Author: Stephen Downes

Another response to a Joanne Jacobs blog post, this one called ‘To fix college, ban ‘I feel’‘ When I was working for Texas Instruments I took a number of courses at their learning centre (Job Entry Subsystem, Multiple Virtual Storage, fun stuff like that). One of the courses was a

by Stephen Downes One exists to show us the wayIt is the self, it is todayIt is the place where we departed Without which we’d never get started Two exists to join me to youIt is the pair, it is the glue It is the way we start out with mathIt

Hiya City of Moncton (Please distribute to Council) February 28, 2013. The snow-blower came up my road today, which is nice, because it gets too narrow to drive on, especially with people parking to go to the nearby hospital. But look at this – behind it, the snow-blower left a

I was asked, what areas would you recommend I focus on …  to illustrate  current e-learning practice? If it were me, I would do a three-stage presentation: – first, I’d show some COTS language-training and/or skills development software, typically what you can but from the computer store or download from

I was asked, “I am interested in your perspective on what you feel may be the greatest scholarly contribution you have made in the area of online learning, particularly your recent contributions on OER?  I also noted from your website that the focus of your research interests has shifted during

The big news today is that New Brunswick Premier David Alward is willing to consider a referendum on the HST. CBC News reports, “the provincial government could hold a referendum on an increase in the harmonized sales tax before the 2014 provincial election.” Alternatively, the proposed HST increase could simply

Responding to Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group, How big should a government be? in the Harvard Business Review blogs. Interesting discussion overall, and it would have been nice to see the actual data presented in the paper linked by the Washington Post article (instead of

Responding to a LinkedIn Discussion. When people ask me what makes a MOOC ‘massive’ I respond in terms of the *capacity* of the MOOC rather than any absolute numbers. In particular, my focus is on the development of a network structure, as opposed to a group structure, to manage the

Responding, again, to David W. Campbell, on  EI and local labour market distortions First. A statement that something “has a distorting effect on local labour markets” suggests that there is some natural ‘non-distorted’ state of those markets. One wonders what that state would be – does it include the ‘distorting’

Our local newspaper in Moncton, the Times & Transcript, came out swinging today with an article attacking citizen journalism authored by new columnist Steve Malloy. The title sets the tone: “Even amateur news hounds should take responsibility.” The article is of particular interest to me because, as a long-time blogger,

Responding to Branko Milanovic, Lead Economist in the World Bank research group and a visiting professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, Why Income Inequality Is Here to Stay, in the Harvard Business Review blog. This article does not establish that “income inequality is here to stay”

This is a really good analysis. I think you correctly identify the missing bit – helping students over those rough patches. Interestingly, to my mind, although the problem of understanding and responding to a student question is an almost intractable problem for machines, it is generally pretty straightforward for humans.

It’s Mayan Apocalypse day, I’m listening to 2112 as I type this, and it seems appropriate to reflect on the end of the world through the words that caught my attention over the last twelve months. K-Pop Some time today, fittingly, Psy’s monster hit Gangnam Style is going to reach

This is my first set of submissions for an online course in digital badges being hosted by BC Campus’s Scope Forum. I’m not really sure how I got enrolled, but I did, and it seems like a good thing to be following up on. Task 1: Describe the merit bad…

So Everton Zanella Alvarenga tossed a hand-grenade into the OER discussion group: “An interesting text by Stallman… On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license … ‘the CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses, as they …

Responding to David W. Campbell, Thanks, Robert. What’s next?Suppose the Irvings had not set up shop in Moncton…Would we have a transport company, like Midland? Almost certainly! In fact, we may have had several, with competition making them more …

Email written as advice to the UNESCO OER mapping initiative.This is beginning to read and sound very much like the debates around learning object metadata of the 1990s. I know that approaches such as LRMI represent an improvement in that elements are …

Interesting commentary from Kevin Willey, which I quote at length from LinkedIn:Performance management is nothing more than buzz words in the government departments, and I speak from experience on this.  I entered the government back in early 2001…

OpenLearning.com, a venture born out of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. Starting this week, you can begin taking two of their courses (Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport & Services Market…

During my days as a student activist studying philosophy in Alberta one wag described me as “a moderate socialist and a radical democrat.”That description is probably still apt 20 years later. The bulk of my work in online learning and media is dedicat…