Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. xAPI, LRS – The Interview
Craig Weiss, E-Learning 24/7 Blog, 2015/03/06
I was fortunate enough to meet with and converse at length with Craig Weiss while I was in Riyadh, so I thought I'd post a link to give people a sense of what he's about. He is, in short, a fountain of knowledge of learning management systems and related technologies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Hi-Tech Police Surveillance: The StingRay Cell Phone Spying Device
Clarence Walker, GlobalResearch, 2015/03/06

I'm not sure whether they cover this on U.S. networks but it's interesting to listed to a report on Al Jazeera about the 'Sting Ray' surveillance system originally designed for use against terrorists but not in increasingly wide day-to-day use by forces across the country. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Identifying and Cultivating Student Leaders
Kylie Larson, Higher Ed Marketing Live, 2015/03/06

I spent pretty much the my entire university career as a 'student leader' first as a newspaper writer and editor during my undergraduate years, and next as a student association representative and president during my graduate years. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Online Conference Presentation Resources
Karl Kapp, Kapp Notes, 2015/03/06
Oh I want to do something like this one day - I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of old time radio fiction over the last few years, I could probably do the genre - and it could be a great format for a presentation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Swearing in conference presentations works!
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2015/03/05
Donald Clark defends the use of swear words and expressions in conference presentations (language warning, not surprisingly). This is also common in various online publications - I frequently see items that would otherwise be good reading except for the irrelevant eruption of an expletive mid-story. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rules, Attribution, and Doing The Right Thing
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2015/03/05
I have to say I'm completely on board with the sentiments expressed in this post from Alan Levine. He writes, "Attribution not just about following rules and avoiding getting in trouble for copyright, it’s about paying forward the act of sharing content freely." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. To Get Big, Start Really Small
Tim Kastelle, The Discipline of Innovation, 2015/03/05
I think this post is a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc - "after this therefore because of this". Here's the argument: "Google didn’t start out by organising the world’s information.  Google started out as a way to make searching the Stanford Library easier....  Facebook didn’t start out aiming to connect everyone in the world... It started out as a way for Harvard students to hook up." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 4 Reasons You Don’t Have an E-Learning Portfolio
Nicole Legault, Flirting W/ Elearning, 2015/03/05
Interesting perspective on why people don't have or use e-learning technology like e-learning portfolios. So why wouldn't you post your best work online? Here are the four reasons:

• You're too busy
• You don't have any experience
• You don't have any e-learning software
• You signed an NDA. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Journal of Online Learning Research
2015/03/04
The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)  has published the premiere issue of an open journal called the Journal of Online Learning Research (JOLR), "a peer-reviewed, international journal devoted to the theoretical, empirical, and pragmatic understanding of technologies and their impact on primary and secondary pedagogy and policy in primary and secondary (K-12) online and blended environments." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The troubling psychology behind how we decide who’s a scientific “expert” — and who isn’t
Chris Mooney, Washington Post, 2015/03/04
The trouble with experts, according to this article, is that they're unreliable (and our choice of who counts as an expert is unreliable as well). So we should let the wisdom of crowds prevail. Real scientific knowledge is emergent knowledge. More...