Author: Stephen Downes

Responding to Donald Clark’s excellent article, Let’s move on from ‘Unintelligible Intelligences’ – IQ, Multiple Intelligences, Emotional Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence…  “Let’s take this idea further. Koch (2014) claimed that ALL networks are, to some degree ‘intelligent’….” Not just Koch. This is, of course, the core idea in Connectivism. Though as

What, again? Yes, again. Today I’m working on creating and saving a reusable Docker image of gRSShopper. I have the benefit of some previous work on this set-up, and so it might work today, so I’m documenting my process. Note: I’m doing all this so you don’t have to. You

Wait, why did he pick that? My newsletter is called OLDaily, which is short for ‘Online Learning Daily’, a title I ripped off from ‘Arts & Letters Daily’, which started publishing just a bit before mine. Readers know by now, after almost 20 years, that I cover a wide swath

Just a quite note I sent to Feedly about it’s AI tool Leo and my OLDaily workflow… I’ve been a Feedly Pro user for many years and moved to Pro+ for the AI and Twitter support. I have two major comments: – first, it’s too expensive. I’m not going to

This is an unedited automated transcript produced by my Pixel 4 from this presentation: https://www.downes.ca/presentation/526   Hi everyone. I’m Stephen Downs and I bring you greetings from my home office in Castleman, Ontario, Canada. Thank you for taking the time to watch my presentation today. It’s called being there and

Note: this is an unedited audio transcript generated by the Google sound recorder app on my Pixel 4. In the future I may edit it (or if you want to, feel free). For now, I provide it as is for your enjoyment. For audio and slides, please see https://www.downes.ca/525  Hello

Jane Hart has issued her annual call for our top ten e-learning tools, and here’s mine. I’ve named my list ‘personal learning tools’ because I think of learning as an activity that blends my own activities as a ‘student’ with those as a ‘teacher’. It’s a practice that thinks of

This is an unedited transcript created by the Google Sound Recording on the Pixel 4 (the main reason I bought this phone in fact) of the webinar I gave July 30, 2020.. Thank you very much Sarah and I’m still waiting for that invitation to speak in Antarctica. Any time

If you expect change, what do you think the “new normal” will be for the average person in 2025? What will have changed most? What will not change much at all? Despite the economic turmoil that resulted from the pandemic, the net result will be an increased recognition of the

PDF versions of the Full Paper and References. Presented at EDEN 2020 – Presentation page. Abstract The growth and development of learning analytics has placed a range of new capacities into the hands of educational institutions. At the same time, this increased capacity has raised a range of ethical issues.

Someone asked me by email, do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? I recently launched an informational website, so far I have around 40 articles and I’m already finding it difficult to come up with ideas that aren’t just a regurgitation of something

“We have no wish to denigrate or criticize online distance education,” write the authors of Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practice, “but rather, the aim of this brief editorial is twofold: First, we want to raise a series of critical cautions, based on previous papers and special issues published in the

Note: I received a request for responses to some questions in my email. The questions were quite involved and it would take me quite a while to type answers. But also, in relation to a work-related question, I had been looking at AI-based transcription. And also, my new Audio-Technica microphone

Responding to an enquiry about assessment. – what about the practical work that must be done in the laboratory? It depends on the laboratory, but mostly, students will not be able to reproduce the laboratory at home. During our current crisis, both practice and assessment in the laboratory will have

Alex Usher points out quite correctly that universities will need to be online by the fall. We’re not likely to be out of the Covid woods by then, and in-person classes will likely be limited and few. So he proposes this:for each of the (say) 100 courses with the highest

I have a lot of sympathy for those working in educational technology positions at schools and universities today because they have been thrust into the unenviable position of converting a recalcitrant faculty of teachers and professors into overnight online instructors. Such a conversion would never have happened without an external

Martin Weller has released his book 25 Years of Ed Tech today. It’s a nice read; you are encouraged to check it out. But I have to confess, on having looked at the table of contents, I thought that it captured my career pretty well. Of course, that was not

This is part two of a series. If you haven’t read part one, you should do so now. Click here to read part one. OK them welcome back. Let’s begin by reviewing what we’ve done in part one, because it’s not obvious. First, we created a repository on GitHub. We

This is a really interesting project that allows you to write posts in markdown, MS Word or Jupyter notebooks and publish them in a blog using GitHub pages. No website needed! But the instructions are far from clear, so here’s a step-by-step version. Login to GitHub. If you don’t have

With even the World Economic Forum embracing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) I thought it would be an appropriate time to check my own activity and see whether I’m supporting the goals in what I do. It’s also a good time to review just what they are and