Author: Stephen Downes

Mojolicious is a real-time Perl-based web framework that can be used for writing modern web applications. Today in an episode of Stephen Follows Instructions I took it out for a spin. It mostly worked well out of the box, but there were a few quirks that needed some thinking. I

Documenting this because the instructions on the Perlbrew website completely failed for me. I got various errors, including an error 5888 when I tried to run perlbrew.   I started with the default Ubuntu image on Docker Desktop: I opened the terminal and did the following: #  apt update &&

I was recently interviewed for the Vincens Vives blog (in Spanish). Below is the full-length set of answers I sent, in English, to the questions I was posed. In recent times, technology has undergone a transformation. How has this influenced learning? This is a broad question. We could talk about

Capturing a short tweet threat for posterity, because it will just disappear in Twitter.  Language is a physical construct; it exists in the world, not the mind. We contribute to language through physical actions, like speaking and writing, not telepathy. There are no rules to language, no ‘facts’ about language

I wrote an article yesterday. It was a political article, but what I said isn’t the point here.  This post reports on my use of the article to test the AISEO Paraphraser. It was, to say the least, a miserable failure. Here’s the original 500 word article. And below, after

  I said on a recent post that “Alexandra Minhai says successful professional learning communities depend on four factors: being a safe space, validation by peers, crowdsourcing ideas, and accountability. If I had to create my own list it would be: tools that work, practical value, timely response, and whole-of-enterprise

Over the years I’ve had occasion to collect names any number of times. The standard way to do this is with an online form. You then store the names in a database for use when sending personalized greetings or to indicate authorship of a post, or whatever. In my own

 Image: © pkab.wordpress.com. Tony Bates has offered a preliminary critique of my paper on connectivism. He suggests that, in the words of Ebbinghaus, “What is true is alas not new, the new not true” (1873, p. 67). To respond to Bates’s criticism I offer words from the same author: “Wherever

Asked to ‘imagine a better world online,’ experts hope for an immersive digital environment that promotes fact-based knowledge, protects individuals’ rights, empowers diversity and provides tools for breakthroughs and collaborations to help solve the world’s wicked problems. This is the second of two reports emerging from a “Future of the

I have a political blog, Leftish, where you’re get an idea of my sense of right and wrong on a range of political issues. But I want to take a few moments here to talk about what I feel is wrong at the most deep and fundamental level.  This is

Following Ben Werdmüller and Laura Ritchie, two members of a small eclectic Mastodon community I belong to, I am using the turn of the calendar to look forward and not backward. Image: Anticosti Island, Wikimedia And honestly, the main thing I am hoping for is to finish 2023 in continuing

Taylor Swift first came to my attention in 2008 with the song ‘Love Story‘, an adaptation of the story of Romeo and Juliet from her second album Fearless. What caught my ear was the way the song would lead you through with vivid detail in the storytelling and a descending-staircase

  This post responds to Alex Usher’s article Non-existent Preconditions for DARPA Success, which looks at a promise to implement a Canadian DARPA, and offers reasons why the conditions for success of a DARPA don’t exist in Canada.  The first thing to point out is that Canada already has organizations

This is an unedited automated transcription by https://otter.aiof my talk given at Nottingham Trent University (online via Teams) Trent Institute for Teaching and Learning (TILT). The full presentation page is here and includes audio, video, slides and a link to this transcript.  Thank you very much. And sorry about the

I wrote this in response to an inquiry. I am bringing the constructs and principles of Information Systems (IS) with those of Connectivism since the previous studies rarely consider the learning theories’ principals, especially the learning theory for the digital age. In conducting my study, I have confronted a construct

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