By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New data on the breadth of skills movement in education
Helyn Kim, Esther Care, Tyler Ditmore, Brookings Institute, 2017/01/25

I would say that it's not a lot of new data, but it's some, and it shows widening adoption of skills programs around the world, including work in critical thinking and problem solving. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Co-design consultation 2016-17
Various authors, JISC, 2017/01/25
Britain's JISC is entering the final stages of selecting it's next big focus. After a process of consultation, the choice is down to two options:

• Which skills do people need to prepare for research practice now and in the future?
• What should a next-generation research environment look like?

I find it interesting that neither of the final two has anything to do with online learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Searchable Directory of Canadian Researchers of Online, Blended and Distance Education
TeachOnline.ca, 2017/01/25
Contact North has launched a directory of Canadian researchers in open and distance learning. Browse through the listings and you'll see a lot of big names in the field. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Community-Focused Versus Market-Driven Education
Matthew Metzgar, Digital Pedagogy Lab, 2017/01/25
The thrust of this fairly detailed article is that "though the true purpose of public education is clear — to provide benefits to individuals and communities — education is now becoming more aligned with the purposes of firms; all of which may lead to richer companies but poorer (in an educational sense) communities. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Of OER and Platforms: Five Years Later
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2017/01/25

David Wiley revisits his suggestion five years ago that 2017 could be the end of open educational resources. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beware! Academics are getting reeled in by scam journals
Alex Gillis, University Affairs, 2017/01/12
This article is OK so far as it goes - there's certainly no doubt that academics are being scammed by scam journals and conferences. I get their invitations all the time, as does pretty much any other author in the field. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Preparing Graduates for Future Knowledge Practices
Thomas Carey, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/01/12
One of my earlier experiences was teaching critical thinking at the University of Alberta Hospital School of Nursing. So it has long been evident in nursing schools that graduates need to have the capacity to reflect on practices and to adapt to changing circumstances. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are They Thinking Differently: A Cross-Cultural Study on the Relationship of Thinking Styles and Emerging Roles in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
Xiaoqing Gu, Huawen Wang, Jon Mason, Educational Technology & Society, 2017/01/12
It's often said that people from different cultures collaborate differently. But why? This paper examines the possibility that different thinking styles result in different collaboration styles. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Augmented Reality Enables Conceptual Understanding of Challenging Science Content
Susan Yoon, Emma Anderson, Joyce Lin, Karen Elinich, Educational Technology & Society, 2017/01/12
We're on the verge of getting a deluge of papers like this: "we hypothesize that students acquire a more accurate understanding of the Bernoulli’s principle, a challenging science concept, by interacting with an augmented reality (AR) device." There's nothing wrong with that; we need to know whether games, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc., actually improve the user's understanding. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Don’t let the experts define science!
Daniel Lemire, 2017/01/17
Interesting commentary from Daniel Lemire. "Formal definitions," he writes, "are less useful than you think." Consider science, where we typically say "You start with a hypothesis and then you try to falsify it." If this defines science, then a lot of science isn't science. More...