Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How did competencies come to dominate talent management in little more than three decades?
Sarah Beckett, HRSG, 2015/03/19

This is a short post that unintentionally illustrates the dangers inherent in a competency-based approach. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Philosophical Investigations
Ludwig Wittgenstein, 2015/03/18

If you've never read Philosophical Investigations you owe it to yourself to do so. This is not an easy book; it doesn't have a neat narrative and structure (though Wittgenstein's students tried to create one when assembling the notes from which it is comprised). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Valve's secret meeting got devs on board with Steam VR
Jessica Conditt, Engadget, 2015/03/18

If I had to place my wager on whether usable VR will be created by either sketchy Kickstarter start-up Oculus Rift or game developers Valve, I'd place my money on Valve. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Down With Selfie Sticks?
Rob Watson, Rob Watson Media, 2015/03/18

I saw my first selfie stick last September and the reaction since then has been, well, negative. Rob Watson questions this. "It seems that users of selfie sticks have broken some kind of taboo. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Do We Have an Inborn Moral Sense?
Marilyn Walker, Open Journal of Philosophy, 2015/03/18
When we want people to behave appropriately, either online or offline, to what exactly are we appealing? One school of thought argues that morality is based on reason - this, for example, gives us utilitarianism or the categorical imperative. But what if morality is more like a sensation, as Hume argued, rather than reason. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. UNESCO's Open Access (OA) Curriculum is now online
Sanjaya Mishra, UNESCO, 2015/03/18

As the headline says, UNESCO has released its new open access curriculum. Here it is:
Curriculum for Library Schools

• Module 1: Introduction to Open Access
• Module 2: Open Access Infrastructure
• Module 3: Resource Optimization
• Module 4: Interoperability and Retrieval

Curriculum for Researchers

• Module 1: Scholarly Communications
• Module 2: Concepts of Openness and Open Access
• Module 3: Intellectual Property Rights
• Module 4: Research Evaluation Metrics
• Module 5: Sharing your Work in Open Access. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The difference between social learning and social collaboration
Jane Hart, Learning in the Social Workplace, 2015/03/18
"Social learning," writes Jane Hart, "is too often deemed to be achieved primarily through an organised educational or training experience that involves people brought together explicitly to learn from one another." This presumes that learning objectives and the rest have been defined in advance. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Translation for massive open online courses to be developed by the traMOOC project
Unattributed, Open Education Europa, 2015/03/17
According to this short report, "The traMOOC project launched in February 2015 aims at tackling this impediment by developing high-quality automatic translation of various types of texts included in MOOCs from English into eleven European and BRIC languages." Automated translation is on the cusp of becoming everyday. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Innovative MOOCs Take Learning in New Directions
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2015/03/17

This article looks at a couple of specialized MOOC initiatives, one from the University of Michigan based on Coursera's expansion into China, and the other a non-MOOC MOOC initiative from Harvard on 'Small Private Online Courses' (SPOCs) directed toward alumni. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We Do Have Memories of the Future; We Just Cannot Make Sense of Them
Stephane Rogeau, PhilSciArchive, 2015/03/17
This paper is a conceptual exercise but it's important in its implications. Basically the idea is that it is theoretically possible to have memories of the future, because our recall of a memory is decoupled with the mechanism that created the memory. More...