By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. For Your Listening Pleasure...
This is the change we're seeing happen: "The last few weeks have been amazing at my school. The Learning 2.0 Conference started it last September. Then the Laptop/Wi-fi pilot in the high school helped key people start seeing the shift that needs to happen." Yeah. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blearning - Yes It's New, It's Exciting, It's Cheap, It's Free
Somebody in Bogota on Wednesday was talking to me about 'Blearning' and it had me scratching my head - until we collectively realized that it's 'blended learning'. Which, of course, is not new - just rebranded. That said, we had a pretty good discussion about the idea of 'blended learning' as classes supplemented with e-learning resources, and the sort of thing we were doing, where there is an on-site in-person component, but it certainly does not resemble a class. And that if we wanted to talk about a newer form of blended learning, we should be talking about online learning supporting real-world activities (not classes). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Swiftboating Higher Education On P2P: Why Higher Education Is Not the Real Problem, and Technology Is Not the Real Solution
What is important about this presentation (Adobe PDF) is that it focuses on the misrepresentations made by music and film companies about file sharing - especially when the same activity occurs on their own networks. One wonders, why do they go after universities and not commercial internet providers? Maybe bulk licensing agreements (and the institutions' legendary tendency to fold under legal pressure) have something to do with it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Habermas Relevant to a Wired Public Sphere?
I have never been a Habermas scholar - I differ from many commentators in this sphere in my philosophical orientation, which owes much more to Russell, Ayer, Quine, McLuhan and Wittgenstein than to continental philosophers like Heidegger, Husserl, Foucault and Habermas. But I certainly recognize the influence of Habermas - at philosophy conferences in the 80s when I was a grad student people would stop talking about him. So it's not surprising to see him surfacing here. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Communities / Social Networking and LMS Merger
Once again we're leading the way. Here's a quote from Gartner: "Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade." I guess their definition of 'successful' is taking something that's widely available for free and convincing money-ladejn enterprises to pay for it. Related: This stuff is freaking me out. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Games and Education
George Siemens links to a Slashdot discussion of games and learning and comments, "Games fit the typical profile of academic envy, namely the condition where we see many people doing something and desire to then use the same tools or processes for teaching and learning." As usual I comment at this juncture that the effort should be to put learning into games, not games into learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educamp Colombia - Medellin
So here we are at eduCamp Colombia in the beautiful city of Medellin. As I type Diego is at the front of the room as we are finished brainstorming and about to enter into discussion groups. Various Authors, Flickr December 7, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Flickr]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Must-Read New Blog: Sean'S Slam Teaching
Clay Burell serves up this new blog. "The idea behind Slam Teaching is not unlike the idea behind slam poetry. Teaching, this blog posits, is an extemporaneous, aggressive, lyric, funny thing to do. It's a way of expressing oneself; it is art, and it is unpredictable. This blog will work (slowly, progressively) toward a better understanding of teaching as this dynamic force - an animated performance rather than a set of skills that react with criteria for learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Fallout From Testing
I'm linking to this post for this one sentence: "The notion that we have come to a consensus on what constitutes the well-educated 8-, 12- or 18-year-old, on what body of facts and scientific truth we all agree is essential, and finally that we have a way to get at this that will not impact on narrowing or distorting the curriculum-all seem far-fetched". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educamp Colombia
Greetings from Medellin, Colombia, where I am getting ready for the second of two 'educamps' we are having here. The workshops - yesterday's involved a hundred or so teachers from the Bogota region, and tomorrow's in Medellin will be similar - are being conducted in the 'camp' format: Diego Leal introduces the format and I talk about the concepts of e-learning 2.0 and connectivism, and then we spend the rest of the day in various user-directed activities. In Bogota, the first set was devoted to the web 2.0 tools, and the second on challenges and issues over using web 2.0 in learning. I got to talk with dozens of educators, to listen and learn a lot, to play in an OLPC, and much more.
There's a lot of content you can look at already. Yesterday's educamp was broadcast live using UStream (check Friday for the Medellin educamp on the same channel). Diego describes the event (in Spanish) in his blog. He has posted his own slides on Slideshare. You can also view my slides on Slideshare. Diego Leal, Colombia Apprendre December 6, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Connectivism, Online Learning, E-Learning 2.0, Web Logs]. More...