Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

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Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning, Charlotte Hu, Scientific American, Mar 01, 2024
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I'm afraid people will draw the wrong lesson from this research. The wrong lesson, of course, is that people should take notes by hand. Sure, this will improve learning compared to the way they take notes by keyboard. But " people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking," according tot he researchers. "It's very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying...  But when taking notes by hand... students have to actively pay ... [Direct Link]


Solidarity among Philosophers Leads to New Journal: Political Philosophy - Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession, Jan 12, 2024
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It has taken decades to get some groups of scholars to embrace open access, and sometimes it takes a push, as it did in this case. I highlight the emergence of the new Journal, Political Philosophy, out of the ashes of the publisher-owned Journal of Political Philosophy. "Wiley had been pushing the journal to publish more articles per year because of the turn towards open-access publishing agreements... [Direct Link]


Food for Thought: What Are We Feeding LLMs, and How Will this Impact Humanity?, Stuart Leitch, The Scholarly Kitchen, Dec 11, 2023
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"Academia has developed an amazing tree of knowledge which is arguably the most important data for Large Language Models to be trained on," writes Stuart Leitch. "Where does the scholarly communication community fit in?" It's a good question, and one we need to be careful about as we answer. We know that the quality of the data given to an AI impacts the quality of the results. I saw a LinkedIn post a day ago (now unfinable because it's LinkedIn) complaining about ... [Direct Link]


The Economics of Vouchers, Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, Nov 19, 2023
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I know this argument has been made before, but we have new data, and I don't want to miss this expression of it. "How can parents make a meaningful choice for their children without solid information about the school? ...  The public is simply told that choice is good and that the "free market" will fix everything. Which is crap since choice, in schools or anything else, is worthless without good information." [Direct Link]


Announcing Dancer2 1.0.0, Jason A. Crome, blogs.perl.org, Oct 16, 2023
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I know most people aren't interested in this but in my world this is big news: the release of version 1.0 of Perl Dancer2. It's definitely on my list of things to play with, and could help me tame (a bit) the monster gRSShopper has become (or just make a bunch of smaller apps to help me do specific things). I've been working with Perl since, I don't know, the early 90s, and while there are more fashionable things (like Javascript, which I also use a lot) nothing to me beats ... [Direct Link]


Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?, Harry Marshall, Hacker News, Oct 02, 2023
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It's a Hacker News discussion thread, so it takes some effort (also - pro tip - use ctl/scroll to increase text size and make it readable). But there's solid advice here. For example: "Good decision support is where most of the value is, and it's about building things that draw conclusions, not just throwing the data over the fence with 50 filters and expecting the end consumer to do the actual analysis." There are links to resources, more advice, etc. [Direct Link]


Evidence Is Mounting That Calculus Should Be Changed. Will Instructors Heed It?, Daniel Mollenkamp, EdSurge, Sept 29, 2023
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The 'direct instruction' crowd isn't going to like this. "The traditional lecture method of teaching calculus isn't as effective as active models. Those who learned from active methods did significantly better across race, gender and major, according to the study." I can believe it. Calculus was my biggest challenge in university. As a loner, I didn't join study groups, and of course the tutors in tutorial sessions were swamped, and so missed out on the active ... [Direct Link]


What 2U’s new flat fee model could mean for the online degree sector , Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive, Sept 12, 2023
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The online program management (OPM) company 2U has traditionally offered its services in exchange for a (large) percentage of tuition revenue. This worked well until the pandemic hit, forcing most programs to move online, and colleges and universities relying on 2U to lose a large chunk of their income. Now (somewhat after the fact) 2U is offering a flat fee model. This may be more in response to legal challenges than to economics, as despite an exception for companies like 2U, there are laws ... [Direct Link]


Learning about learning networks, Fiona McKenzie, Alli Edwards, Thea Snow, Networkweaver, Aug 25, 2023
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The 2021 Orange Compass' paper Building a culture of learning at scale: learning networks for systems change covers many of the themes we cover in this newsletter. I don't endorse it without criticism (for example, I would revise the section on mental models) but in the main it offers a solid understanding of learning networks. In this blog post the authors describe "some of the insights and deeper questions that have been emerging as we apply and embody the principles set out ... [Direct Link]


Threads Adopting ActivityPub Makes Sense, but Won't Be Easy, Richard MacManus, The New Stack, Jul 17, 2023
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Threads could have adopted a different federation propocol "such as Tim Berners-Lee's Solid and Bluesky's AT Protocol," writes Richard MacManus. But ActivityPub, which is used by Mastodon and more, "perfectly suits Meta's goals." Why? "With ActivityPub, the server manages your identity and data... As fediverse developer Ryan Barrett put it in a post this week, your ActivityPub "identity, data, and administration are all tied to your ... [Direct Link]


Network Know-How Guides, Network Impact, Jun 17, 2023
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Oh, I really like these guides. They're based on the recognition that people are "organizing strategic networks—rather than relying on conventional, centralized organizations—to have a positive impact on a pressing social challenge." The series of six medium-length guides (downloads here) identify and explain key network organization principles. The advice is solid and well-founded, clear and easy to follow, and supported with examples and worksheets you can use with ... [Direct Link]


Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories, Edgar Dubourg, Valentin Thouzeau, Charles de Dampierre, Andrei Mogoutov, Nicolas Baumard, Nature Scientific Reports, May 30, 2023
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This paper was recommended, but I have to say, I read this paper and unfortunately can't get that time back. Basically, it says people who like to explore are that way because they like exploring; people who like imaginary worlds are that way because they like imaginary worlds, and the underlying factors are that they are "younger individuals, males, and individuals living in more affluent environments." In related news: objects are solid because they embody solidity. [Direct Link]


"Deskilling" and AI as a Tool, Laura Hilliger, May 12, 2023
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Responding to danah boyd on deskilling, Laura Hilliger (who is just as smart) writes, "what if instead of contemplating that 'deskilling' is going to lead to a population without highly skilled experts, we think about how expertise will change? What if the new tools help humans develop cognitive skills that we never knew we had? What if we have a capability for skills that solidify relationships between recall and intuition? What if our instincts start to play a bigger role in ... [Direct Link]


okieli dokieli, Sarven Capadisli, Apr 28, 2023
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dokieli, writes Sarven Capadisli, "is a socially-aware clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions with an ocean of open Web standards at its disposal." People may recognize his name (csarven) as a long-time contributor to Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project. This client uses Solid for storage and therefore part of a wider social network that allows for annotations and comments. It's not part of the fediverse (yet) because ... [Direct Link]


OPM Market Landscape And Dynamics: Spring 2023 Updates, Phil Hill, Phil Hill & Associates, Apr 14, 2023
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Phil Hill revisits his 'Mad Max' diagram of online program management (OPM) companies and concludes that the wheels have fallen off the truck. "We still get a picture of a chaotic market that is not for the faint of heart, and one that is seeing consolidations and category changes, and these changes will continue." [Direct Link]


PROPOSED Solid Working Group Charter, W3C, Apr 10, 2023
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Under Tim Berners-Lee, the Social Linked Data (Solid) project has worked for a very long time to develop a protocol and applications supporting a network for distributed linked data. This proposed working group builds on the Solid Protocol v.0.10.0 authored by the group. The idea is that "Solid storage enables fine-grained control over private data on a per-application and per-principal basis" while enabling interoperability and data sharing. I've always been supportive of the ... [Direct Link]


Element, Element, Feb 07, 2023
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I've been following the Social Linked Data project on Gitter for many years. Well now, all of Gitter is migrating to a new platform, Element. Element uses the Matrix protocol, "an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication." It's similar to, but different from, ActivityPub. So this prompted me to finally create a Matrix profile; I'm @downess:matrix.org ('downes' was taken, or was an earlier profile I created, I don't know). Here ... [Direct Link]


https://graphmetrix.com/trinpod, GraphMatrix, Feb 06, 2023
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As I've said before, the core technology of the metaverse isn't virtual reality, but persistent digital objects. Blockchain is one way to provide persistence, but another is based on Tim Berners-Lee's SoLiD (Social Linked Data) project. SoLiD is based on interconnected 'pods'. Here's a new example. GraphMatrix is a company producing something called TrinPods, "The TrinPod is the master of all your data, and you grant the apps read and write access to the data... a (... [Direct Link]


What am I doing here? 1. Credential Engine, Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, Jan 20, 2023
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Phil Barker is one of those people who has been quietly doing solid technical work for a very long time. This article describes his role providing consultancy to Credential Engine and his work on the Credential Transparency Description Language (CDTL), the latest release of which was last November. "By CTDL," he writes, "we actually mean three related vocabularies: CTDL, itself which covers the core of credentials, courses, pathways, organizations; CTDL-ASN, an extension ... [Direct Link]


Universities are failing to capture the value of their data, research finds, Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive, Jan 18, 2023
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"Institutions have access to both academic administrative and research data sets but often lack a centralized repository for all that information," reports this article, suggesting that "with more data about things like faculty members' research focus areas, funding patterns and higher ed policy trends, they could make more strategic hiring decisions." Maybe they could, but I cannot begin to say how bad an idea this is. The airtight security required to manage budget... [Direct Link]


What does it mean to build a new social contract for education? An invitation to think, act and write! , Elena Toukan, NORRAG -, Jan 06, 2023
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We learn though this article that "UNESCO is inviting researchers, educators, and practitioners to contribute 1000-2000 word think-pieces that explore, from different perspectives, the governance imperatives of a new social contract for education." Elena Toukan here argues that "the socio-political agreement at the heart of education systems requires reimagination, to probe why, how and for what purpose education is organized." The article argues for "principles of a ... [Direct Link]


Teachers v ChatGPT: Schools face new challenge in fight against plagiarism, Osmond Chia, The Straits Times, Jan 04, 2023
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The first paragraph of this news article is the most relevant: "Teachers in Singapore say they will likely have to move from assignments requiring regurgitation to those that require greater critical thinking, to stay ahead in the fight against plagiarism." (Great lede; now that's some solid news writing). Via Sun Sun Lim. Related: Tony Hirst discusses chatGPT on URLs and citations. [Direct Link]


From powerhouse to plummeting: Here’s a timeline of FTX’s collapse , Nat Rubio-Licht, Protocol, Nov 11, 2022
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The world of blockchain has been roiling this week with the collapse of FTX, a major currency exchange. Here's the timeline. That it happened during the Blockchain and Web3 summit was very bad news for Don Tapscott and company. It would be very premature to dismiss the technology, though - maybe start thinking of it as distributed ledger technology rather than blockchain or Bitcoin. Related: making sense of web 3.0 in education ("Web 3.0 is about decentralization, stripping ... [Direct Link]


Top 100 Tools for Learning 2022, Jane Hart, Sept 01, 2022
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Jane Hart has published her list of top educational tools for 2022, and usefully, divides it into three sections: tools that support personal learning (PPL), tools for workplace learning (WPL), and tools for education. The top of the list is virtually unchanged from last year (as is the make-up of the top 100 list as a whole). YouTube, PowerPoint, Google search, Microsoft Teams and Zoom lead the way. "It has become clear that whilst 2021 was the year of experimentation – with an ... [Direct Link]


The Malagasy Ideal of Fihavanana and Western Ethics, Casey Woodling, Comparative Philosophy, Aug 05, 2022
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This (17 page PDF)(also) is a clear and direct presentation of Malagasy ethics and in particular the principle of fihavanana. "As a first pass, we can say that fihavanana is a state of peace or harmony that people can achieve with others within their communities; it is modeled on the peace, harmony, solidarity, love, and closeness that is often seen in family ties." Source materials are Malagasy proverbs (ohabolana) that either directly use the term or talk about it without using ... [Direct Link]


The One-Traffic-Light Town with Some of the Fastest Internet in the U.S., Sue Halpern, The New Yorker, Jul 08, 2022
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This week I was finally connected to fibre internet, after years of waiting. I was the first in my neighbourhood in a thriving rural village in eastern Ontario to be connected. So this article from 2019 describing how an impoverished county in Kentucky accomplished the same thing through their local cooperative is particularly relevant to me. As the article explains, "The big telecom companies aren't going to do it, because it's not economical and they have shareholders to ... [Direct Link]


Connectivism: My PhD journey in few lines, Alaa AlDahdouh, May 24, 2022
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This article recounts a fascinating research program based in a solid understanding of connectivism and a desire to push at its limits and determine whether there's actually anything of value there. The article is a brisk overview of Alaa AlDahdouh's journey, punctuated with the publications he produced along the way. In the end, he argues that Connectivism "provides a valuable framework for interpreting how the higher education students learn," however, "connectivism ... [Direct Link]


Structural Stupidity, Leeway, Metafilter, May 02, 2022
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This Metafilter thread links to what the author says is "a solid summary of why algorithmically-driven social media is harmful to common culture and democracy itself, ending with a few ideas about what can be done to course correct." Now I'm no fan of the misuse to which the algorithm is put, as readers know, but I reject the conclusion that it is social media that is the cause of division in society. Ask yourself whether the same degree of division were it not for very well-... [Direct Link]


The fall of the Tower of Babel, Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, Apr 18, 2022
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"The Tower of Babel has fallen, writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic. We Americans no longer speak the same language or recognize the same truth." I think this is an interesting observation, not so much because nobody has noticed this before (it's not hard to see if you look) but because of the implications. Now Joanne Jacobs is inclined gto blame this on social media or overbearing parents or generational change. But I personally just think it's a think ... [Direct Link]


Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3, Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly, Mar 24, 2022
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According to Tim O'Reilly, " "Web3" as we think of it today was introduced in 2014 by Gavin Wood, one of the cocreators of Ethereum. Wood's compact definition of Web3, as he put it in a recent Wired interview, is simple: 'Less trust, more truth.'" Well, that's one way to put it. As O'Reilly explains, "Wood's point is that the blockchain replaces trust in the good intentions of others with transparency and irrevocability built into the ... [Direct Link]


Why e-learning requires Wi-Fi optimization , Roger Sands, eSchool News, Feb 17, 2022
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For me the internet's great leap forward happened in 1998 in Brandon when I got always-on cable internet after years of doing dial-up. Forward 20 years and a move to rural Ontario and I'm still on cable internet and my office in Ottawa is in a wireless dead zone. Connectivity was and is the major hurdle. So though the topic of this article may seem obvious, I would say that in practice it's not realized. Think of it like lighting; you can't have lights that are too dim or that ... [Direct Link]


How The BBC Does Ethical Personalisation, Pernille Tranberg, DataEthics, Jan 31, 2022
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This article is too brief to be really satisfactory, but it marks what to me is a signal event, the first actual use I've seen 'in the wild' of Tim Berners-Lee's Social Linked Data (SoLiD) project. SoLiD is described here as "an open-source Personal Data Store (PDS) developed by the company Inrupt." here's how it worked in practice: "In their first demo, a user created a new data pod on the BBC system and then linked their BBC and Spotify user accounts to ... [Direct Link]


How Snap is sidestepping the metaverse, Casey Newton, Platformer, Dec 08, 2021
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Snap is a company that most people are overlooking, argues Casey Newton, but it has slowly been developing a solid foundation for augmented reality (AR) glasses that will eclipse its rivals. He makes a good argument. This, for example, is tantalizing: restaurants have been telling customers to scan QR codes to access the menu, but Snap has a 'lens' that displays what the menu item would look like on the table in front of you. "When I opened it up using Spectacles, I waved my ... [Direct Link]


Use a spreadsheet for literary criticism: it's more accurate, Terry Freedman, ICT & Computing in Education, Nov 22, 2021
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"If book blurb writers had any sense," writes Terry Freedman, "they wouldn't put wordy descriptions on the back cover of books. They would put a graph there instead.' I'm honestly not sure whether this post is serious or satire, but it doesn't really matter, because the idea of using graphs instead of text for literary criticism is satisfying either way. "Good solid numbers, and a graph to boot. If one carried on applying this approach to the whole book... [Direct Link]


Aggregators aren't open-ended, Gordon Brander, Subconscious, Substack, Jul 24, 2021
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I think there's merit to this post, though I thing it relies on questionable hypotheses to get to where we already are. The first hypothesis is the characterization of aggregators as systems that monopolize demand by consolidating it; Gordon Brander offers Facebook, Uber and Amazon as examples. The second is that aggregators have broken a natural law describing how technology evolves: "yesterday's product becomes tomorrow's component." But you can't make Facebook... [Direct Link]


Many Americans don’t support journalistic values, study says, Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, Apr 15, 2021
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As usual, many of the lessons here for journalism could also apply to education. Today we're looking at the role of journalism. There is no direct analogy between 'journalist as watchdog' and 'educator as whatever' but nonetheless the values we presume apply to education might no longer be relevant to the community at large. So this is an interesting approach: " The API study recommends they (journalists) consider reworking stories in order to broaden their appeal to ... [Direct Link]


What are the symbols in digital education/design for learning?, David T. Jones, Some assemblage required, Mar 29, 2021
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I've spent the last couple of days working on buttons, an effort I'm sure any reasonable employer would consider a complete waste of time, but which to me is infinitely valuable. Until you actually encode a button, it is difficult to ask the questions you need ask about what a button does, what it represents, and what it says. A simple question, for example: when you push a button, does it stay down, or does it pop back up? If it's down and you push it again, does it pop back up... [Direct Link]


Digital Badges Turn 10. So What?, Noah Geisel, Verses Education, Medium, Mar 05, 2021
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Sometimes it feels to me that innovation in educational technology has been frozen for about ten years. That doesn't mean nothing has happened; quite the opposite, actually. But it feels to me that the idea we're working with today are the ideas we were talking about ten years ago. I think there's a lot behind the scenes that will change this, along with high-profile technology, like Zoom, that have had a wide impact. And of course, Coursera is launching an IPO with a multi-billion-... [Direct Link]


Paradoxes of Engagement: Less Communication Is More, Stowe Boyd, Work Futures, Mar 05, 2021
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This probably applies to learning as well: "Human communication is naturally "bursty," in that it involves periods of high activity followed by periods of little to none... Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas... Bursts, in turn, help to focus energy, develop ideas, and achieve closure on specific questions." I'm definitely that way, and what works really well for me is to spend a lot of time working on whatever, and then ... [Direct Link]


Teach Your Students to ‘Explode’ Complex Text, Sunday Cummins, Middleweb, Dec 20, 2020
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It is common for students to disguise their inability to comprehend a text by simply regurgitating text or citing evidence with little explanation. This post offers ways to help them improve by 'exploding' complex test. I would describe this as finding ways to critically analyze text (and it is a huge advantage to be able to do this naturally while reading). I used to do this a lot with my critical thinking students; I'd have them bring in clippings from the newspaper and we'd ... [Direct Link]

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 26, 2024 2:12 p.m.

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