By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Open Access Interviews: F1000 Founder Vitek Tracz
Richard Poynder, Open, Shut?, 2015/09/23
Fifteen years ago Vitek Tracz launched Biomed Central and in so doing gave open access the boost it needed into the mainstream. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How adtech, not ad blocking, breaks the social contract
Doc Searls, 2015/09/23
The Applesphere has been roiling over the ad-blocking controversy recently (the Firfoxsphere has been happily blocking ads for years). The argument is that people blocking ads are somehow taking advantage of publishers, since they rely on advertisements. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is Twitter Where Connections Go to Die? – The Unfollowing Experiment
Luis Suarez, E L U S A, 2015/09/23
Regular readers know that I don't follow people on Twitter - I can't follow everybody (it would be just noise) and I don't want to create a special subset of privileged connections. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead
Alexandra Alter, New York Times, 2015/09/23
According to the article, "E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media." I disagree. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Musicians hear songs when they read music, non-musicians seek visual patterns
Roheeni Saxena, Ars Technica, 2015/09/23
You learn to perceive. Or, to put it another way, to learn is to learn how to perceive. There's no better illustration of this than the example cited in this article. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Peeple app lets you rate human beings like restaurants
CBC, 2015/09/23
The headline says it all. I give the headline writer a ranking of '5'. I give the creator of the app a '2' (because people have been rating each other on dating sites and on things like 'hotornot' for decades, and sites like eBay and Uber have been rating clients and vendors almost as long). More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ECTEL2015 Mon a.m. (1): Lisa Marie Blaschke Keynote
Doug Clow, New Technolopgy in Higher Education, 2015/09/23
I talk a lot about personal learning (and have for a very long time). But I have to be clear that there is also a tradition in self-determined learning, under the name of heutagogy, which has been around since the early 2000s. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 10 uncomfortable truths about the con that is University rankings
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2015/09/22
I rarely report university rankings (or pretty much any rankings) in this newsletter, and any time I do, I add a hearty note of scepticism. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Questions about online ‘openness’
Jenny Mackness, 2015/09/22
Some good questions for an open education practitioner. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis
Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic, 2015/09/22
David Hume was one of my early important influences and remains today among my favourite philosophers. Hume is known mostly as a sceptic but the many hours I have spent in his work rewarded me with a philosophy of mind and associationist logic that accords well with what we actually see of humans (and infants, and animals) thinking and reasoning. More...
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