Half an Hour: The Open Road

Right now, the government awards road-building contracts to large construction companies. But imagine the government decided to end these contracts, and to simply grant anyone who wanted to build a road a license to build a road. It would still be a complex process, of course. Road-builders would have to

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Half an Hour: What’s Ours

As it was purchasing Tumblr, Yahoo was also quietly making changes to the Flickr photo sharing service. Flickr has been one of Yahoo’s few success stories recently, and this was the first major revision to the site in a number of years. The change came without warning, it dramatically changed

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Half an Hour: MOOC – La résurgence de la communauté dans l’apprentissage en ligne

Texte de ma conférence a Edmunston – pour plus, svp voir http://www.downes.ca/presentation/317  Dans cette présentation, Stephen Downes aborde la question à savoir comment les MOOC (massive open online courses) influenceront l’avenir de la formation à distance. La présentation examine de façon détaillée la nature et l’objectif des MOOC comparativement à

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Half an Hour: CN1376 AcadMOOC

7:54 pm Stephen Downes T -5 minutes 7:55 pm Mary Zedeck Hi Stephen! 7:55 pm Janesh Sanzgiri Excellent. Almost midnight here. 7:55 pm Javier Benítez disconnected 7:57 pm Susan Dixon Aloha from Hawaii! 7:57 pm Javier Benítez connected 7:57 pm Kenneth Ronkowitz disconnected 7:58 pm JH Shannon connected 7:58 pm

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Half an Hour: Assessment in MOOCs

I was asked: “I was wondering how they might work with the Humanities, as I teach Seventeenth-Century Literature, Shakespeare and other related subjects, which require research papers and final examinations. I can see using MOOCs for people who simply have a (non-credit) interest in these subjects, but I can’t see

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Half an Hour: The Great Rebranding

Responding to Michael Feldstein, who on summarizing the recent EDUCAUSE MOOC conference (see my summaries from this blog) represents MOOCs as yet another form of artifact in support of traditional instruction, diagrammed as follows: I was at the same conference of course and viewed it a bit differently. The attendees

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Half an Hour: Advice to OcTEL

Context: email to David Jennings, on the occasion of the start of the OcTEL MOOC, in which participants have been flooded with introductory emails from the course mailing list. Hi – here are some suggestions – posted here because you’ll probably not get them if I send an email (heh)…

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