Author: Stephen Downes

OK, before you panic, I’m not thinking of quitting OLDaily. It’s not that kind of post. But still. When I changed email providers a few months ago I lost a lot of readers and my totals never did recover. (*) Nor am I being invited to speak at conferences any

This is based on my contribution to the new Creative Commons ‘Education Platform’ discussion of issues related to open educational resources (OERs). This is the next step following the development of a set of principles for the Platform. (I’m not sure of the origin of the set of suggestions above

Continuing from Part 1 The story so far In Part 1 I covered the basics of Electron up to and including building executable applications from the Node.js application. In particular I looked at the fundamental role played by the package.json file in defining the application requirements, defining start and build

Over the holidays this year I indulged myself in some guilt-free play: learning Electron. I ran across it reading my Medium feed, via this article demonstrating how to build a sound-machine app using Electron. I didn’t build the sound-machine, but I built a bunch of other stuff. What is Electron 

Short response to a questionnaire. 1. What is Digital Literacy Digital literacy is a type of literacy, specifically, the type of literacy that arises in the digital context. By ‘the digital context’ we mean the multimedia and inter-networked context enabled by digital technology. What’s significant is how it advances beyond

As always, I (a) have plans, and (b) know that the plans never survive very long. That’s OK; I include options and backups in my plans, and I’m always ready with the tools I need to take advantage of any opportunities that arise. Courses Offering online courses allows me to

Yes, the world probably existed before me, and it will probably continue to exist after I’m gone, but for me, my life is the universe, and vice versa. This is the state of it. This coming year I will turn 60, which I suppose will leave me in a state

Joanne Jacobs links to an article titled Why I Wish I Hadn’t Gone to College by Keri Savoca. Savoca writes that she would have been a lot better off had she spent the 11 years doing something else. “I watched my peers who didn’t go to college establish businesses, get

I am participating in a series of Open Science consultations within NRC, an effort that I hope will have long-term value for the organization and for Canadians. My first input is below: Supporting open science helps NRC be better at science, maximizes the impact of NRC work, and delivers the

Workflow The next step in the use of badges is to develop a mechanism for awarding them. This is something that can generate a lot of labour in a hurry (9 modules times 10 people means 90 badges issued…). I’d like to automate this as much as possible, but this

The Badge API and Setting Up Badges This actually represents almost a week’s worth of work. You might ask, why am I working on something obsolete, like badges, using a computer language that is even more obsolete, like Perl, to create code for an application that will never be widely

Badges I looked at openbadges.me and Badgr and selected the latter mostly because it’s where the Mozilla Backpack project landed. My allegiance will last as long as it works. This was tested right away when the login failed; it’s not letting me use my password (even though I changed it

This is in response to the following question from a student in Iran: I am going to start an academic project on the application of connectivism in the context of foreign language acquisition. I was just wondering that since learning a foreign language is basically mastering some language skills practically

Harvesting, Again I’m having issues with the harvester again. There are two distinct problems:– The harvester isn’t harvesting– When I do harvest, it’s downloading things that were downloaded before I’m going to deal with the second thing first. I think the problem is that the previous things were deleted. Because

The RSS Feed The course isn’t truly distributed until it has an RSS feed. We’ll use the course newsletter as our RSS feed, except we’ll publish the output in rss2 format instead of HTML. So, exactly as before, we’ll build the RSS page in the page Editor. Figure 117 –

Syndication Syndication is the core of the cMOOC approach to learning and we haven’t talked about it at all yet. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in things like video events and content and to forget that the true purpose of the course is connection. OPML Now that we

[Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7] OK, I’ve put on some Cœur de pirate and am set for today’s work. Feeds One of the key attributes of gRSShopper is the harvester. This application scans websites for

Ethics I’ve just finished sending off the ethics review board (REB) documents for research ethics review. This is something I should have done in August, not October, and something that was done in all our previous MOOCs, but by someone else more competent than me. So if you’re wondering why

We launched the course this week and I did a bunch of things to get ready. This summarizes them in no particular order (except that they were all done in the last few days in a frantic rush). Videos Videos are an important part of any MOOC and these MOOCs

Activities Each week of the course will feature some events. These are mostly live video conferences with guests. I also want to be able to show slides and to include the activity feed. I’ve been creating these using xSplit and then broadcasting the entire screen, but it’s a bit unreliable.