By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. George Siemens[Edit][Delete]: Knowledge and Our Structures of Learning, Elearnspace [Edit][Delete]ELearnSpace [Edit][Delete] November 30, 2006
George Siemens continues his conversion to business consultant: "To survive, all organizations need to embrace experimentation - an ongoing 'blood in the corporate veins' type of experimentation. Policy-induced change can be effective, but most often, if we follow the lessons of evolving organisms, developing corporate competence progressively is the best approach for long-term sustained change." If I were writing a corporate management bible, I would write it very differently. It's all very well to teach managers about networks, but I don't think they're really interested in networks. They're interested, if you will, in making friends and influencing people. Well, mostly the latter. Alas, poor Carnegie. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Stephen Downes[Edit][Delete]: Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge - The Podcast, October 17, 2006

MP3 Audio and PowerPoint Slides (the slides form a nice summary of the paper, if you didn't want to read the paper) from my session at the University of Prince Edward Island yesterday (also Skypecast, but notice came out so late I don't think we had any attendees). I thought it was a good session, not because of the quality of my discourse (in fact, there are some pretty awkward moments in there) but because it shows some of the thinks I need to think more deeply about. It was a pretty good back and forth - Dave Cormier kept saying, "This is great audio." Yeah well I guess it's good to see the points where people disagree with my theories and take apart my presentation. And I suppose it's good to post them on my website. [Tags: Quality] [Comment]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Charles M. Reigeluth and Alison Carr-Chellman[Edit][Delete]: A Common Language and Knowledge Base for ID?, IT Forum [Edit][Delete] October 3, 2006
I was all prepared to rake this one over the coals. After all, I have been reading the comments on IT Forum for the last month, and it seems like Yet Another Attempt to impose order on a messy discipline. But I hadn't read the paper, so I held off linking to it here. Good thing. It is actually a pretty good paper, if you take it at face value, as an analysis of the various aspects and dimensions of eductaional theory (or, instructional design, or...). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Patrick Lambe[Edit][Delete]: What is Knowledge Sharing?, Green Chameleon [Edit][Delete] July 17, 2006

A couple of good reflections on knowledge sharing, including this one on types of knowledge sharing ("A pop fan sets up a website about her favourite Taiwanese boy band") and the follow-up on the reasons why we share knowledge. More...