By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Facebook As LMS?
Interesting idea. Christy Tucker writes, "I've seen a lot of research about the value of creating a learning community, and I think using social networking could help create that community." Well and good. But are you going to manage learning in such an environment? And the main benefit, to Tucker, is that learning in Facebook would be collaborative. "Heck, it's even an improvement if we make sure that all our discussion board assignments actually encourage discussion and/or debate and aren't just used as galleries or bulletin boards where everyone posts a variation on the same ideas and talks past each other." Is this the benefit Facebook offers? Would this improve learning? No, I think that the answers are more subtle than that. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Creating Learning Experiences
From time to time I talk about students not only joining communities of practice and interacting with people already working in a field, but of their contributing to the field as though they were actually practitioners (which, in fact, they are). This post describes what I mean, in a learning context, as Konrad Glogowski describes five states of learning based on his emerging practice: discover, define, immerse, build, contribute. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Will Teachers Be Like in 10 Years?
The 'Future of learning agents' conference held Tuesday in Palo Alto, based on a map of future forces affecting education (see also information aesthetics and edu.blogs), has attracted a variety of comments. Steve Hargadon, one of the attendees, noted "that the characteristics that were listed for learning-agents in 10 years are not those that are the primary measures today. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top Edublogs - August 2007
Interesting because McLeod estimates the size of the edublogosphere to be more than 50,000 blogs. In an analysis of 3600 of them, using Technorati link ratings, he identifies the 'top 30'. This blog is ranked fifth, behind Inside Higher Ed, apophenia (Danah Boyd's blog), Weblogg-Ed (Will Richardson) and Education Week. The other blog comes in 26th, making me (I think) the only person with two blogs in the top thirty. So what does it all mean? In a word: nothing.

For one thing, I don't agree with McLeod's argument that "The hubs and superhubs are the essential connectors, the glue that holds the network together." The diagram he uses, from Barabasi's Linked In, is simply wrong. Wrong both descriptively - it's not what the blogosphere actually looks like - and normatively - it's not what it should look like. What we are more like, and more want to be, is a mesh, and not a hub-and-spokes network.

For another, I agree with Jennifer Wagner. "No one should ever feel 'not good enough' to blog." Nor should they feel that rankings - Technorati or otherwise - are in some way indicative of the quality of the writing, despite what McLeod claims. All you have to do is to get a bunch of your friends together, create blogs, link to each other, and voila, you're powerful and influential, at least according to Technorati. Or all you need is some way to give your blog an extra boost - perhaps you can hire writers, have a print magazine, or give seminars on a daily or weekly basis where you encourage people to blog - when I was publishing the MuniMall newsletter my biggest boost in subscriptions was from the booth and talks at conferences.

Don't believe in the myth of 'rankings'. These matter to commercial media and advertisers, people who are more interested in counting eyeballs than insights. Even were the Technorati (or Feedburner) rankings accurate, they wouldn't be worth the paper they were written on. Even the idea that there could be a ranking of 'best' bloggers is mistaken. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning, Knowing, and Reflecting: Literacies for the 21st Century
According to this essay, "students are best prepared for the beginning of the 21st century when they know how they learn, when they convert information into knowledge, and when they document and reflect on their life-wide learning." The first is accomplished by participation in communities of practice, the second by information literacy, and the third by reflective practices such as e-portfolios. This essay fronts the new issue of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Artichoke comments, "Check out the 'ICT triumphs regardless' positioning of information communication technology throughout the thought document... I suspect we may have produced a more compellingly audacious document, something without the pervasive sense that ICTs will be ubiquitous, extensive and in some ill defined way the rescuers of future schooling." Well maybe. But the world in which ICT does not triumph does not, today, seem very likely. And the characterizations of the different schools of thought are certainly to some degree accurate, enough so that I am seeing the terminology repeated elsewhere. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The OECD Schooling Scenarios in Brief
So what is the future of learning? The OECD draws a few scenarios for us:

1. Attempting to Maintain the Status Quo
Scenario 1.a: "Bureaucratic School Systems Continue" - The use of ICT continues to grow without changing schools' main organisational structures.
Scenario 1.b "Teacher exodus - The 'meltdown scenario'" - Widely different organisational responses to shortages - some traditional, some highly innovative - and possibly greater use of ICT.

2.Re-schooling
Scenario 2.a "Schools as Core Social Centres" - ICT used extensively, especially its communication capabilities.
Scenario 2.b "Schools as Focused Learning Organisations" - Extensive use made of ICT.

3.  De-schooling
Scenario 3.a "Learning Networks and the Network Society" - A multitude of learning networks, quickened by the extensive possibilities of powerful, inexpensive ICT.
Scenario 3.b "Extending the Market Model" - A wide range of market-driven changes would be introduced into the ownership and running of the learning infrastructure, some highly innovative and with the extensive use of ICT. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Getting Social Networks to Socialize
My recent work to implement OpenID is especially relevant in view of articles like this one as it considers the need for social networks to communicate with each other. What this requires is a system of personal identification that is not owned by any of them - and that, to my mind, is OpenID (as people like Marc Canter are saying (here too - lots of links) - odd that Michael Geist completely misses this, talking instead about Plaxo and Liberty). Today I managed to get the OpenID Consumer script working. I'm thinking about how to implement this into my login system. As I ponder these things, I read a lot and write a lot - which results in today's jam-packed issue. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tenure and the Public Sociologist
Interesting article on the public sociology movement and the attitude of academia toward a discipline that works outside traditional classes and journals. Public sociologists work inside the community, doing things like, say, redesigning soup kitchens. The perspective of the article is that there must be some sort of peer review in order to assess the discipline. Academics would review portfolios consisting of "research reports prepared for non-academic groups, research on the effectiveness of policies or programs developed by the tenure candidate for community groups or government agencies, op-eds or testimony before government bodies." Review is a good thing, surely. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Disney Asks UW to Retract 'Irresponsible' Statement On Baby Videos
We can expect more of this. Disney, which produces 'Baby Einstein', an infant training video that was panned in recent research, has written to the administration of the University of Washington asking them to require a retraction of 'irresponsible' statements. "Baby DVDs, videos may hinder, not help infants' language development," the university reported in a press release, following the publication of the work. Disney is of course free to criticize the research. But the tactic of communication with administration and demanding retraction reminds one more of the scholarship of thugs, not researchers. More...