Stephen Downes

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Love Letter to Plywood
Tom Sachs, YouTube, May 16, 2012.

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This short video, a tribute to plywood, is getting rave reviews. It's an educational video, but one that leaves one viewer "weeping in the building materials aisle at Home Depot." Me, I've spent a lot of time with plywood, and so I get that.

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Research Sidebar in Google Docs
Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, May 16, 2012.

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Microsoft recently introduced online research support in its office suite and Google has announced a similar service in its 'Research Sidebar'. This post from Google Operating System (not an official Google weblog) covers the basics. "The sidebar includes the top Google search results, image search results, facts, maps, reviews and famous quotes. Click the icon from the search box to restrict the results to images and quotes." My question is, do we really want pages and pages of 'hotel deals' listings in the sidebar of our Google documents?

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Educational Technology and Education Conferences, June to December 2012
Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web Document, May 16, 2012.

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Clayton R. Wright has once again gifted the community with his massive listing of conferences. It can be downloaded here as an MS Word document. He writes, "The 27th version of the conference list provides over 1,000 events that may be of interest to educators. The rationale and format of the list is described (here). Readers are encouraged to cut and paste a selection of events for their colleagues. Through this process, they may discover professional development opportunities that may help them create a better educational environment for their learners. For example, the list comprises conferences such as "Using the Cloud for eLearning", "The World Open Educational Resources Congress", "Wikis and Open Collaboration", "Open Education", "Improving University Teaching", and "mLearning". Those seeking to improve the development and delivery of e-learning courses may find a few of the suggestions in this publication helpful. And, educators working in developing countries who seek to use open educational resources may want to refer (here). 

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How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic, May 16, 2012.

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Good story about T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. The idea here is to engage students by having them create a fabricated hostory and attempt to fool a community with it. Their first attempt succeeded in planting a false Wikipedia article. But their efforts from the current year, including one that was undone on Reddit in a mere matter of minutes. What's really inteersting about the article is the anaysis of why Wikipedia was fooled and Reddit wasn't. "One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content." As Wikipedia editors gain more authority and nfluence, as they have over the last few years, the ability of the site to detect errors and falsehoods actually decreases. Of course - this Atlantic article may also be a deception. Who's to know?

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Advancing Culturally-Aware Information Technology: Intercultural Agents and Cultural Signposts
Elaine Raybourn, ADL Newsletter, May 16, 2012.

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Elaine Raybourn discusses early efforts to create a system that would place people in proximity according to their interests and activities. But in the development of such a system in ADL's Personal Assistant for Learning (PAL) she notes that such a system needs to be culturally aware and act as a mediating agent, 'introducing' people based on context (you may be interested in the U.S. procurement request for research on what are essentially personal learning environments). This would come in the form of "feedback from our interactions in virtual, digital, computer-mediated, or electronic settings." These are based on "footprints" left as we navotage the electronic environment and which are interpreted as subtle cues created and detected by cultrally aware interactive avatars.

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How to Keynote an Unconference
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, May 15, 2012.

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When we tried it our unkeynote was less than a success. But to judge from comments after the event, says Michael Feldstein, his effort at an unkeynote went reasonable well. So what worked? "The point of an unkeynote should be to prime the conversational pump," he writes. But how? He considers some of the creativity exercises in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. The idea is to have yourself (or your audience) create something, anything - a collage from a magazine, or a solution (written down) to a problem. Whatever. (Contrast with what we did: we asked people to begin by speaking out loud in front of an audience.) "So," he writes, "I gave a talk that didn’t demand immediate group participation, but it was all questions." Me, I think a keynote composed of questions is still a keynote, not an 'unkeynote'. But I think he maybe made the right call in getting up there and delivering a talk, rather than turning it over to the audience, even in an unconference. But you know, I like the collage idea...

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Open Clip Art Gallery
Doug Peterson, doug -- off the record, May 15, 2012.

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"It always seems to me," says Doug Peterson, "that the 'perfect' piece of clipart is so elusive!" So the Open Clipart Gallery is probably not going to solve all your image issues, but based on the review here it looks like it would be a good addition to the Flickr Creative Commons search and (if you have the money) commercial image DVDs you may have purchased.

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Edshelf: An Educational App Directory for Teachers
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, May 15, 2012.

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As Watters writes, "Edshelf hopes to become a go-to site where teachers can recommend to one another what’s worked for them, and it’s building a directory of educational materials that have been reviewed for educators by educators." In this Edshelf addresses the age-old problem attempted by learning objects, repositories, Dewey Decimal, and Good Housekeeping: how to find the good stuff in a sea of dross. Tapping into social networks is a good idea, but it trades the overabundance of anonymous recommendations for a dearth of recommendations from people you actually know.

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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
Skype: Downes

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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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