Author: Downes

The argument from theft once again rears its ugly head, this time in an OER discussion forum. On 01/11/2012 6:44 PM, Jacky Hood wrote: There is an alternative: stop forcing people to pay for research, education, etc. How good is something that requires jail sentences and fines to get people

Responding to x28, ‘Lower Levels of Connectivism‘ First, it is probably more accurate to speak of ‘domains’ of connectivity rather than layers. The use of ‘layers’ suggests some sort of ordering (from, eg., small to large) that isn’t really a defining characteristic. Using ‘domains’ allows us to recognize that *any*

Responding to Cooperative Catalyst, Metrics and “Success” I think data is important (it’s the only evidence we have!) but I think that people take a very narrow view of data, which is unfortunate. – they think, for example, that data is just numbers, when in fact data can be found

From my post titled ‘Wrong’: I get where Gary Stager is coming from. Learning is not the same as remembering. By the same token, I made myself a set of flash cards this week as an aid to remember my past participles in French. So there’s another side to it.

Originally posted in One Change a Day, January 3 When George Siemens and I created the first MOOC in 2008 we were not setting out to create a MOOC. So the form was not something we designed and implemented, at least, not explicitly so. But we had very clear ideas

Before addressing editorial writer Norbert Cunningham’s concerns about the dropout rate at Canadian schools, let’s look at the actual data. Here are the statistics from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada: And lest we suppose this is a snapshot of an isolated statistic, here are some more figures regarding educational

Responding to Durff’s Blog In a post today I summarized Bill Cushard in Mindflash as follows: If I had to summarize the best advice I could give to e-learning developers, it would be this: “here are two key lessons for learning professionals:1. Adapt to the on-demand world.2. Embed learning into

What has been most offensive about the media coverage of the Occupy movement has been the misrepresentation of both the issues that have prompted the protests and the response of the Occupy movement. We have yet another example of such coverage in (where else?) our local newspaper. Martin Latulippe (“CSP,

In response to Brian Kelly, The (Technology) Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Christmas Yet To Come While my perspective is admittedly limited, and while I can almost be legitimately referred to as an old stick-in-the-mud, I think my own experience is relevant. Currently, email is by far and

A local writer and editor of the teen section in our newspaper, Isabelle Agnew has gotten herself into hot water in the letters section of the newspaper by penning a column in which she admits she’s a pagan and asserts that she finds Christmas greetings offensive. “My issue,” she writes,

This morning I read a short item from Mashable describing some predictions being made for the next five year by IBM. Among more workaday predictions we’ve heard elsewhere – that biometrics will become mainstream, for example, or that mobile computing will end the digital divide – is a prediction that

Drupal & Hosted Drupal Newspapers Running on DrupalThis is a demo site showcasing newspapers running on Drupal, a popular open source content management system. These are sites set up using Drupal and then expanded with various modules. There are four newspaper-specific Drupal module packages:* NodeStream – publish content in newspaper

My response to Jon Dron, And so it ends… Interesting reflections and I appreciate the comments and the participation. It’s easy enough technically to implement some sort of collaborative filtering or reputation management system, but the result would conflict with the objectives of the design of the MOOC. To over-generalize,

EDUCAUSE has this habit of creating placeholders for its posts and then sending RSS feeds composed solely of those placeholders. Maybe the content will be filled later, maybe it’s just a program entry and will never be fleshed out, but RSS readers like me will never know; we see nothing

From Col – see also Beer, Clark, Jones, Indicators of Engagement, which has much of the same content Most of the research into measuring student engagement prior to the widespread adoption of online, or web based classes, has concentrated on the simple measure of attendance (Douglas & Alemanne, 2007). “Stovall

This is an interview of me conducted by Karen Stepanyan for the the BlogForever Consortium, a project co-funded by the European Commissionwithin the Seventh Framework Programme. An audio version of this interview is available here. First,we would like to understand your background. This will help us to understandthe context of your answers. 1.          Could

I have submitted the following responses about #change11 and MOOCs in general to the Open Education Quality Initiative (OPAL) survey of OER practices (I love how the email said it would take five minutes to complete the survey). I would also encourage others involved in MOOCs to participate in the

Here’s what we have for participation rates in the #Change11 MOOC this far.

‘Persons’ are people who have registered for the course. The gap between persons and subscriptions is the number of people who signed up for the course but unsubscribed to the newsletter.’Subscriptions’ is the number of people subscribing to the daily newsletter.’Feeds’ is the number of blogs submitted by course participants and harvested by the feed reader. It includes active feeds only.

Presented to the Best Practices in Upgrading Online,Calgary, via Adobe Connect, March 29, 2011. Presentation slides and audio.The very first thing I want to do is to counter thedisclaimer that frightened me as this session opened, it was very loud, and…