By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Old-school choice: Lie about your address
Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, 2019/03/11
True story: I left home before finishing high school. I moved to Ottawa's centre town so I would be eligible to attend Lisgar Collegiate, which was one of the better schools in the city. They wouldn't let me attend, telling me to instead go to Laurentian High, a dumpy old third rate school way out on Baseline Road. Then I moved to Quebec, but I wanted to finish high school, and I wanted to go to a decent school. So I set my sights on Nepean High School in a nice west end neighbourhood. A friend gave me a relative's address to use. It worked, I graduated from Nepean, and didn't get caught until they tried to mail me my diploma. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. #OpenBlog19 Most Valuable Lesson I Ever Learned
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2019/03/11
I'm not sure whether this is something I can commit to (not sure how often new topics will be posted by self-appointed moderator David Hopkins) but this is the sort of thing people used to do before social media - not the hashtag bit, the blogging bit - and I think it might be fun. The idea, in a nutshell: people submit topic ideas to David, he posts one as an #OpenBlog19 blogging topic, and then people write blog posts on that topic. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Concreting
Is YouTube blocked at your institution? Try Motionbox. That's where I learned all about pouring and setting concrete (very complete - the only thing missing was the point where the kids come and scratch their initials in the newly set sidewalk). Not sure how long Motionbox will last before being blocked, but it points to the fact that this will be a losing struggle for network administrators - they won't be able to block all the sources of online video. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hey Blogger! Andrew Keen Says You'Re a Pajamad Monkey Intellectual-Kleptomaniac Communist!
I protest! I am not wearing pyjamas! The blogosphere responds as one to Andrew Keen's ridiculous book, "We are not monkeys." Keen - who has been promoting the book relentlessly (I was one of the unfortunates to be subjected to his marketing on the mailing lists) - will probably make some money as a result of his uninformed attack. But such is the nature of that irresponsible and uneducated medium - traditional book publishing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging Inside or Outside the Corporate Firewall
Some comments on my post from yesterday talking about PLEs and corporate learning. Jay Cross says it was nonsense. He writes, "He knows full well that the reason I question 'Personal' is that I don't want us to forget that learning is co-creation, not solo." So, what, we replace 'personal' with 'work'? How does that follow? Tony Karrer writes, "Stephen's very much correct about a PLE being for the person. It is going to be a challenge for corporations to come to grips with the ownership of the learning if it is captured in a system. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Just the Facts
It's a short post, but I want this statement out there and presented for the record: "Our research, actually looking at what puts kids at risk for receiving the most serious kinds of sexual solicitation online, suggests that it's not giving out personal information that puts kid at risk. It's not having a blog or a personal website that does that either. What puts kids in danger is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web like going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there, kind of behaving in what we call like an internet daredevil." You know, it kind of reminds me of the kids I used to know at the arcade down on bank Street. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Web 2.0 Driven SECI Model Based Learning Process
The diagram in this post reminds me of my old 'knowledge - learning - community' diagrams from 2001 or so. There's still something to that, I think. In this case, the cycle is something like "externalization - communication - internalization - socialization". "After 15 years," writes the author, "Web 2.0 concepts seem to be an ideal fit with Nonaka's SECI approach opening new doors for more personal, dynamic, and social learning on a global scale". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. System Content: The Seven Models in a Sim
Very good post that should cause readers to rethink what they think about simulations. "Our world is filled with systems, as complex as the universe or simpler than a light switch. And complicated systems are made up of simpler systems, equations, variables, relationships, processes, units, and actions. There are seven different techniques for building out systems in sims, all compatible with each other, overlapping, scalable, and recursive". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging 2.0
Interesting discussion of the future of blogging. "The future of blogging must be connected to why people blog now," writes Ian Delaney, and also why they don't blog. Many aspiring bloggers underestimate the workload - and so future blogging may resemble more micro-blogging (such as twitter) or passive blogging. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lolcats
From the internet culture department, you ma want to take note of 'lolcats' - photographs (originally of cats) with captions (funny, LOL) expressed in altered grammar. They're pretty creative - and what I find interesting is that the altered grammar has a pattern, it is recognizable, and you can sense when it's done incorrectly - but it does not, obviously, follow any rules, standards or guidelines. More...