Author: Stephen Downes

Summary ofTeaching and Learning in the Digital Age for Indigenous LearnersWith Robert Andrews, Executive Director, Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of AlbertaDeborah Hurst, Dean of Business, Athabasca UniversityDeAnne Lightning, AU-FB BComm Student Robert Andrews Video Talking about the program they have with Athabasca University, to increase the managerial capacity of First

Summary of:Digital Learning 4.0: How to Guarantee Measurable Learner Impact Where Others Have FailedPaul HunterDirector Digital Learning, IMD Business School IMD is a business school based in Switzerland. (Table discussions – what are you doing in digital learning, what have been your biggest successes and challenges). Table summary: Successes: one

Summary of a presentation:The Gen Z Learning Journey From Higher Education To The WorkplaceGiselle Kovary, M.A., Presidentn-gen People Performance Inc. I want to cover research on Gen Z, especially from a Canadian context. They’re more 1996 than 2012. But we can’t make a statement about an individual person based on

Summary of ‘From Anxiety to Opportunity – The next 20 years of learning innovation’, John Baker, CEO, D2L. To look at the future it’s helpful to understand the present and where we’ve been in the past. It’s 20 years since D2L started – it has been a bit of a

Summary of ‘Educating the Next Generation Workforce: Preparing Students to Meet Employers’ Expectations’  by Susan Aldridge,  President (ret), Drexel University There are new types of jobs for students gradauating today, and new learning opportunities in igital labs, etc. Technology has enhanced our lives. So it has become crucial for higher

Summary of a talk by Alan Bostakian, Senior Analyst, TD Bank – Future Ready project  Why? The field is moving extremely fast and very soon all professionals will need to have some level of understanding about them.  These areas help is in upskilling, instructional design, instructon, coaching, more. The Basics Data

Summary of the talk “Hearables” by Rory McGreal –    What are they – Hunn 2014 – speaker-microphone in-ear with AI–    Progressive development from earphones, hearing aids, etc–    Can monitor: Blood pressure – stress, excitement Etc. ‘Biological Equivalent to a USB port’ FDA approval no longer required Could call 911 for

Shaping (As Opposed to Stumbling Into It!) – The Future of Online Learning and Training Stephen Murgatroyd, PhD, Chief Innovation OfficerContact North | Contact Nord These are summary notes of the talk, taken by me, “I’m here because I’m old…. So I have a (Read more…) that says ‘Be careful

This is the result of a quick survey I did today on the Canadian governments’ stance on cryptocurrency, responding to an internal request. This is a policy-neutal document; that is, I don’t advocate one way or another for any of the items described below. Overall, over the last few years,

The fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to roil. Ethan Zuckerman has left the Media Lab. Joi Ito has resigned in disgrace, Nicholas Negroponte offered a bone-headed defense, Lawrence Lessig has written a bone-headed defense, an official at Brown has been taken down, we probably haven’t seen the end

If you take a look at this George Couros post, you’ll learn that the “Sunday Seven” is by the Burgess Consulting community, of which “IMPress Books” is a part of as a subsidiary company. I have nothing to do with either – but you can get my Sunday Seven without

The New York Times today came out with a list of “the 25 works of art made after 1970 that define the contemporary age, by anyone, anywhere.” What struck me as most significant was how little any of the works meant to me. Most of them I had never heard

The word ‘whence’ means “from what place, source, or cause”, and that is the question I would like to address with respect to the virtue of ‘open’. The question is raised in the context of Heather Morrison’s recent comments on The Dialectic of Open. Unfortunately I don’t have the full

NB This is only a very preliminary sketch of what should really be a longer treatment. I was asked: 1) Today I found a great idea in your work that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. You said at page 555 (Connectivism and connective knowledge): “Language games – I

During yesterday’s Future Trends Forum conversation featuring Kathleen Fitzpatrick – the author of Generous Thinking and proponent of reasoned debate between opposing parties – I asked a question that went roughly along the following lines: What if reason is what’s at fault here? We don’t use reason to arrive at

Image: Sui Fai John Mak – https://suifaijohnmak.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/bubblus_pln_ple_rev1.png   Martin Weller makes some excellent points in his recent post on connectivism and scale, and they merit a short response. Weller is writing in response to a specific statement I made in a recent post on another topic, which I’ll quote here:

A week ago, by way of a post in the Creative Commons Open Education Platform discussion list, I became aware of the Creative Commons Certificate course, “an in-depth course about CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of the Commons.” I did’t know that it had been offered previously, but

I was asked: I’m a second-year student at Sciences Po Paris on the Nancy French-German campus. As part of a research project on the link between science and society, I’m working with a small group of other students on the concept of MOOCs. Therefore, I have been reading a lot

You sometimes hear me stumble over the word ‘value’, the way I did in a recent interview. Let me explain why. The word ‘value’ is widely used in our field and elsewhere. It is intended to represent a measurement of the ‘benefit’ something might produce – so ‘economic value’ might

So I don’t have an original bone in my body, as proven by this blatant rip-off of Ken Bauer’s post of the same title and theme. Three Decade Mark I will turn 60 in April and so far things have turned out pretty well. I’m still here, which is an