Stephen Downes

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Scholarship and the 'Tyranny' of Openness
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, May 18, 2012.

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Now I'm not sure how a course you don't have to take and can leave at any time could be called a "tyranny" but I'll deal with the question raised in this post head on: "Are we are attempting to impose our values (of openness, sharing, online learning as the future of education, etc) without a critical examination of what that means for practice and for individuals who are part of social organizations?" And the short answer is: no. For two reasons. First, nobody's imposing anything here; if you want to go back to your structured formal education, where you pay a substantial fee, there are thousands of institutions who would be happy to help you. Second, the openness (and the rest of it) is the result of a critical examination. As I have argued with respect to the principles of successful networks, if you want your social organizations to be effective at all, you need to embrace things like autonomy, openness, interatcivity and diversity. We select these principles, not because we're arbitrary, but because the best evidence tells us they work.

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And So It Begins…
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, May 18, 2012.

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As david Wiley reports Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is facing bankruptcy "as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding." And he asks, "Why are we surprised this bankruptcy is happening? Anyone who’s been paying attention isn’t. The shake up in educational publishing we’ve long anticipated is beginning… and students will be the benefactors." Of course, one bankruptcy isn't a trend. But my thinking is with Wiley's. It's the beginning of the end for these guys.

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S3 Storage for WordPress Blogs
Joe Brockmeier, ReadWriteCloud, May 18, 2012.

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I have been thinking of setting up a hosted version of gRSShopper but things like storage pose daunting challenges once you get into large numbers of sites. A solution like this, though, points to an innovative way of solving the problem. One one site, you provide access to the software - WordPress, an LMS, gRSShoppper, whatever. And the actual storage is  handled by a service - like Amazon's AWS - which specializes in that. Of course, for my money, speed remains a major concern - AWS isn't exactly fast. But that, with time, will change.

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Ready or Not, Adaptive-Image Solution Is Now Part of HTML
Scott Gilbertson, WebMonkey, May 18, 2012.

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One of the (few) really neat things about OpenPublish on Drupal is the image system. Here, you upload an image once, and the system creates several versions of the image, which can be used by a device-aware system (which OpenPublish isn't) to put small images on small screens and bigger images on the large screens. As Webmonkey says, "web authors use a variety of hacks to (incompletely) work around this problem, but to really solve it the web likely needs new tools." Using HTML, for example, that will read information from the head of the document to serve the right image.

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Here's The TED Presentation About Rich People That TED Doesn't Want You To See
Grace Wyler, Business Insider, May 18, 2012.

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Normally people with these sorts of views would never be allowed near a TED stage. But a millionaire slipped through the cracks and as the National Journal reports, TED's Chris Anderson is refusing to publish a talk given on its stage by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. As Time reports, Anderson's explanation is that the talk was “too political” to be posted during an election year, and that "a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted" by some of Hanauer’s arguments. Alas for Anderson, the video has surfaced at YouTube, so the rich will be insulted no matter what. Anyhow, you can read Hanauer's radical arguments on that beacon of socialism, Bloomberg. Or read the full text of the talk here. Meanwhile, you can read the discussion at TED where members are shocked - shocked! - to discover that TED wasn't the open marketplace of ideas they thought. People who read me know I have been critical of this aspect of TED for a long time. Maybe now, a few more eyes will be opened.

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OAuth is your future
Dan Hon, Flickr, May 18, 2012.

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OK, this doesn't exist, but it is imaginable that we could read something like this in the near future: "Klout is trialling a beta program with the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to provide fast-track entrepreneur visa entry to individuals with high Klout scores in specific areas." Now - I know the first reaction is to say how bad this is. But is it unreasonable for government to have as much information on you as some company? Is it unreasonable for us to use it in some practical way, like crossing borders? And maybe - just maybe - if it becomes used in this way, maybe we'll have some rights to access it, use it ourselves, and ensure it is correct. Because right now none of that is the case.

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Justice Dept. defends public’s constitutional ‘right to record’ cops
Kim Zetter, Ars Technica, May 18, 2012.

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Via Metafilter: "In a surprising letter (PDF) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights." It really is time that governments (or at least those that defend civil liberties) were clear on the rights of citizens to make digital media, to store digital media, and to share digital media, without unreasonable interference from the state (or for that matter those individuals who don't want to be seen, discussed or filmed doing things they should not be doing in public).

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“I will never stop learning”
Harold Jarche, Weblog, May 18, 2012.

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The Automattic (WordPress) company creed is funny - it starts out really strong, weakens through the middle, and by the end relies on a tired old cliché as though the author ran out od ideas even as he or she was typing it out. Also on the same page, some strong words from Lawrence Lessig: "We’ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists."

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Links and Resources

(presentations include slides and audio recordings)
Videos: http://www.downes.ca/me/videos.htm
RSS Feed: http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.xml
Podcast: http://www.downes.ca/news/audio.xml

Key Articles

Scholarly Articles

Cites:294 Educational Blogging (Local copy)
264 Learning objects: Resources for distance education worldwide (Local copy)
134 E-learning 2.0 (Local copy)
126 Models for sustainable open educational resources (Local copy)
88 The future of online learning (Local copy
75 Learning networks and connective knowledge (Local copy)
70 Design and reusability of learning objects in an academic context: A new economy of education (Local copy)
59 Resource profiles (Local copy)
40 Learning networks in practice (Local copy)
33 Semantic networks and social networks (Local copy)
35 An introduction to connective knowledge (Local copy)
27 Design, standards and reusability (Local copy)
23 EduSource: Canada's learning object repository network (Local copy)
22 An introduction to RSS for educational designers (Local copy)

(Cites from Google Scholar for an H-Index = 14)

Recent Popular Articles

The Purpose of Learning, February 2, 2011.
The Role of the Educator, December 6, 2010.
Deinstitutionalizing Education, November 5, 2010.
Agents Provocateurs, October 28, 2010.
What Is Democracy In Education, October 22, 2010.
A World To Change, October 19, 2010.
Connectivism and Transculturality, May 16, 2010.
An Operating System for the Mind, September 19, 2009.
The Cloud and Collaboration, June 15, 2009.
Critical Thinking in the Classroom, June 5, 2009.
The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On, November 16, 2008.
Things You Really Need to learn: http://www.downes.ca/post/38502

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Contact: stephen@downes.ca Stephen.Downes@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
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About Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes is a senior researcher for Canada's National Research Council and a leading proponent of the use of online media and services in education. As the author of the widely-read OLDaily online newsletter, Downes has earned international recognition for his leading-edge work in the field of online learning. He developed some of Canada's first online courses at Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, Manitoba. He also built a learning management system from scratch and authored the now-classic "The Future of Online Learning".

At the University of Alberta he built a learning and research portal for the municipal sector in that province, Munimall, and another for the Engineering and Geology sector, PEGGAsus. He also pioneered the development of learning objects and was one of the first adopters and developers of RSS content syndication in education. Downes introduced the concept of e-learning 2.0 and with George Siemens developed and defined the concept of Connectivism, using the social network approach to deliver open online courses to three thousand participants over two years.

Downes has been offering courses in learning, logic, philosophy both online and off since 1987, has 135 articles published in books, magazines and academic journals, and has presented his unique perspective on learning and technology more than 250 times to audiences in 17 countries on five continents. He is a habitual photographer, plays darts for money, and can be found at home with his wife Andrea and four cats in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Vision Statement

I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.

Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations - or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.

This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence. This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward.

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Canadians who gave their lives in service in Afghanistan

Hundreds of my IAAF Track & Field Photos from Moncton 2010

My calendar

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