By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learners don’t know what’s best for them
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Blog, 2014/10/20

Can autodidacticism be taught? That is, can you learn how to learn for yourself? It would seem obvious that you can - for example, you can be taught to read, which is a major component of learning for yourself, you can be taught experimentation through examples such as Mythbusters, and you can be taught learning strategies, logic and inference. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users
Paul Lewis, Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, 2014/10/20

The Guardian is standing by its story that Whisper, the application that guarantees complete anonymity to users, is tracking and sharing their locations. For its part, although Whisper dismisses the Guardian story as a pack of lies, it has also altered its terms of service to allow such tracking. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. On the Question of Validity in Learning Analytics
Adam Cooper, CETIS Blogs, 2014/10/20

So your learning analytics have produced a result. How do you know you should rely on it? As Adam Cooper writes in this post, there are two dimensions of assessment of analytics results: reliability (or, how closely focused the results are on a single value), and validity (or, how closely the results are to the correct result). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers
Tamar Jacoby, The Atlantic, 2014/10/17

It is tempting to want to simply import Germany's successful apprenticeship training model to the United States, says Tamar Jacoby, but such an idea should be approached with caution. For one thing, the system is expensive - from $25K -to $80K per apprentice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Where Has All the Learning Gone?
Rob Reynolds, The Learning Lot, 2014/10/17

It has been a couple weeks since the EDUCAUSE conference, but this retrospective is worth reading (and I was in Brazil so I can be forgiven for being a bit slow with this item). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Launching the new Open Access Button. Push Button. Get Research. Make Progress.
Unattributed, Open Access Button Blog, 2014/10/17

I'm sure every research has had the same experience: we do a search on Google or follow up a promising reference form some other paper, access the link, and are faced with nothing but a subscription wall. It's a daily occurrence for me, and to my min, these search results are nothing but spam. The Open Access Button is intended as a remedy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs: A Review of the State-of-the-Art
Ahmed Mohamed Fahmy Yousef, Mohamed Amine Chatti, Ulrik Schroeder, Marold Wosnitza, Harald Jakobs, CSEDU 2014 - 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2014/10/17

This is quite a good overview of the current state of MOOCs with a number of good images, statistics and definitions, making it a great reference paper for future discussions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Our Digital Future: A Crowdsourced Agenda for Free Expression
Various authors, Open Media, 2014/10/17

"At its best," reads the executive summary of this report, "the Internet encourages us to share, use our creativity, and express ourselves freely. It fosters the same key experiences that help us preserve our imaginations and our capacity to learn as we grow from children into adults." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Marc My Words: In Learning and Performance Ecosystems, the Whole is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts (Part One)
Marc Rosenberg, Learning Solutions Magazine, 2014/10/16
Marc Rosenberg describes what is essentially the Learning and Performance Support System (LPSS) we are in the process of launching here at NRC. More...