Stephen Downes

This is a lightly edited transcript of the talk I gave online on Tuesday to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Advisory Group on "Developing skills, knowledge and capacities through innovation: E-Learning, M-Learning, cloud-Learning." It was a brisk presentation, which makes for a quick read stepping lightly over a number of important topics - what is a MOOC, what technology do we need for personal learning, access issues, and evaluation (to name a few). The audio recording was quite poor (there was a lot of echo) so I really wanted to have a good text record.

Another excellent summary article by Audrey Watters, this one on data and privacy (it was too bad we didn't see her at MRI13 - I certainly hope she's making lots of money with Hack Education and related projects, because it would be a shame to lose such an articulate voice in the field). She writes, "The appropriate choice for Person of the Year, some argue, would be Edward Snowden, who along with the journalist Glenn Greenwald, is certainly responsible for the most important story of the year: revelations about widespread government surveillance by the National Security Agency... Interestingly I heard very little outcry from ed-tech proponents about the troubling implications of NSA surveillance via the technologies that are being pushed in schools, about the impact that this might have on students’ privacy, – hardly a peep from those who have gone 'all in' with Google Apps or iPads or YouTube for Schools or Skype in the Classroom or Facebook."

My favourite has to be, "We blog in the LMS." But I'm sure you can think of many more. Some other faves: "My provost heard about MOOCs." And "Pearson invested in our startup." Here's the hashtag.

Even in 2013 I often find myself the only persopn around a table using a computer. The rest have their pens and notebooks out, keeping a record in a form that will never be indexed (or searched, or possibly even read) again. Keeping notes has intrinsic value - doing it helps you remember the conversation and creates interactivity and engagement. But I still prefere to take notes on a computer. So I find it surprising to read Bud Hunt react to claims that "we never use pen and paper." Even I would never make such a claim! As I write there's a scratch pad beside me (I did some quick calculations on it even today). And as Hunt says, "the important piece of tool selection is picking the right tool for the right job.  That it’s digital or analog really doesn’t matter all that much.  What matters is that you are making something."

My thanks to Jenny Mackness for drawing out some key points of the recent panel discussion I took part in at MRI13 around the idea of learner support in MOOCs in terms of self-organisation. "This would mean," she writes, "providing learners with an environment in which they can self-organise and which itself is self-organising. In these terms support isn’t something we do for learners, but something that we support them in doing for themselves – a ‘once-removed’ form of support." She is right, I don't have all the details worked out. But it is, I think, an important concept in new models of learning, one which xMOOC providers haven't realized yet.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: the PISA rankings should measure every child in China, not 'economies' such as Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau (after all, Canada can't simply send in measurements for the Peel School Board or the Calgary Board of Education, both of which would score similarly well). And even the individual 'econom,ic zone' rankings are misleading. "Shanghai led the world in all three subjects—math, science, and reading. But that ranking is misleading. Shanghai has a school system that excludes most migrant students, the children of families that have moved to the city from rural areas of China. And now for three years running, the OECD and PISA continue to promote a distorted picture of Shanghai’s school system by remaining silent on the plight of Chinese migrant children." (Note that TES, a European magazine, reported on December 6 that China has decided to participate as a nation in the next round of PISA tests in 2015.)

There's a lot I could say about this series looking at the lives of homeless children trying to go to school in places like New York. But really, you should read the series yourself to get that first-person perspective. I will say this, though: the idea that there are more than 20,000 homess children in the system poses a significant challenge that can't be addressed simply by advocating home schooling or saying that the child's education and upbringing is the parent's responsibility. A lot of the solutions I propose would well for wealthier families that can afford the time and expense of student support., But for the rest, the system has to provide, and it's in all of our interests to ensure that it provides well, with good spirit, and good intentions.

I have always felt myself to have a loose if grudging affiliation with postmodernism, at least, with respect to scepticism regarding things like the unification of truth and the march of progress (I'm also sceptical of logico-constructivist foundationalism, but I digress). But now there's a set of new schools of post-post-modernism calling for my affiliation - automodernism, complexism, hypermodernism, to name a few - and if I cared more I could probably refine my alignment more precisely. But I wonder whether this is true: "once one uses technology as the primum mobile of consciousness and global epistemological constructs, it’s easy to see how a next logical step would be a preferential shift to technocratic social organization, from individual communication to bodies politic." I would have thought the shift would be in the oppoisite direction. See also: Baudrillard's Proxy.