Stephen Downes

Like everyone else, I suppose, I have to deal with attempts to intimidate and bully that come my way through social media (you can probably see my frustration with these unprovoked attacks show through at times). "The available information so far indicates roughly one in five undergraduate students has been cyberbullied, mostly through Facebook, text messages and email, Cassidy said." I imagine the actual numbers are higher. And while I applaud efforts to stem it, I think that it's a wider cultural issue that we have to consider. People act this way because they believe it's socially acceptable (and even socially encouraged) to act this way. In-your-face abrasiveness is felt to be a virtue, not a socially-harmful vice.

OLPC news plays the eulogy. "The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project." Not a noble end. Still - would we have had the tablet revolution without OLPC? Maybe - but not for a long time, probably. So it worked out well in the end.

This is a national learning object repository for schools in Greece, subject of another presentation at INTED 2014 in Valencia. It includes interactive text books, a national digital repository infrastructure, and a digital education platform.

Presentation at INTED 2014 today. "If we want a powerful innovative culture in schools which is self-sustaining we have to empower system-aware practitioners, working ever more closely with the service users, to create it. And to avoid simply creating interesting but isolated experiments, we have to design in collaborative ways of learning and enquiry between professionals – a “pull” rather than “push” approach." See also this presentation from 2012.

Fropm a presentation at INTED 2014 today in Valencia - "It is a web-based learning resource modelled on a real UK high street community provided for  academic staff and students or others to use. It aims to meet the needs of a range of subject areas in Business Education by simulating the complexities of modern organisations within local communities with many interdependent and inter-related functions and processes." The city is composed of OERs, and the information supports various student activities. You can find quite a few more of these resourcess just by searching for 'Wincton City' on Google - for example, this fiuctional Wincton Gazette.

The funny thing about this article is that the author does not seem to know just how much of the average love life has moved online, from dating and flirting, getting to know each other, and even day-to-day conversation. Yes, there is the in-person aspect, without which love just wouldn't be the same. But the difference between love in person and education in person is this: we would feel funny paying highly specialized individuals $150K a year to satisfy aspects of our live life. It feels funny, in this respect, to read a line like this: "Teaching and learning involves human beings, interaction, opinions, facial expressions, emotion, and yes even a touch of the hand or a warm, sweaty handshake." And that's where Sky Gilbert misses the point of online learning, done properly. It takes all the bits of an education that be put online, and puts them there, and then leaves us with the tools and the means of providing the interaction and back-and-forth discourse we need for ourselves. Just like love.

Poor bandwidth means a leaan newsletter, but here's a book on MOOCs that you migth want to read. (I'm in Valencia where I gave a talk today.) "Unlike accounts in the mainstream media and educational press, Invasion of the MOOCs is not written from the perspective of removed administrators, would-be education entrepreneurs/venture capitalists, or political pundits. Rather, this collection of essays comes from faculty who developed and taught MOOCs in 2012 and 2013, students who participated in those MOOCs, and academics and observers who have first hand experience with MOOCs and higher education."

It's not quite the same as licensing the content for reuse, of course, since the user has to be online to view embedded photos, and the photos are send froma Getty server, which means that websites can ensure speed of delivery, and that the Getty server logs all transactions. But hey, since so many people make use of online images in this way in any case (yours truly included) it's a welsome development, and dare I say, the de facto standard operating procedure for the use of web media (indeed, Getty may be getting ahead of the curve by allowing this use, which implies that it could refuse permission, rather than simply accepting the default premise that anyone can embed web imagery.