By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Experiential Learning: It’s been happening for years
Joe Henry, It's Not Academic, 2017/05/09
Experiential learning is not new, argues Joe Henry. It has been happening for years. " students have for generations, accessed and created a myriad of co-curricular, extra-curricular and work opportunities on campus that have allowed them to develop the skills necessary to think about their coursework in different ways or gain the experience necessary for that first job post-graduation." I agree. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fait Accompli: Agentive Tech Is Here
Chris Noessel, A List Apart, 2017/05/09
Today's new word is 'agentive'. Something that is agentive "handles tasks so that you can use your limited attention on something else. So this part of “acting on your behalf”—that it does its thing while out of sight and out of mind—is foundational to the notion of what an agent is, why it’s new, and why it’s valuable." More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Chrome won't be allowed on Windows 10 S
Ed Bott, ZDNet, 2017/05/10
We are in the process of entering an unhappy world where the browser is part of the operating system. This seems to be the trend set by Windows-S, on which Google's Chrome browser won't run. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Plan to Kill High School Transcripts … and Transform College Admissions
2017/05/10
I think it would be very interesting to be able to hear some of the discussions behind the scenes. The "Edward E. Ford Foundation on Tuesday announced a $2 million grant to support the effort," according to this article, and one wonders, why? "This foundation has a narrow focus in its support—independent, private U.S. high schools," according to Inside Philanthropy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Email is the new RSS (or a Factotum is Born)
Clint Lalonde, ClintLalonde.net, 2017/05/10

I'm not sure I agree with Clink Lalonde that email is the New RSS, but I'm not sure I disagree as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Unsplashing
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2017/05/10
Alan Levine writes about trying out Unsplash. "I’ve known and used photos from Unsplash before but after a presentation on it at the Creative Commons Summit, I thought it was time to try it out with my first set of 10 photos," he writes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Building on Open Educational Resources – What’s Next?
TeachOnline.ca, 2017/05/04
The focus of this article is on "three particular developments to shape the future of OER (quoted):

• Developing replicable, scalable models for institutions and faculty members to adopt.
• Adopting and Adapting New Approaches to Assessment and Flexible Degrees
• Sharing The Tools for Generating Simulations and Games

As the authors say, "he key is not so much making new OER products, services and processes available but stimulating their adoption and use. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Have You Heard: Education Can’t Fix Poverty. So Why Keep Insisting that It Can?
Jennifer Berkshire, National Education Policy Center, 2017/05/04
This is Harvey Kantor is professor emeritus in the Department of Education, Culture and Society at the University of Utah, making sense. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Students to colleges: Please use our data this way
Meris Stansbury, eCampus News, 2017/05/04
The Ellucian survey cited is presented as nothing more than an infographic and so we learn very little about how it was conducted (other than that it was an online survey of 1,000 U.S. students conducted last October). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How to Prepare for an Automated Future
Claire Cain Miller, New York Times, 2017/05/04
Why are we preparing students for jobs that won't exist? Consider this: "We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers." More...