Presentation
Life-Long Learning
Stephen Downes, June 4, 2013, Encuentro Educación, Caracas, Venezuela, by Adobe Connect

Slides and audio from my presentation to Encuentro Educación 2012 - 2013 in preparation for my upcoming visit to Caracas. Learning overall can be divided into the teaching function and the learning function; in this presentation I focused on the learning function, focusing on learning that is interactive, usable and relevant.

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

2013 Internet Trends
Mary Meeker, Liang Wu, KPCB, June 4, 2013

I'm a few days late but I don't want to pass by without mentioning Mary Meeker's 2013 internet trends report. What I really like about these reports is that they're not just people expressing opinions, they're chock full of data. There's 117 slides in this presentation, so get a coffee and set aside some time. Big stories, to me:

• the U.S. has taken over smartphones (but Blackberry still increased market share)(slide 7)
• SnapChat (Android/iOS 'content that disappears') has emerged from nowhere since last year to challenge Facebook for photo uploads (Flickr: not a significant player)(slides 14,15)
• DropCam - (live/DVR video camera) more video uploaded per minute than YouTube (slide 18)
• Fitness data on mobile (that's a big one for me) (slides 24,25)
• Tablet growth more rapid than smartphones, iPad (I wonder whether my Yoga counts as one)
• Wearables (slide 52) and flyables (slide 60)
• Alibaba (China) (24% owned by Yahoo) more sales volume than Amazon and eBay combined (slide 69)
• Sina Weibo (China) 530MM users push for social change (slide 72)
• $1.1 Trillion spent on education in US, students loans up 8x over 10 years, student load debt 914B (slide 98)
• MOOCs (slide 101)
• Why, exactly, are the (medical) bills so high? (slide 103)

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IBM to acquire SoftLayer
IBM, June 4, 2013

Many years ago, I set up my website on a new service, EV1 Servers, that came highly recommended. January 5, 2007, to be precise, after my CSoft installation crashed and burned. Just yesterday, I wrote about how fickle internet services have become. And then today, "the ISP on which I hosted my own server has been purchased three times since I started with them (which is how I find myself a SoftLayer customer without even trying)." And now, today, again without even trying, I find myself an IBM customer. For the record, the service at EV1 was every bit as good as recommended. With each new acquisition, it got a little more distant and a little worse.

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Les cours gratuits en ligne transforment les universités
Julien Brault, Les Affairs, June 4, 2013

Article in Les Affairs (en français) in which I am interviewed. Note that I point to a likely future for the MOOC outside the traditional campus, as a result of corporate sponsorship. «Ce sera difficile pour les grandes entreprises de ne pas commanditer de MOOC. Elles auront intérêt à le faire ; pas seulement pour la publicité, mais pour avoir une influence sur les programmes et former leurs futurs employés.»

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New Annual Report and Strategy Document
Elliot Harmon, Creative Commons, June 4, 2013

Two items today from Creative Commons, one outlining their "mission, vision, and priorities for action. The resulting publication, The Future of Creative Commons (2.7 MB PDF), lays out priorities for each area...", and the second a (hard-to-read) annual report called Dispatches from the Commons. Overall it's all about what you would expect - build on foundations, extend use, build sustainability - which is overall good news. I'm a bit concerned about the strategic partnerships (thus, for example, we see Creative Commons tout P2PU, yet say nothing about WikiEducator, which seems backwards). I'm also a bit preturbed by the third part of the mission statement from the Futures document. While "universal access to research, education, and full participation in culture" is great, reference to "a new era of development, growth, and productivity" begins to sound more than a little Imperial.

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Outsourced Lectures Raise Concerns About Academic Freedom
Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2013

Colleges and universities have long counted on their monopoly over the granting of degrees to cement their economic position. After all, people would say, students need degrees in order to get a job. But this reliance may now be backfiring. What do they respond to this: ""The MIT certificate has a lot more value in the marketplace than three course credits at MassBay—absolutely," says Chandrakant Panse, a professor of microbiology at MassBay. But if this is the case, one wonders what it is MassBay students are paying for when they pay tuition.

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