Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ed Radio Reimagined
Stephen Downes, Ed Radio, 2014/10/03
I find it interesting to note that audio podcasting has almost dropped off the internet map. For someone like me, audio is a lot more useful than video, and almost any time of the day, unless I'm actually in a meeting, I'll be listening to something online (in my car I still listen to radio, but my mobile phone connects to it by Bluetooth and gives me a lot more content). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The myths about Canada’s skills gap
Chris Sorensen, 2014/10/02
Reasonably coherent article about the skills shortage in Canada. Here's the first major data point: “There are increasing calls by employers for educators to do more job-ready training. But these calls have been increasing at the same time employers’ spending on training has been dropping.” Why would this be? "A sort of workplace prisoner’s dilemma: Why spend thousands improving an employee’s skills only to have him or her poached by a hungry competitor?" That's why our focus is on personal learning, while looking for industry support. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Does job success depend on data rather than your CV?
Matthew Wall, 2014/10/02

I have written recently about alternative modes of assessments and credentials. This story feeds intot hat trend. "A number of firms are moving beyond automatic keyword matching to find 'suitable' candidates... for example, recruitment technology firm Electronic Insight doesn't even bother to look at your skills and experience when analysing CVs on behalf of clients. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Great British Bake Off copyright grab: We can use your #ExtraSlice Twitter images but not give you credit
Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog, 2014/10/02

It's almost certainly not legal, but who is going to stop them? In case you haven't seen it (and you almost certainly haven't), here are the terms posted on the BBC TV show An Extra Slice website. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 'Connectivism': Creating Learning Communities
Balthas Seibold, Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), 2014/10/01
Short, crisp and well-written article on connectivism connecting it to Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory and "the early notion of 'Bildung' that sees education as the process of shaping oneself and the world as put forth by German writers and thinkers Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schiller in the late 18th and early 19th century." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education
Eden Dahlstrom, D. Christopher Brooks, Jacqueline Bichsel, EDUCAUSE, 2014/10/01
As Audrey Watters comments, the LMS is back and humming like it's 1997. "Global learning management system (LMS) revenue was estimated at $1.9–2.6 billion in 2013, with projected growth to $7.8 billion by 2018.3 These estimates include the K–12 market, corporate training, and higher education segments and demonstrate clearly the considerable scope of the LMS market." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Datapalooza
Jose Ferreira, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2014/10/01

Knewton's sales representative, Jose Ferreira, is making some big claims. "We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close.... We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything." Except, responds Philop Kerr, it's not that simple. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Diversity Makes Us Smarter
Katherine W. Phillips, Scientific American, 2014/10/01

I have frequently cited diversity as one of the key ingredients of network design. This is not an arbitrary choice; emergence is not possible without diversity. So it's not surprising to see articles like this pointing to how diversity makes us (ie., society) smarter. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Guide to Evaluating Networks
Madeleine Taylor, Beth's Blog, 2014/09/30

From the original post it took three clicks to actually read the document, and that includes a form asking for my name and email for spamming purposes. But I'm interested in networks and I wanted to see what they had to say about evaluating networks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Want even more mind-blowing TED Talks? Let’s get more STEM teachers in the classroom. Starting with … you!
Baratunde Thurston, TED Blog, 2014/09/30
Sorry about the super-long title. It's typical of this post, which in turn is typical of the TED approach to education. Which is sad, and (as we see in this video) disappointingly patronizing. More...