Stephen Downes

Anil Dash follows up his "The Web We Lost" post with one on how to rebuild it. It's a set of good suggestions, aimed mostly at builders. Som e of them resonate quite a bit with me. This, for example: "The people involved in creating these platforms are hired from a narrow band of privileged graduates from a small number of top-tier schools, overwhelmingly male and focused narrowly on the traditional Silicon Valley geography." He adds, "Flickr was born in Canada!" I can think of a few other Canadian innovations swllowed and made corporate by that same narrow band of privileged graduates. And then there's this: "Right now, all of the places we can assemble on the web in any kind of numbers are privately owned. And privately-owned public spaces aren't real public spaces. They don't allow for the play and the chaos and the creativity and brilliance that only arise in spaces that don't exist purely to generate profit. And they're susceptible to being gradually gaslighted by the companies that own them." What we are trying to build with (our version of) MOOCs is a public space for education. Has there been push-back against that concept? oh yes.