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14 février 2020

Evolution Is a Blind Watchmaker

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Evolution Is a Blind Watchmaker
Interesting video demonstrating a computer program that emulates the random generation of accurate clocks from a pile of clock components. This was the first time I had seen this particular response to the teleological argument for the existence of God (aka, the argument for God as watchmaker) and what was interesting to me was the way computer programming and video were combined to crate a compelling case in a way that would have been almost impossible in written text. More...

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14 février 2020

Nintendo's Own Study Show Wii Not So Great As Exercise

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Nintendo's Own Study Show Wii Not So Great As Exercise
I'm somewhat disappointed to read this. That still won't stop me from getting a Wii. As one commenter notes, "Playing the Wii is clearly not a substitute for real exercise. However, it's definitely better exercise than 'normal' gaming." The study was paid for by Nintendo, which definitely increases the company's cred with me. As TechDirt notes, 'Perhaps we've just become so cynical about corporate "studies" like this in the past, that it's relatively shocking to find one paid for by a company that shows the opposite of what the company probably hoped to see -- and then to still see that study actually published somewhere". More...

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14 février 2020

How Babies Build a Picture of the World

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Babies Build a Picture of the World
Do people learn by forming 'rules' inside their head? I have argued on numerous instances that they do not. This is not always evident from the scientific literature, though. As Dave Munger summarizes in this post (originally from 2006, which is before I started reading his blog), in some cases infants appear to form rules. However, as I argue in the comment attached to the post, the evidence for a 'rule' depends as much on how the experimenter interprets the result as it does on what goes on in the infant's head. More...

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14 février 2020

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do
Dangerous things my parents let me do (not always knowingly): climb very tall elm trees, ride my bicycle to communities many kilometers away (I once made it to Cassleman with my brothers, a ride of some 20 miles), build bows and arrows, hitch hike (as I did going home from work at the race track very night for a year), launch rockets (one of which flew), build and float on rafts in the creek, use knives and axes while winter camping. I was also taught, as in this talk, to fend for myself, to have a healthy respect for things like fire and electricity and such, and to have known some element of risk in my life. More...

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14 février 2020

Top 12 Technologies Innovations by 2025

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 12 Technologies Innovations by 2025
Most of these technologies are reasonable projections - some of them, like carbon management, are absolute necessities. I will say, though, I'm less sanguine about nanotechnology - not because I'm afraid of being infested by billions of tiny robots (that doesn't bother me a bit) but because I think quantuum phenomena may make nanotechnology a bit further out of reach than we think. More...

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14 février 2020

The ME-Learning Manifesto

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The ME-Learning Manifesto
Stephen Lahanas used to frequent the E-learning Leaders Yahoo! group and was one of the first people in my field of vision to begin seriously questioning the role of the learning management system (LMS); here I am responding to some of his concerns in 2003. Then I sort of lost track of him, but it's really good to see his name surface in this paper (even it it has 'Proprietary Material ' stamped all through it). The 'M' in E-Learning described in this paper is intended to pick up where traditional e-learning falls short. More...

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14 février 2020

Wrapping the Intro to Open Ed Class

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Wrapping the Intro to Open Ed Class
David Wiley's Intro to Open Education course is wrapping up; in this post he links to a closing slide show (using Google Docs) created by a group of his Italian students. The course demonstrates best a dictum I'm sure Wiley knows well, that the greatest influence in a society is through education. For myself, I was interested to watch as he tried to find a balance between his paying students and his non-paying students. More...

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14 février 2020

On Trust and How Communities Are Organised

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On Trust and How Communities Are Organised
Graham Attwell puts it mildly: "The debate over the closure of eduspaces continues apace... there is growing disquiet over the way on which the closure has been handled." And I think this is reflective of the tension that always existen in Elgg. Curverider - the company that makes Elgg - always had the attitude that they were giving free stuff to the community. The community, in turn, always felt that the free stuff was a community accomplishment. The closure sends an unambiguous message: that this was Curverider's, to give or to take away, all along. That is not the picture most people have of open source communities. More...

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14 février 2020

Next in the Economist Debate Series

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Next in the Economist Debate Series
The Economist's educational debate series is such a crock. Here is the second topic: "Governments and universities everywhere should compete to attract qualified students, regardless of nationality or residence." This is not about debating this issue, this is totally about framing the discussion of education in terms of markets and competition. And, of course, by carefully selecting the participants, the magazine will ensure that the discussion never goes of-message. Oh, and don't you love the image of strong male hands in a power suit counting out the points. More...

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14 février 2020

Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
Some of this W3C doment discussion seems to be echoing some of the discussion about open social networks. It's nigh well time. "RDF allows the users to describe Web documents and resources from the real world-people, organisations, things-in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important". More...

Posté par pcassuto à 09:11 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

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