Author: Downes

Many people want the traditional locked down LMS, where students are seen as needing competencies and knowledge, where content is to be dumped, absorbed, and pumped out via tests.

But an LMS can be like a community, where every member is a teacher and…

Talk about open government/data and open pedagogies including underlying philosophy, practices, benefits and challenges with specific reference to NRC

So let’s talk about open government and open data.

Geodata – MuniMall – where are our layers?…

Partial summary of presentation by Terry Anderson and George Siemens of Jon Dron’s preconference workshop.

The topic is basically around finding the right balance between Moodle and alternatives.

We began by talking about pedagogies we’ve used or hav…

I remember standing in the front row of the Coalition demonstration in December of 2008. Jack Layton came over and shook my hand, and I said to him, “I hope you become Prime Minister some day.” I registered a look of surprise in his face, as though h…

NDP Rally, a photo by Stephen Downes on Flickr.Jack Layton speaks to a very crowded NDP rally on the dock in Saint John, New Brunswick. Full set of photos.

In its 2010 Speech from the Throne, the Government of Ontario, Canada announced its intention to create an Ontario Online Institute (OOI) to support online learning in the province as part of the Open Ontario Plan. I was asked to provide some initial r…

Responding to the enquiries posted to this blog post. Originally intended as a comment, but Blogger very arbitrarily limits the size of comments, and I can’t seem to change that.

I honestly don’t think that most people think of the definition of ‘grou…

I commented, here:

The best learning I’ve ever done has been on my own, working through a hard problem, by reading and then writing, either text, or software, or derivations. This is also the hardest learning I’ve done; most of the people I could talk…

David T. Jones asks, “Does connectivism conflate or equate the knowledge/connections with these two levels (“neuronal” and “networked”)? Regardless of whether the answer is yes or no, what are the implications that arise from that response?”

…

(Note to philosophers: this represents only my take on the brakeless trains example, and is not intended to be a full and accurate depiction of Russell’s argument (and does not even mention Strawson’s response). I am concerned here not for exegetical

I attended an open house to discuss the city planning exercise with various city officials on Wednesday at the city’s L’Odyssée High School (they let the students name the school and that’s what they picked; they haven’t let the students name a school…

RSS is ridiculously easy to create. It should be available to everyone, without the need for a specialized blogging application.

Here’s a Perl script that will create an RSS feed from a tab separated document.

<p>&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &…

Downes : Thinking:Our concept of ‘self’ is not created through internal reflection. It is created via our perception of self from the external world.

Downes : ‘self’ is a concept, like ‘bacon’ or hope’, created through the production of artifacts in t…

A ‘success verb’ is a verb that refers not only to an action or set of actions, but also tacitly to the outcome of that action. Such verbs are often used to imply that one hopes to achieve the outcome.For example: “I’m convincing my mother to come…

Responding to David W. Campbell, this post, in which he refers to this column and asserts “We need a new approach – see the column for a few ideas.”Update: It looks like David W. Campbell has removed my reply from his post.Update: my reply is ba…