By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Brexit
Stephen Downes, Jun 24, 2016.

I understand the feelings of the people who voted in favour of the Brexit. They are Europe's Americans. The situation of the UK and Europe is in many ways the inverse of Canada and the U.S. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Part 2: Draining the Semantic Swamp of “Personalized Learning” : A View from Silicon Valley
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform, Classroom Practice, 2016/06/23

Continuing from Part One, covered here earlier this week, Larry Cuban continues his exploration of “personalized learning spectrum,” as anchored in the tangled history of school reform (he says) and now subject to more recent developments. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Of OER and Free Riders
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2016/06/23
David Annand writes, "Incentives need to discourage ‘free-riders’. Otherwise, a valid competitive strategy for institutions... would be to wait and merely use without cost the OER resources produced by others." Heather Ross asks, "Is the idea of 'free-riders' really a concern in OER?" David Wiley replies with an emphatic "no" and then, more usefully, takes Annand to task for his presumed model of OER production. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Work Changes Culture
Simon Terry, 2016/06/23

Nothing is more true than this. "Work changes culture, not words.... Creating new value requires people to do more than communicate. They must work in new ways." Simon Terry is talking about the future of work, but I'm thinking of work more generically, in the sense of taking action rather than merely thinking about it or talking about it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Examining ethical and privacy issues surrounding learning analytics
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/06/23
Tony Bates reviews Drachsler, H. et al. (2016) Is Privacy a Show-stopper for Learning Analytics? A Review of Current Issues and Their Solutions Learning Analytics Review. The problem stems when individuals who provide data "are unable to specify who has access to the data, and for what purpose, and may not be confident that the changes to the education system which result from learning analytics will be desirable." My own response has been to focus on personal analytics, but this has been a hard sell. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Can a Classroom Be a Family? Race, Space, and the Labour of Care in Urban Teaching
Kathleen Gallagher, Canadian Journal of Education, 2016/07/01
"Does the idea of 'family' as a pedagogical compass get a classroom more efficiently from one idea to another, or safely through the sometimes turbulent seawaters and challenging relationships of an urban classroom?" asks  Kathleen Gallagher. "I arrive ultimately at a qualified yes," she writes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Business Leaders Have Abandoned the Middle Class
Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review, 2016/07/01

It's so nice to see Umair Haque emerge from the shadows, so to speak. And isn't this true of education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Awesome AWS
Donne Martin, GitHub, 2016/06/20

If you don't write software this will be almost completely useless to you, but you might want to browse anyways just to see the impressive list of languages and services supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) software development kits (SDKs). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Does EdTech have an ethos? And why should I care?
Jim Groom, Maha Bali, AMICAL Consortium, 2016/06/20

Presentation by Jim Groom and Maha Bali; this link is to the supporting blog post. They depart from the premise that “it’s not about the technology,” or “it’s not about the tool!” As they write, "While it sounds good as a slogan, it is actually a pretty ridiculous statement in this day and age. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Canada’s New Plan on Open Government 2016-2018
Government of Canada, 2016/06/20

The area of most interest to me is in regard to open access of scientific data and publications. This is addressed in Commitment 14, and recommends that we:

• Increase engagement with Canadians on federal S&T activities, including, as appropriate:
  • Enhanced communication of scientific participation opportunities in support of federal S&T activities; and
  • Targeted consultations on best practices for increasing the impact of federal S&T activities.
• Develop and implement an open access policy for scientific research funded through grants and contributions.
• Work toward the development of policies on digital data management for research funded through the Granting Councils. More...