As we all know, when things shut down beginning in 2020 we had to adapt to working and learning from home. It was a hard time; a lot of people lost their jobs and a lot of companies went under. We made the rapid transition to what we called ‘remote
Continue readingAuthor: Stephen Downes
Half an Hour: Being Online: Facing the Digital Future Together
This is an unedited auto-generated transcript of my talk for LINC home learning professional development, November 28, 2020. All right so for the purpose of a recording and I’ve just turned on my audio here oops and I should turn on my start recording over here, all right so this
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Reflections on the Futures of Education
On the Futures This post is a series of short comments on the just-released document from the Canadian UNESCO chairs on the future of education. It consists of six short contributions from across the country from the various UNESCO chairs to a larger document, Humanistic Futures of Learning: Perspectives from
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Reimaging Open Educational Resources
This is an edited transcript of my presentation ‘Reimaging Open Educational Resources’ presented November 10 2020 to the Open Education 2020 Conferemce. https://www.downes.ca/presentation/534 So what I want to talk to you today talked about with you today is open education resources. I’m going to talk about content addressable open education
Continue readingHalf an Hour: 12 Degrees of Freedom
I just read a post from Mitch Resnick on the seeds that Seymour Papert sowed, and highlighted for myself this most important statement: “Seymour rejected the computer-aided instruction approach in which ‘the computer is being used to program the child’ and argued for an alternative approach in which ‘the
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Open Learning, Open Networks – Online Learning in 2020
This is an unedited auto-transcript of the talk delivered November 3, 2020. Hello. Hello everyone pleasure to be here today. This presentation will be in English. I’m going to be talking about open learning open networks and. Just a few just a few notes to begin our presentation. First of
Continue readingHalf an Hour: The Future of Online Learning 2020
This is an edited text transcript from my presentation from April 27, 2020. Presentation page (audio, video, slides): https://www.downes.ca/presentation/520 This talk is about change. It’s about the change we see individually in our homes and in our workplaces and it’s about the (Read more…) changes sweeping through society. It’s also
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Cruft
Responding to Donald Clark’s excellent article, Let’s move on from ‘Unintelligible Intelligences’ – IQ, Multiple Intelligences, Emotional Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence… “Let’s take this idea further. Koch (2014) claimed that ALL networks are, to some degree ‘intelligent’….” Not just Koch. This is, of course, the core idea in Connectivism. Though as
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Boxing gRSShopper
What, again? Yes, again. Today I’m working on creating and saving a reusable Docker image of gRSShopper. I have the benefit of some previous work on this set-up, and so it might work today, so I’m documenting my process. Note: I’m doing all this so you don’t have to. You
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Wait, Why Did He Pick That?
Wait, why did he pick that? My newsletter is called OLDaily, which is short for ‘Online Learning Daily’, a title I ripped off from ‘Arts & Letters Daily’, which started publishing just a bit before mine. Readers know by now, after almost 20 years, that I cover a wide swath
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Feedback to Feedly
Just a quite note I sent to Feedly about it’s AI tool Leo and my OLDaily workflow… I’ve been a Feedly Pro user for many years and moved to Pro+ for the AI and Twitter support. I have two major comments: – first, it’s too expensive. I’m not going to
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Being There: What Presence Means in a Digital World.
This is an unedited automated transcript produced by my Pixel 4 from this presentation: https://www.downes.ca/presentation/526 Hi everyone. I’m Stephen Downs and I bring you greetings from my home office in Castleman, Ontario, Canada. Thank you for taking the time to watch my presentation today. It’s called being there and
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Personal Learning: Taking Ownership of Learning Online: Part One
Note: this is an unedited audio transcript generated by the Google sound recorder app on my Pixel 4. In the future I may edit it (or if you want to, feel free). For now, I provide it as is for your enjoyment. For audio and slides, please see https://www.downes.ca/525 Hello
Continue readingHalf an Hour: My Top Personal Learning Tools 2020
Jane Hart has issued her annual call for our top ten e-learning tools, and here’s mine. I’ve named my list ‘personal learning tools’ because I think of learning as an activity that blends my own activities as a ‘student’ with those as a ‘teacher’. It’s a practice that thinks of
Continue readingHalf an Hour: How to Help Students Succeed by Taking Ownership of Their Learning Online Through Personal Learning
This is an unedited transcript created by the Google Sound Recording on the Pixel 4 (the main reason I bought this phone in fact) of the webinar I gave July 30, 2020.. Thank you very much Sarah and I’m still waiting for that invitation to speak in Antarctica. Any time
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Responses to Pew on the Future and Ethics in AI
If you expect change, what do you think the “new normal” will be for the average person in 2025? What will have changed most? What will not change much at all? Despite the economic turmoil that resulted from the pandemic, the net result will be an increased recognition of the
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Ethical Codes and Learning Analytics
PDF versions of the Full Paper and References. Presented at EDEN 2020 – Presentation page. Abstract The growth and development of learning analytics has placed a range of new capacities into the hands of educational institutions. At the same time, this increased capacity has raised a range of ethical issues.
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Where Do Blog Post Ideas Come From?
Someone asked me by email, do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? I recently launched an informational website, so far I have around 40 articles and I’m already finding it difficult to come up with ideas that aren’t just a regurgitation of something
Continue readingHalf an Hour: On Pandemic Politics, Pedagogies and Practices
“We have no wish to denigrate or criticize online distance education,” write the authors of Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practice, “but rather, the aim of this brief editorial is twofold: First, we want to raise a series of critical cautions, based on previous papers and special issues published in the
Continue readingHalf an Hour: Bruno de Pierro Interview
Note: I received a request for responses to some questions in my email. The questions were quite involved and it would take me quite a while to type answers. But also, in relation to a work-related question, I had been looking at AI-based transcription. And also, my new Audio-Technica microphone
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