By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Communicating Through the Entire Student Lifecycle with Apps
Jordan McArthur, Higher Ed Live, 2016/03/22

It has always been difficult to communicate with an entire audience because of changing technology. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Philosophy Lost Its Way
Robert Frodeman, Adam Briggle, New York Times, 2016/03/22
My central disappointment with philosophy was with what it had become as an academic enterprise. "Philosophic activity devolved into a contest to prove just how clever one can be in creating or destroying arguments." I can think of more than a few such people - Jerry Fodor, David K. Lewis - who seem to think of it as some sort of scholarly gamesmanship. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. To build a sustainable world, academics need to tear down the Ivory Tower
Anthony D. Barnosky, Elizabeth A. Hadly, Paul R. Ehrlich, Ensia, 2016/03/21

I am in agreement with the sentiment expressed in this article - indeed, they have defined my career. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From Individual to Community: The Learning Is in the Doing
Stephen Downes, Mar 19, 2016, World Congress on Continuing Professional Development, San Diego, California

In this presentation I begin with the assertion that learning is personal, distinguish 'personal' from 'personalized' as being based in personal practice, describe practice in a learning network, and show how progress and evaluation through practice is based on performance in authentic communities. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why I Love the Open Learning XML Format and XBlocks
George Kroner, edutechnica, 2016/03/16
There's a bit of a sense in which I feel this is a post from ten years ago, but I am faced with the inescapable fact that learning management systems (LMSs) haven't really changed in that time. And they've been emplying the same disjointed design all that time:

• learning tools separated from learning content
• links everywhere with several clicks before actually reaching learning material
• new tools just added to the bottom of ever-increasing dropdowns. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Towards a New Pedagogy
Contact North, 2016/03/16
MOOCs are impacting learning in many ways, says the author (11 page PDF), and the overall result is that we're looking at pedagogy differently. Interestingly, though, "MOOCs showcase the developments which online learning and other innovations have been encouraging for some time: they are not so much initiating these developments as acting as an accelerant for them," according to the author. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Threat to openness: managing access to public archives
Lawrence Serewicz, Thoughts on management, 2016/03/16

Though the focus of this article in on access to public archives, many of the same concerns apply to educational resources. The author considers the nature of openness, drawing for example from Popper's work, and notes that it consists not only of the absence of barriers but also something like the ability to comprehend and use the resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who You Know Matters. So Why Isn’t Edtech Helping Students Build Social Capital?
Julia Freeland Fisher, EdSurge, 2016/03/16
I have commented on numerous occasions that one of the main products elite universities sell is not high-quality learning (they're really no better than anyone else) but rather access to networks of power and influence. That's why we see the same names from the same schools show up over and over again in research and news reports - the people who run media are writing about their friends from Yale or wherever who run businesses or research. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Philosophy in Figures
Ryan Reece, Philosophy in Figures, 2016/03/16

There are some pretty good images in this all-too-brief 'Philosophy in Figures' Tumblr blog. The one that caught my eye is the 'philosophy of science' image that has been circulating recently on Facebook (without attribution, natch). You could locate me somewhere on the border of instrumentalism and relativism, and metaphysically eliminativist. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Visual self-directed informal learning in FutureLearn MOOC
Inge de Waard, Ignatia Webs, 2016/03/16
Inge de Warrd diagrams the results of her stidy of FuutureLearn open online course participants. "The key inhibitors or enablers of self-directed, informal learning are: motivation and learning goals," she writes. "Motivation (in most cases intrinsic motivation) keeps them wanting to learn more, which is not the same as following all the content of the MOOC, simply absorbing that content which is relevant to the learner. More...