Author: Stephen Downes

The New York Times today came out with a list of “the 25 works of art made after 1970 that define the contemporary age, by anyone, anywhere.” What struck me as most significant was how little any of the works meant to me. Most of them I had never heard

The word ‘whence’ means “from what place, source, or cause”, and that is the question I would like to address with respect to the virtue of ‘open’. The question is raised in the context of Heather Morrison’s recent comments on The Dialectic of Open. Unfortunately I don’t have the full

NB This is only a very preliminary sketch of what should really be a longer treatment. I was asked: 1) Today I found a great idea in your work that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. You said at page 555 (Connectivism and connective knowledge): “Language games – I

During yesterday’s Future Trends Forum conversation featuring Kathleen Fitzpatrick – the author of Generous Thinking and proponent of reasoned debate between opposing parties – I asked a question that went roughly along the following lines: What if reason is what’s at fault here? We don’t use reason to arrive at

Image: Sui Fai John Mak – https://suifaijohnmak.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/bubblus_pln_ple_rev1.png   Martin Weller makes some excellent points in his recent post on connectivism and scale, and they merit a short response. Weller is writing in response to a specific statement I made in a recent post on another topic, which I’ll quote here:

A week ago, by way of a post in the Creative Commons Open Education Platform discussion list, I became aware of the Creative Commons Certificate course, “an in-depth course about CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of the Commons.” I did’t know that it had been offered previously, but

I was asked: I’m a second-year student at Sciences Po Paris on the Nancy French-German campus. As part of a research project on the link between science and society, I’m working with a small group of other students on the concept of MOOCs. Therefore, I have been reading a lot

You sometimes hear me stumble over the word ‘value’, the way I did in a recent interview. Let me explain why. The word ‘value’ is widely used in our field and elsewhere. It is intended to represent a measurement of the ‘benefit’ something might produce – so ‘economic value’ might

So I don’t have an original bone in my body, as proven by this blatant rip-off of Ken Bauer’s post of the same title and theme. Three Decade Mark I will turn 60 in April and so far things have turned out pretty well. I’m still here, which is an

Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Saint-Jean-de-Luz, photo by the author. Prompted by a sketch on CBC radio, I was curious this morning to see how Google would answer the question, “Does God exist?” To my mild surprise, the first page of results consisted of statements that God does, in fact, exist. I

In my post referencing the ICDE’s Global Guidelines: Ethics in Learning Analytics yesterday I said: This document summarizes the considerations of an ICDE working group on learning analytics. For the most part it is a clearly-written and even-handed treatment of a number of difficult subjects, though it would appear to

Photo: Caitlin Tomotsugu throws a pitch. Photo credit: Darryl Gershman, MLB Baseball is of course a great sport. But there’s no end to the things people want to do to make it ‘better’. For example, some changes will be tried out in the Independent Atlantic League this year. Changes to

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