By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Affiliation and Ignite
Chris Kennedy, Culture of Yes, 2014/11/28
This is a pretty key statement, I think: "Our profession will not be mandated into meeting the needs of modern learners but the power of networks and new thinking around affiliation can help diffuse the work." It is the way we work as individuals, and work with learners as individuals, that will define the new structures of learning. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Datapalooza
Jose Ferreira, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2014/10/01
Knewton's sales representative, Jose Ferreira, is making some big claims. "We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close.... We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything." Except, responds Philop Kerr, it's not that simple. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Diversity Makes Us Smarter
Katherine W. Phillips, Scientific American, 2014/10/01
I have frequently cited diversity as one of the key ingredients of network design. This is not an arbitrary choice; emergence is not possible without diversity. So it's not surprising to see articles like this pointing to how diversity makes us (ie., society) smarter. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Guide to Evaluating Networks
Madeleine Taylor, Beth's Blog, 2014/09/30
From the original post it took three clicks to actually read the document, and that includes a form asking for my name and email for spamming purposes. But I'm interested in networks and I wanted to see what they had to say about evaluating networks. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Want even more mind-blowing TED Talks? Let’s get more STEM teachers in the classroom. Starting with … you!
Baratunde Thurston, TED Blog, 2014/09/30
Sorry about the super-long title. It's typical of this post, which in turn is typical of the TED approach to education. Which is sad, and (as we see in this video) disappointingly patronizing. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Most Popular Social Network for Young People? Texting
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 2014/09/30
I can't say I'm surprised that texting would be more popular than Facebook or Twitter - it is, after all, the medium you can use to talk to your friends that doesn't leave a content trail, isn't monetized by advertisers, and won't accidentally become the next internet meme. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Online Participant Invite for 2014-15
Various authors, Gleneagle Secondary‘s Philosophy 12 class, 2014/09/29
If you want to challenge the preconceptions of high school students (well, at least some of them) this is the place to do it. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How To Train Your Attention and Be Effective When Working Online
Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog, 2014/09/29
OK, I have a cat that sits on my desk right in front of my keyboard, so I know about being distracted. But then again, I'm usually playing on Facebook or Twitter, so I guess it's a wash. But I'm not sure I need to go on an Information Diet, even if Clay Johnson recommends it. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Network Theorist Barry Wellman Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute
Unattributed, Oll Awards, 2014/09/29
Worth noting as University of Toronto researcher Barry Wellman receives a significant honour. "The top-cited Canadian sociologist, Wellman’s current work continues to focus on the interplay between information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, social relations and social structure." Here's a sample of his writing, from Connecting Community. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight Among the Incompetent
Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnson, M. Banner, D.Dunning, Justin Kruger, PubMedGov, 2014/09/29
It is well known that low-skilled people tend to over-estimate their performance. This is typically thought to result from their inability to recognize what poor and good performance looks like. But in this paper, the authors suggest there may be more to it than that. More...
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