By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Constructivist Ship In A Bottle
Matthias Melcher, x28’s new Blog, 2014/10/08
I think Matthias Melcher quite rightly points to the constructivists' objectivist problem. Quoting Potter: "Constructivists, analogously, do not realize the extent to which they work with objectivist ideals in objectivist contexts." But he then suggests that connectivism has the same problem. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Let’s get systematic, baby…
Brian Lamb, Abject, 2014/10/07

Good overview of a number of posts looking at the post-LMS LMS, which (to me at least) seems like the same old LMS, but with a cloud back-end and maybe some social. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Working out Loud and Serendipity
Sahana Chattopadhyay, ID, Other Reflections, 2014/11/24
This week (or maybe last week; I don't really keep up on these things) is "work out loud week". What that means is that we should share the work that we're doing as we do it. OLDaily is my tool for this. Though to be honest, my work has shifted in a way OLDaily hasn't, exactly, as for the last year I have been leading the LPSS program, a role that has added a slew of new responsibilities: project planning, budgets and resource planning, marketing and communication strategies, and more. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight Among the Incompetent
Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnson, M. Banner, D.Dunning, Justin Kruger, PubMedGov, 2014/09/29
It is well known that low-skilled people tend to over-estimate their performance. This is typically thought to result from their inability to recognize what poor and good performance looks like. But in this paper, the authors suggest there may be more to it than that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Learning Machine, pecking pigeons and the Sending of Being
nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, 2014/09/29
When people interact with each other, the social learning produced is not the replication of content from one mind to the next to the next. It's not even contained in any individual mind at all. Rather, society as a whole develops new learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 16 reasons why this research will change how you look at news consumption
Paul Bradshaw, Onloine Journalism Blog, 2014/09/25
This is not a listicle (list-based article) even though the headline suggests it is. The '16' in the title refers to 16 different ways of using news media, and the report compares them across different dimensions: engagement, amount remembered, and the like. So we get suggestions like: "Reading is about depth; listening is barely remembered." Which may be true, but I still love the audio podcasts, because it's not about memory. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A shift toward efficacy
John Watson, Keeping Pace, 2014/09/23
Discussion of the Pearson report published in 2013 The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes, which “outlines Pearson’s own efficacy programme and shares the company’s strategy and initiatives in its first phase.” I think 'efficacy' is a nice non-threatening way of saying 'outcomes' (it's like they have writers or something). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I’m Not in Love with the Word Empowerment
Bud Hunt, Bud the Teacher, 2014/09/22
I am generally in agreement with Bud Hunt's concern with the word 'empowerment' though I'm probably not going to stop using it. He says, "for me to empower you, especially when I hear the word used by others, I’ve got to have something that you don’t have, and I have to give it to you." In this sense, it is like 'giving freedom' or 'giving choice', as though these things wouldn't exist without your magnificence. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man
Rebecca Schuman, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/09/26
Fun read in which Inside Higher Ed and Slate education writer Rebecca Schuman defends herself against a long criticism authored by by Cornell writing lecturer Charles Green. "I think she crafts fundamentally anti-academic arguments, anti-academic in that they rely heavily on unsourced and unsupported generality clothed in hyperbole," he writes. More...