Stephen Downes

Often overlooked by education technology pundits are services like Stack Overflow that exist outside the traditional education infrastructure of colleges and universities and yet play such a vital role in learning and development. As this article says, "Any app that is on your phone, as an example, I'm sure Stack Overflow was leveraged by developers to build those." It's free and publicly available to anyone in the world, and supported partially through advertising but mostly by offering the platform as a service to companies. "Microsoft, Google, Logitech — you name it, they're using Stack Overflow to coordinate conversations between their engineers." I use it. A lot. This article dives deep into Stack Overflow as a company, as a platform, and as a concept.