New Learning
Those of you who are my age may remember something called ‘new math‘. The idea was to replace fixed-value mathematics, which is characterized with an emphasis on rote learning, with…
Stephen Downes
The Moncton Shooting and Social Media
During the events of June 4-6 in Moncton I was one of those heavily involved in social media, following and posting to several Facebook threads, Twitter feeds, and the official…
Mass Collaboration Workshop, Day Three
Darren GergleUnderstanding and Bridging the Wikipedia Language Gap There is an extensive literature on Wikipedia, everything from collaboration to participation to embedded bias to the uses of Wikipedia data structures…
Mass Collaboration Workshop, Day Two
(My presentation will appear separately) Collective Knowledge in Social Tagging EnvironmentsJoachim Kimmerle, KMRC Even though it is hard to find good definitions of knowledge, most psychologists would agree that knowledge…
Workshop on Mass Collaboration – Day One
Introduction to the Workshop – Ulrike Cress Why a workshop in mass collaboration? Recent mass phenomena: Wikipedia, tagging, blogging, Scratch, massive open online courses and connectivism, citizen science, maker-space Who…
Foreign Workers and Employment in New Brunswick
Here’s David W. Campbell: This is not an academic question. It happened this week. Now, I suspect there would be folks lined up to tell us everything that was wrong…
Focus on the Words
I’ll return to my other flow of posts in a bit, but in the meantime Dron has responded to my last four, and there are some things worth addressing. In…
Networks, Information, and Complex Adaptive Systems
Under the heading “A believable theory? Actually, yes it is. But…” Jon Dron offers a longish paragraph in two parts. In the first part, he outlines a view of my…
On Death and Dying: Evolution and Networks
As he makes clear in a comment on his recent post, part of Dron’s motivation for depicting connectivism as a ‘family of ideas’ is so that he, too, can be…
Networks and Systems
Let’s move up one paragraph in Jon Dron’s post. We’ve seen already Dron’s notion that connectivism should be thought of as a family of ideas. In this paragraph, Dron states…
Is Connectivism a Broad Family of Ideas?
I think it is worth looking at the end of Jon Dron’s long post to get to the heart of what he finds so wrong about my work. I reserve…
Bell / BellAliant: Get your act together
Long story short: I tried to access CTV online. It wouldn’t accept my login and sent me to a password recovery page. But this page rejected by email address because…
Response to Dron
I don’t want to restate the theses of connectivism as I understand it but it may help readers of Jon Dron’s to identify where his exegesis leads him into misunderstanding.…
Connectivism as Learning Theory
I think the students in the Building Online Collaborative Environments Course has an almost impossible task. Here is their effort to prove that connectivism is a learning theory. “Connectivism has…
OLDaily Over the Years
Still messing around with statistics. Here’s the graph of the production of posts on OLDaily over the years since the first posts in 1995: Until 1999 the only posts produced…
Measuring MOOC Media
Here’s the information I sent Steve Kolowsich for his Chronicle article on the (possible?) decline of MOOC mentions in the media: My data measures news articles from selected (and reasonably…
MOOCs for Development – Day 2
The Challenge of MOOCs Panel Stephen Downes Please see my presentation and audio here: http://www.downes.ca/presentation/339 N.V. Varghese – view from developing countries – largest expansion of the system in this…
Notes from: MOOCs for Development
Welcoming Intro Ezekiel Emmanuel – MOOCs ‘democratizing’ education? (vs? ‘socializing’) – but – access, language, etc – MOOCs – equalize opportunity for elites in developing countries – may widen inequality…
The MOOC of One
I want to talk about the MOOC of one. What I mean by that is I want to talk about the development of the MOOC or the Massive Open Online…
Like Reading a Newspaper
I’ve stated this in many times in talks and interviews, but I can’t find it anywhere in my actual text-based materials, so let’s get it on the record so people…