By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 Technologies Supporting Problem-Based Learning: A Systematic Literature Review
Erhan Ünal, Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 2019/12/24
The more I see systematic literature reviews, the less reliable I think they are. In the current case (26 page PDF), the author surveys the literature between the years 2004-2018 to find articles investigating the use of web 2.0 technology in problem-based learning (PBL) and finds only 18 articles to include in the review, the vast majority of which use the wiki in PBL. It's hard to believe that the academic record on this topic is so sparse, even if the selection is limited to "only high quality peer-reviewed published articles". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We Can’t Handle What the Internet Has Done to Us
Jules Evans, OneZero, 2019/12/24
The funny thing, for me, is that I'm actually comfortable with all this chaos. The whole internet thing doesn't bother me. Why not? Here's how Jules Evans characterizes the problem: "Social media has also totally transformed our politics, in a decade. It’s ripped apart our sense of trust in media and politicians.... The trick mirror turns everything into a performance, so political debate becomes wrestling.... We have reached a stage of collective consciousness, through globalization and the internet, and we can’t quite handle it."
So why am I OK with all this? Maybe it's because I grew up in a small town, maybe it's because I was writing from an early age, maybe it's because I never trusted media and politicians, having seen from the inside how they fabricate reality, maybe it's because I read a lot of science fiction and to me all this is normal. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Glossary Items
Training Industry, 2019/12/23
I was looking for something else (specifically - pre-2015 references to 'learning experience platform' - why is Google's date-based search so unreliable?) when I encountered this glossaty of training industry terms. Useful. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The War for Corporate Learning Platforms Gets Hotter
Josh Bersin, 2019/12/23
This is a pretty good overview of the shifting market in corporate e-learning technology (I wouldn't classify it as a "war" since as far as I know no violence has occurred, happily). One point of focus is the learning experience platform (LXP), "intelligent learning portals that use a variety of approaches to making all forms of learning content (articles, videos, courses, podcasts) easy to find for employees." These need to be linked with (or merged with) 'systems of record' in the corporate environment. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ATARs measure privilege, not academic merit, and it starts in kindergarten
Tara Schultz, ABC News, 2019/12/23
If we combine the philosophy of testing with the well-established fact that socioeconomic status is the best predictor of academic success, then we must draw the conclusion in the title. This article is a forthright and frank story about how that played out for one person. "I failed school because I grew up in a world that exists beneath yours. I learnt a range of skills that helped me survive in the impoverished world I was born into. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Hacking the MOOC: Towards a Postdigital Pedagogy of Critical Hope
Joel Lazarus, Postdigital Science and Education, 2019/12/23
This post (22 page PDF) is thickly laden with jargon and a theoretical overlay, but its core message is clear enough: "I am arguing that radical cMOOCs should be designed with and express a consciousness of class relations of knowledge production and that the relations and knowledge we cultivate through our cMOOC experience and endeavours can express our personal and collective power to overturn and transform these relations." Well, yes, that's one message we could get from a cMOOC. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Chatham House Sharing for OER
Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, 2019/12/23
I always thought it was 'Charterhouse Rules', but I guess not (I say this after a Google search for the alternatives). The idea of the rules is that "you can report out anything said, but you can’t identify who said it." This is because, presumably, "people need to speak freely as they hash out things at a conference, and to do that they sometimes have to speak loosely in ways that don’t translate outside the conference." Of, as I interpret such rules, "they're able to lie with impunity either inside or outside the meeting. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Attack on Canada’s Schools
Grant Frost, frostededucation, 2020/01/28
Canada has had for many years one of the best school systems in the world. This is not just opinion; it's a statement that is proven in test after test. However, as Grant Frost notes, "from coast to coast, regardless of province or political affiliation, our public education system is in turmoil, driven by a strikingly similar  'Our schools are failing' rhetoric." Why? He argues, and I agree, that "our public education system, from coast to coast, is embroiled in a fight for its very life." I also think that collective bargaining itself is also under attack, as Doug Peterson suggests. And the motivation is money - the money that could be made by privatizing schools, the money that could be made by plundering teachers' pension plans. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Individual Learning Experience in Connectivist Environment: A Qualitative Sequence Analysis
Alaa AlDahdouh, International Journal of Research in Education and Science, 2020/01/28
This is a really good paper. It's a very fair treatment of connectivism, representing the theory accurately and well. Some comments:
- instead of  the three types of networks (neural, conceptual, and external) I tend to draw on three examples where entities actually *connect*: social networks, neural networks, and artificial neural networks. Also Watts's network of crickets, if pressed.
- The paper correctly applies connectivism to problem solving, as opposed to learning some specific content. However, it forces a degree of sameness on people, in the sense that they are trying to solve problems that are put to them, rather than tasks and challenges of their own choosing.
- finally, it's a lot to ask for students to go from zero to full-on connectivism (especially in a challenging setting like Palestine). I've discussed the skills needed to be successful (cf. 'critical literacies') but there doesn't seem to be any indication that students have these skills, or are even aware of them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mental Representation
David Pitt, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020/01/28
This is a substantive revision of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on mental representation. I won't say a lot about it here, except to say that this is (by and large) a theory I believe to be incorrect. I am definitely in the minority here, though. The representational theory of mind (RTM) "takes as its starting point commonsense mental states, such as thoughts, beliefs, desires, perceptions and imagings". More...