Author: Stephen Downes

As readers may know, I’ve been looking a lot recently at ethics related to online learning. In particular, I’ve studied a number of ethical codes and frameworks, publishing a paper summarizing my work. Assuming we need to draft such documents at all, my preference is for something more informal, rather

  Right, I’ve never used one in a MOOC. So how I would set one up is a bit speculative, though based on some examples (references completely forgotten) I’ve seen in the past. There are different types of things called ‘case studies’. When I think of a case study, I’m

  A few comments on this post… Having taken a look, I don’t think a search of the top ten Google results for ‘post-COVID skills’ was the best place to look for lessons learned. The Google search gives us results from siets like McKinsey, Forbes, and topuniversities.com. It would have

A Reader wrote: I have seen the shift in politics over the last two years and find myself fundamentally disagreeing with many of my professor’s views more often than not.  Education is headed down a slippery path of indoctrination.  It should be the school’s job to teach its students how to

I wrote this in OLDaily today: There’s a lesson here anyone interested in the ethics of AI or education or whatever should heed. “There are no simple solutions, because there will never be unanimous agreement on highly contested issues. Making matters more complicated, people are often ambivalent and inconsistent about

Responding to a survey:  Please tell us how you imagine this transformation of digital spaces and digital life will take place: What reforms or initiatives may have the biggest impact? What beneficial role do you see tech leaders and/or politicians and/or public audiences playing in this evolution? What will be

Responding to an email enquiry – what is your opinion/ vision regarding the application of the CONNECTIVISM theory at present ? I see it being widely applied both online and offline. I recently wrote a paper called ‘Recent Work in Connectivism‘ where I describe this work. It’s important to note

Image: Quotes A while back I read an article titled ‘My words have meaning, your parrot’s do not. Wittgenstein explains‘ and commented: For me the key message of Wittgenstein’s slogan ‘meaning is use’ is that the meaning of a word or sentence is not inherent in the word or sentence,

Google Reader – source Responding to Mark Berthelemy. RSS was essentially disappeared because there wasn’t a good business model for commercialization. Centralized social networks work much better for user tracking and link promotion. But they lose this advantage if they support RSS. That’s why, for example, when Google was trying

Image: Forbes General Design for Humans The application of AI should be based on a human-centered approach. This means that the design should be based on actual human use, and not an idealized model. For example, not everybody is going to be able to ask exactly the right question using

I’m just going to offer a short post today as I develop some aspects of gRSShopper. In particular, I now have the gRSShopper MOOC environment up and running in a Docker environment – all the instructions are here if you want a copy for yourself, plus there’s a video showing

This is an unedited AI transcript of a conversation I had with a group of people at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. Please note that the AI does not distinguish between speakers; in all, sever different speakers spoke. To hear the audio please see https://www.downes.ca/presentation/548 Sure. Before I present you our part

Unedited AI-generated transcript of a talk given online April 27, 2021. So, hello everyone. As was stated in the introduction, my name is Stephen Downes and it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s April 27 for me April 28th for you in Malaysia and this presentation is simply called ‘Connectivism’.

This is an unedited transcript of my workshop. There we go, so now I’m recording. That would have been interesting so welcome to the session called supporting everyday learning you probably saw the the advertisement for it so you have some idea of what to expect but overall what I’ll

These are notes taken during Shirley Steinberg’s CNIE keynote, Sympathy for the Devil: Criticizing and Criticalizing the Media:   Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil – accomplishments of the devil, listeners as audience are complicit in these accomplishments. Media is the devil We need a “socially aware media pedagogy”

I guess the answer seems pretty obvious: you provide your personal contact information, maybe pay some money, maybe show you’ve satisfied a prerequisite, such as admission to an institution, and provided there’s room in the course, you’re registered.  Behind the scenes a bunch of things will happen: you’ll be assigned

Published as Change in Education and What Needs to be Done, 15 pages, 2020, Maysan Center for Future Studies. In recent months we as a global community have experienced a hard lesson about the nature of change. While it is common to plan for the normal ebb and flow of

[source] “We should pause and ask the question,” says David Wiley, “is more open always better?” The answer, of course, is “it depends”. I don’t keep my house open for just anyone to drop by. I keep my bank account PIN a secret. I work for the government and have

  Thanks to Jeff Rubenstein for a thoughtful comment. I agree that the division between ‘content’ and ‘paper + ink’ isn’t always the best way to approach the discussion, and should note here that it was generated as a metaphor to frame a response to a commonly raised issue. Jeff

Dear Boss, Thank you for your email about e-learning, titled ‘A message about learning from the C-suite’ which was reprinted in Chief Learning Officer.  You asked some questions and made some comments, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to reply. Thanks for asking how I’m keeping up my skills