By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “Never get sucked into the ‘company knows best’ approach to your career”
Jane Hart, Learning in the Modern Social Workplace, 2016/05/04

I think this should be sort of obvious (and I've mentioned it in this newsletter in the (distant) past) but it always bears repeating that your employer is not looking out for your best interests when it makes decisions. Nor should it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Toronto students create emoji to reflect themselves
Katrina Clarke, Toronto Star, 2016/05/03

There's a very involved emoji-approval process (which is how we end up with an unrepresentative set of emogis) but it'd good to see these students speaking out against it and creating their own alternatives. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We are the Monkeys of Rum
Ben Werdmuller, Medium, 2016/05/03

This is a great story. I wonder how many people have stories like this - certainly most of the people I know and talk to and work with have their own internet origin stories. I did. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved
Joshua Topolsky, Medium, 2016/05/02

Good article making a point with which I am in full agreement: new technology won't save traditional media because traditional media isn't offering content people want. Note: language warning, especially at the point where they describe the quality of existing media content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Load a Website in Firefox’s Sidebar
Lori Kaufman, How-to-Geek, 2016/05/02

For various reasons I've been looking at how to create and open sidebars, modals, and other embedded content windows. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If everything is a network, nothing is a network
Mushon Zer-Aviv, Visualising Information for Advocacy, 2016/05/02
Good article that will push your think on networks a bit. The bulk of the discussion is devoted toward convincing people that they ought to look at more than just nodes and edges "to also include flows and (as per Galloway and Thacker) protocols." This makes sense to me, and there are other network properties that should be discussed more as well (connection weights, activation functions, and more). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tinker With a Neural Network Right Here in Your Browser.
Daniel Smilkov, Shan Carter, TensorFlow, 2016/05/02

This is a lovely visualization that allows you to play with a neural network by playing with some network parameters and watching the output. Even better, the authors write "We’ve open sourced it on GitHub with the hope that it can make neural networks a little more accessible and easier to learn. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web Conferencing - Key Market Trends for Higher Education
TeachOnline.ca, 2016/04/29

Good comprehensive article on web conferencing in education. Unlike other software sectors, there's never been a runaway leader in web conferencing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The need for technopedagogues and will it ever go away?
David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, 2016/04/29

According to Tim Klapdor a technopedagogue "can oversee the design, implementation and even the implementation of interfaces, environments and the digital tools that support learning or various processes."  But there's a sense in which the technopedagogue has a foot in two incommensurate camps. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. You Don't Need a Makerspace To Have a Space for Makers
John Spencer, The Creative Classroom, 2016/04/29

Reading this article reminded me of the day my father and I built a baseball diamond on the front lawn of our ballpark-sized front lawn. Sure, he did the heavy work, but I was involved in the design and made sure there was a pole for the flag. More...