, while pragmaticism is kind of a post-modernist doctrine (though I would say, while I am not a modernist, I am hardly a post-modernist either). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. One for the Mouse-Potatoes: Your Future Without Net Neutrality
One thing I've notice recently, in addition to an overall increase in the volume of Ed tech related content, is a big jump in the quality and accessibility of that content. I have dozens of journal articles to review, videos to watch, sharp insights to comment upon, applications to try out - and items like this, summarizing really important concepts in incisive cutting diagrams. Like this one, which makes the case for net neutrality (supported, I read in an article today, by more than 60 percent of Canadians) better than any essay ever could. More...