Stephen Downes

Michael Feldstein offers his retrospective on the MRI conference, suggesting that "the connectivist/open ed crowd has been spectacularly, stunningly successful at 'changing the narrative'." But as Phil Hill points out in another post, the only media coverage of the most significant gathering of cMOOC people ever is of some fairly minor UPenn study of xMOOCs. But I do agree that there's no point expecting to improve things by changing the narrative. I've watched the narrative - mine and others' - be changed over and over the last 20 years. LMSs. Learning Objects. Educational Modeling. Content syndication. OpenID. E-Learning 2.0. EduPunk. Learning Networks. Connectivism. OERs. MOOCs. The result is always the same. Sometimes it's ignored. More often it is co-opted and somehow becomes the property of the very institutions it targets. You can't change the world - or the establishment - with a narrative.