By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Dawn or dusk of the 5th age of research in educational technology? A literature review on (e-)leadership for technology-enhanced learning in higher education (2013-2017)
Deborah Arnold, Albert Sangrà, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2019/02/11
The first four 'ages' ae defined by Winn (2002) (21 page PDF) as the studies of instructional design, message design, simulation/interaction design, and (the new) learning environment design. The 'fifth age' is proposed by Jameson (2013) (27 page PDF) and is the focus on "more critical, selective, strategic e‐leadership approaches to the adoption and use of educational technology." This paper is an update of that 'fifth age' and is "an exploratory review of the literature for the period 2103-2017." The result is a pretty good paper on work in educational technology management. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Laws of UX
Jon Yablonski, 2019/02/11
This is a set of 19 key tenets of User Experience (UX). They're nicely summarized and illustrated, and each one has a 'More' button linking to an extended description and links to more resources. Each also has a nice downloadable poster suitable for framing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Blogosphere As an Artifact of Distributed Cognition
Over on the other blog today I have posted a longish item called What I am Working On. It's another attempt to explain things like learning networks and distributed cognition (if I try enough times I'll eventually get it, right?). The sorts of things discussed in this article constitute the sorts of things I think about on a day-to-day basis - and while the author is showing how brains are different from computers, there is a flipside, which is, how computers could be the same as brains, but aren't, yet. Lots of room for invention. Like this, for example: "The brain uses content-addressable memory." What does that mean? The author says, "The end result is that your brain has a kind of 'built-in Google.'" Well, yeah. But: "memories are composed of linked sensory fragments -- odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value
When asked how to create knowledge management solutions for an organization, consultants may respond with "creating big central 'knowledge bases', or websites, or community of practice 'collaboration spaces'." Sound familiar? But Dave Pollard argues, correctly, that "these types of initiatives tend to produce disappointing results.. these are easy to do, and often fun, which is perhaps why they're so tempting... but I think programs that focus more on context than content, and more on connection than collection, often pay the biggest dividends. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Just Say No! A Few More Reasons for Universities to Foster Independent Mediated Voices
Some universities are caving to the RIAA's demands that they pass along information about student accounts - Purdue, for example, warned 40,000 students to "remove or at least partially disable any peer-to-peer file sharing software on their computers." On the other hand, some other universities - notably Nebraska and Maine - have had enough and are fighting back. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating ePortfolios with Web 2.0 Tools
Helen Barrett consolidates some of her work on e-portfolios and Web 2.0. "One advantage of Web 2.0 tools is that many of them are free, although WikiSpaces may place ads on the page. There is some concern about security in a K-12 school environment, so care should be taken when using these tools with children." See also these audio clips from some of her e-portfolio presentations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Help define digital literacy
W. Ian O'Byrne, 2019/02/11
Last week Ian O'Byrne wrote of work he is doing with  the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to define digital literacy. He was asked "why this work wasn’t being conducted in the open" and this post is the result. There's some annotation work being done with hypothes.is and he's using FlipGrid to solicit video-recorded opinions (this site is mostly empty, though). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Roadmap to becoming a Solid Developer in 2019
Solid, GitHub, 2019/02/11
Solid, you may recall, is the project by Tim Berners-Lee and company to create a distributed social web. This page makes it clear just how difficult and complex that task is. It's a 'roadmap' to becoming a Solid developer - that is, it identifies and links to the different things you need to know. The 'basics' include identity, DOM manipulation, APIs and more, not to mention graph data and RDF. You'll also need package managers like Yarn or (Node.js) NPM. Then you can move on to React, a Javascript framework for dynamic web interfaces. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. TeacherTube
A bunch of people have mentioned TeacherTube recently - like YouTube, except for teachers. Some people have taken note of Mrs. Burk's 'perimeter rap' video - though I'm not sure 'chick' and 'nasty' are the most appropriate ways to describe what is really a nice video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Zenith Space Mission 2007
I always like stuff like this. Hosted by Yukon College, "This 12 hour space shuttle simulation is designed to give students an idea of what it might be like to be part of a shuttle crew or the Mission Control Team... On Tuesday, April 3, 2007 this Grade 6 class will blast off into space!" Virtually, of course. More...