By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design
What is Human-Centered Design, and how can you use the design process to create innovative solutions for change? Acumen has teamed up with IDEO.org to offer this popular course on principles of Human-Centered Design. More...
MOOCs in Workplace Learning - Part 3: Launching a MOOC
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs in Workplace Learning - Part 3: Launching a MOOC
ID and Other Reflections, Sahana Chattopadhyay, 2015/02/06
This is a continuation of the series on MOOCs and focuses principally on launching a MOOC. More...
Standards Based Grading Gamified With Badges
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Standards Based Grading Gamified With Badges
Kyle Pearce, Tap Into Teen Minds, 2015/02/06
This is quite an interesting article that will reward careful reading and will reward even more following the background reading and working with the samples yourself. But be prepared to spend some time on it. More...
Coursera sets sights on universities
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Coursera sets sights on universities
Tim Dodd, Financial Review, 2015/02/06
According to this article, " Coursera was rebuilding its platform “from the ground up” to allow students to commence courses “on demand” and to give university instructors access to student data on progress and performance." More...
Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Better Listener
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Better Listener
Sarah Green, Harvard Business Review, 2015/02/06
This explains in part why lectures are so ineffective. "In a study of thousands of students and hundreds of businesspeople, they found that most retained only half of what they heard — and this immediately after they’d heard it. Six months later, most people only retained 25%." More...
Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification
Charles W. Bailey, Jr., DigitalKoans, 2015/02/06
This is interesting. The document describes the management of administrative data related to open access publications. More...
Privacy challenges
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Privacy challenges
Larry Hardesty, MIT News, 2015/02/04
This story has been making the rounds (I heard it on BBC world last night): an MIT research project is determined that you can positively identify a person with only four data points across a set of anonymized data. More...
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
James Somers, the jsomers.net blog, 2015/02/04
This is a fascinating item looking at the old Websters 1828 dictionary, and the editions that followed in its line. While today's dictionaries publish terse and matter of fact definitions that strip the nuance from the word, the original dictionary was elegant and detailed, presenting the word in all its flavours. More...
Educational Technology Strategies
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational Technology Strategies
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2015/02/04
I've been at the Education Technology Strategies conference in Toronto, for the last two days. Here are my notes - Day One, Day Two. Good conference, interesting. I liked the mix of elementary schools and post-secondary. More...
Google Brain’s Co-inventor Tells Why He’s Building Chinese Neural Networks
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Brain’s Co-inventor Tells Why He’s Building Chinese Neural Networks
Caleb Garling, Medium, 2015/02/03
Basically this is a look at Coursera founder Andrew Ng's next venture. He's now working with Baidu and still focused on massive - “only interested in tech that can influence 100 million users” - and in particular on using neural networks for analytics. More...