By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Maybe College Isn't the Great Equalizer
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/02/17
Two things have held up through decades of research on education and its impact. First, socio-economic background is the single best predictor of educational outcomes. And second, education is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to increased socio-economic outcomes. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CLOs, Move From Conduit to Curator
Greg Pryor, Chief Learning Officer, 2017/02/08
A CLO is a 'Chief Learning Officer' and the point of this article is to suggest that CLOs shift their role from being a 'conduit' of knowledge and information to being a 'curator'. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Path to Prosperity
Advisory Council on Economic Growth, 2017/02/08
The Canadian Government's Advisory Council on Economic Growth has released a set of five papers under the heading of 'The Path to Prosperity'. Here they are:
The second (FutureSkills Lab) and Fifth (Workforce Participation) have the greatest impact on education and training. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graham Brown-Martin
Graham Brown-Martin, Learning {Re}imagined, 2017/02/03
I'm generally sympathetic with the aims of this post but I can't get past his use of corporate logos and branding (specifically, the whole Star Wars motif) to animate his call. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is ‘fake news’ a fake problem?
Jacob L. Nelson, Columbia Journalism Review, 2017/02/01
Not to keep harping on this, but I wonder whether the failure of traditional news to come to terms with fake news is a failure to understand what fake news is. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The University and Student Learning: A System in Conflict?
Janet Adkins, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 2017/02/01
According to this article, the globalization of the education system "creates tepid universities all doing the same thing and producing similar results." This results from the primacy of the market-driven economic model at the core of globalization, which eliminates specialization and favours standardization and commodification. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Loving It
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2017/02/01
Just a day or so after authoring a good article Alex Usher comes out with this piece defending the agreement made between McDonald's and Colleges Ontario to recognize part of the corporation's training program as equivalent to college credit. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We Are Not Agreed
noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes), Half an Hour, 2017/02/15
A few days ago University Ventures authored a piece in response to a post from the New America Foundation comparing Republicans who defend for-profit colleges to climate change deniers. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Knowledge Science: The Great Big Beautiful Puzzle
Dennis Thomas, Learning Solutions Magazine, 2017/02/02
This is a view of knowledge and learning that I think is wrong (and would argue has been disproven in application) but which is nonetheless believed - either implicitly or explicitly - by many. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The state of Jupyter
Fernando Pérez, Brian Granger, O'Reilly, 2017/01/30
If you've been doing any work in data analysis you might have run across references to the Jupyter Notebook. Essentially this is an application that allows you to embed running bits of code into a text document. More...
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