By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Person to Person: That’s How My Kind of Internet Works
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/01/03

I'm not so much a person-to-person person. I prefer mass media and talking to large groups. But that's my shortcoming, the habits of a person raised in the era of best-selling books, newspapers and television. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interaction networks for learning about objects, relations and physics
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2017/01/03

One of the criticisms of neural networks (and of associative inference generally) is that it cannot generalize. See, for example, Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 2017: Quarks, Love, and Insight
Gardner Campbell, Gardner Writes, 2017/01/03
Gardner Campbell starts off the new year with a terrific post asking the question: "what are the elementary particles and fundamental constituents of learning?" It's not that there's a right answer, but rather, that it sets us in motion asking the deep questions about our discipline. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When are Digital Media and Tools Wrong for Teaching and Learning?
Hugh Beaulac, Emerging EdTech, 2017/01/03

My answer to this is: almost never. But let's hear the other side. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Journalism That Stands Apart: The Report of the 2020 Group
New York Times, 2017/01/18

This is an internal report that the New York Times has shared with the world (and plugged with an article) describing how it needs to modernize its approach to journalism (archive version on Scribd). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The State of the MOOC: What Associations Should Know
Ernie Smith, Associations Now, 2017/01/18

This is a routine report on MOOCs with a focus on associations, but note the zinge rat the end. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Early learning is making a difference for children from ethnic minority communities
Sam Waller, Medium, 2017/01/18

This article summarizes two reports from UNICEF on pre-school programs in rural Cambodia. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Design of an Embedded Engineering Learning on Social Cloud Model to Enhance Creative Thinking and Creative Product
Sathaporn Yoosomboon, Pallop Piriyasurawong, International Journal of Online Engineering, 2017/01/18
This paper (9 page PDF), as the title suggests, describes the use of embedded systems to promote creative thinking in engineering. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. No More 'Beall's List'
Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/01/18

Beall's List, a collection of what the author called "predatory" journals, was suddenly removed from the internet this week. The story broke on Twitter Sunday night and on Debunking Denialism Monday. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 5 Big Ideas In Education That Don't Work
Anya Kamenetz, NPR Ed, 2017/01/16

When you say things "don't work" you have some idea of what it would look like if they "worked". In education, however, this definition of an outcome has remained elusive. More...