By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Playing to Learn
Doug levin sends in this link from the latest issue of Cable in the Classroom, now available. Some good insight into how games should be supported. Games require media literacy, for example - they are not real, should not be taken as real, and players need to be able to recognize that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reading Between the Lines: Understanding the Role of Latent Content in the Analysis of Online Asynchronous Discussions
Prompted by a discussion on DEOS the other day I have been pondering the difference between traditional distance learning, as advanced by people like Keegan and Moore, and online learning. If I had to put it in a nutshell, I would say that it is the difference between communications theory and network theory, the difference between structured symbolic representations and unstructured subsymbolic reflections. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. lashing them together
Foucault on the soul: "the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Xiao Mina, Nieman Lab, 2019/01/04
Michael Caulfield asks "Why Reputation" in reaction to this piece by Xiao Mina. Mina writes, " Rather than trust in sources of authority (institutions in power as such), people today are more likely to put their trust in networks of affiliation (those in your circle, however you define that)," which seems right to me. But this is different from reputation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dance video goes viral as supporters mock shaming attempt
Joel Shannon, USA Today, 2019/01/04
I've said this before but it bears repeating: the problem is not what there is about you on the internet, the problem is in what people do with it. Case in point: there is utterly nothing wrong with making a video of you and some friends dancing on a rooftop. That's what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Presence (2019)
Wendy Wickham, In the Middle of the Curve, 2019/01/02
There's an interesting conundrum here, and it bears drawing out. On the one hand he have 'presence' as described here - as something like Senge's description: paying attention to "What is happening right now? What biases and assumptions am I bringing to this observation? How do I choose to respond to this?" Sure. Fair enough. Good  questions. But performance-killers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If Not Venture Capital, Then What?
Ben Werdmuller, 2019/01/02
Ben Werdmuller, who is an unusually good position to comment, writes that "Venture capital has, inadvertently, created a template for what can be built on the internet. It's harmful, and it's a lie." The template dictates that internet companies scale rapidly and, therefore, depend on revenue models that scale rapidly, like advertising. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are You a Prosumer?
The subject has come up in recent weeks (as it always does) about how to pay people to produce content. I argue (as I always do) that you don't need to pay people, that given time and resources, they will do it themselves. This article is about the 'prosumer' - the person who actually invests substantial sums of money (to buy, say, digital cameras or audio recording equipment) in order to create. More...