By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Game Over - Play Again?
"People learn just [fine] without us. And not only that, the web is making it possible for people to...GASP...learn from each other...WITHOUT us! Holy career crashers, Batman!". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who's Responsible for Online Culture?
The issue of the principal being harassed online via comments from his students in Facebook has been front page news here recently, because the students in question were suspended from school for cyberbullying. This is a bit of a departure, as principals are not usually thought of as victims of bullying (the power imbalance has historically made bullying the principal all but impossible). Joan Vinall-Cox puts the incident in much better perspective than most of the press coverage: "Why are we surprised at the behavior of some digital natives online, when we watch what happens on some/many TV news shows, in sections of most newspapers, and in popular celebrity magazines?". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Happy B-Day: Logic + Emotion Turns One
The Logic+Emotion weblog has been one of my favorites for, well, almost a year now. Author David Armano celebrates the first anniversay of the blog by releasing a year's worth of graphics in a PowerPoint presentation. Some good stuff here, such as 'Approach to Creating Experiences' (slide 18). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Applying the 80-20 Rule
Jane Hart asks, if "you have a £100,000 budget to spend this year, does that mean if you apply the 80-20 rule, you really only have as little as £20,000 to spend on formal learning? So what on earth do you do with the other £80,000?" It's a good question. And the answer is, of course, "access to 'learning' when they need it and just in time to do a task." But what does that look like? Because I access our organization's online resources basically never. How do you get people to look at them when they're needed, is ever? You have to look at the work flow. If you have a wiki, but staff have to stop what they're doing and open it up to use it, then they mostly likely won't. If you have a blog but staff have to access blogspot every day to use it, they won't. Because it's not part of their workflow. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Toward a Theory of Discontent: What Can Learning Theory Contribute to Education?
"A theory is as much an assumption, a basis for belief, as it is an explanation, an ontology, or an understanding of things." So writes Christopher D. Sessums in this criticism of the theories advanced by George Siemens and I during last week's Connectivism conference. But this tactic of reducing all theory to the level of assumption, opinion and belief is misleading and, frankly, wrong. It's the tactic creationists use to make their fancies the scientific equivalent of the years of study and research that inform evolution. And in the same way Sessums argues that my own theory (which is not substantially different from that offered by George Siemens, despite the personification of Connectivism that seems to characterize some writing) "resists an explanation of how we overcome learning difficulties." Um.... huh? Sessums characterizes my and Siemens's work thus: "how do we design educational settings or social contexts for learning in such a way that they encourage and develop intentional learning." Perhaps he missed the bit where I said, "It's not a theory of intentional learning". More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard - Proving That Just Because You Know What a Blog Is, Doesn'T Mean You ‘Get It'
Scott Leslie is quite rightly grumpy after receiving being urged by a Blackboard PR Flack to cover its new social networking service. Grumpy, because the flack didn't even both to read his blog, which announced the service several weeks ago (and was widely cited in the blogosphere, including these pages, as having done so). "If you barge in waving your press release about, don't expect me to treat you any different than I would the vacuum cleaner sales guy who rings my doorbell during a dinner party." On the other hand - I don't get anything from Blackboard. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Connectivism Conference
This page continues the discussion (and I guess the site will continue to function into the future) and, more importantly, houses full archives of the conference, including Google video versions of the actual live presentations. This is a really nice way to archive Elluminate presentations - much better than requiring people to download, install and run the Java Elluminate player just to get a playback. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Problems of New Media - The Book
This reconstruction of Gutenberg-era tech support, as a YouTube video, has been making the rounds over the last few days. I saw it first on Mark Federman's McLuhan blog. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Nature Medicine 2.0
A pretty ridiculous editorial, really. One would have thought more of Nature. "Everybody will eventually be famous to 15 people," reads the editorial. "In such a world, is there room for journals like Nature Medicine?" What appears obvious is that they haven't been paying attention - nothing in the 2.0 world prevents something from being widely popular (see next item). What changes is this: while the Nature editorial says, disingenuously, "Scientific journals, as it turns out, are also information providers," it means that scientific journals are not the only information providers, and that publications need to compete on the basis of merit, not on the basis of prestige or being the sole supplier in a monopoly market. Do we really have "a world divided into small tribes (some of which could well fit in a family minivan), in which the safety of being one of many people able to express their points of view has replaced the authority of experts?" No. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
Isaac Asimov, MIT Technology review, 2014/10/24
Isaac Asimov was very influential on me ion my youth, and I read many of the dozens and dozens of books he authored. This essay is a previously unpublished article he wrote on creativity, and it is not surprising to see the affinity between my own thought and what he wrote. "What is needed," he writes, "is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected." And, "Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring". More...
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