Stephen Downes - Career Highlights
1994 – First ‘Multi Academic User Domain’ in Canada
Stephen Downes worked with Athabasca University between 1997-1994 and during that time pioneered a number of electronic tutor support applications, developing and running a bulletin board service (BBS) called Athabaska BBS in 1990 and designing a critical thinking ‘compugraphics’ course in 1993. In 1994, with colleagues: Jeff McLaughlin, Istevan Berkeley, and Wes Cooper, he launched ‘The Painted Porch MAUD’ on Athabasca University servers, the first such service in Canada. The service was used to support critical thinking students at Athabasca, philosophy students at Cariboo College, and hosted a conference for the Canadian Association of Distance Education in 1996. See archived version of conference records, http://www.downes.ca/archive/1996/isiit/cade2.htm
1996 – Manitoba’s First Web Based Course
Working with Assiniboine Community College between 1995-1999 Stephen Downes built the college’s first web server and website. He played a major role in introducing the college staff and the citizens of south-west Manitoba to the internet, for a time driving around in a van with a computer network and ‘net-hopper’ to demonstrate it to rural communities. In 1996, with colleagues Conrad Albertson and Shirley Chapman, he build Manitoba’s first web-based course, ‘Introduction to Instruction’, which was offered online as part of the Certificate in Adult Education required by all college instructors in the province. See archived version of the course, http://www.downes.ca/archive/1996/cae/welcome.htm
1998 – The Future of Online Learning
While at Assiniboine Community College Downes developed a learning management system (LMS) called OLe (online learning environment) and used it to deploy the college’s General Business Certificate program, and to support high school courses offered online throughout Manitoba by the Brandon Adult Learning Centre. As part of this work he authored the widely cited paper The Future of Online Learning, which correctly predicted most developments in the field in the two decades that followed. See the original distribution of the paper at http://www.downes.ca/future/ In 2008, at the request of Contact North, a follow-up article was written, The Future of Online Learning: 10 Years on. https://www.downes.ca/files/books/future2008.pdf. In 2018, Contact North commissioned a 20-year follow-up: Quantum Leaps You Can Expect in teaching and Learning in the Digital Age - A Roadmap. https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/insights-online-learning/2018-02-07/quantum-leaps-you-can-expect-teaching-and-learning-digital-age-roadmap
1998 - NewsTrolls
Downes was co-founder and an executive officer of NewsTrolls, Inc., launched in 1998 and dedicated to the collection and dissemination of news, articles, and opinions on all things Internet. NewsTrolls represented a collective spirit dedicated to the expression of free speech through our links, articles and postings. Publishing for ten years, NewsTrolls was a pioneering social and commentary web site, becoming obsolete only with the launch of social network services such as Twitter and Facebook. http://www.newstrolls.com
2000 – MuniMall
In 1999 Downes accepted a contract to move to the University and work with colleague Terry Anderson to develop an online learning, resources and learning portal called MuniMall.View a slide show demonstrating MuniMall at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/26 and Internet Archive version from 2001 at https://web.archive.org/web/20010203221000/http://www.munimall.net/ One of the first portals of its kind, MuniMall combined content aggregation and an email news product. This service supported the Faculty of Extension’s program in municipal governance offered to town managers and elected officials throughout Alberta for a ten-year period after its launch in 2000. MuniMall won the 2000 NAWeb award for best educational website.
2001 – OLDaily
Since May, 2001, and continuing to the present, Stephen Downes has authored and published OLDaily, a compilation of links and commentary about advances in educational technology. See archives, 2001 – present. http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/archive.cgi See the website at http://www.downes.ca/ OLDaily has had an online readership of more than 40,000 people daily through web, email, RSS, JSON, Twitter and Facebook distribution for almost 20 years. In 2014 the site had more than 1.5 million visits and 12 million page views, making it one of the most widely read and cited sites in the field in the world. See statistics at http://www.downes.ca/stats/2014/awstats.downes.ca.html (after November, 2014, the statistics software broke). The site won the 2001 NAWeb award for best educational website, and the 2005 Edublog award for best individual blog.
2001 – Learning Objects: Resources For Distance Education Worldwide
Based on a presentation of the same name offered in 2000, this article published in the The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (2,1) remains one of the most widely read and cited articles in the history of the journal. The article defined the basis and underlying technologies for the concept of the ‘learning object’ (first developed by Wayne Hodgins in 1994). The article may be viewed at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/32/378
2002 – eduSource
The eduSource pan-Canadian network of learning object repositories was funded by CANARIE in order to provide nation-wide access to learning resources. Downes sat on the executive committee and chaired the vision committee, defining the network's ideals and objectives. The project was a collaborative venture among Canadian public and private sector partners to create the prototype for a working network of interoperable learning object (LO) repositories. The project used Canada’s broadband Internet network CA*Net4 as a development and application platform. The total project value was C$9,830,000. http://www.edusource.ca/ and see also https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/743
2003 – Content Syndication, Edu-RSS and Ed Radio
In 1998 Dave Winer and Netscape developed the content syndication format RSS. Stephen Downes created Netscape Netcenter RSS feed #31 and was a member of the early working groups defining RSS 1.0 content syndication. Downes was the first to propose the use of RSS for educational applications https://www.downes.ca/post/148 and demonstrated its use to aggregate and distribute learning objects with Edu-RSS. https://www.downes.ca/edurss02.htm The invention of podcasting in 2004 by Adam Curry and Dave Winer was motivated in part by Downes’s invention of Ed Radio in 2003. https://www.downes.ca/ed_radio.htm Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL or Webjay audio feeds.2004 – Learning Networks – The Buntine Oration
As the capstone of a month-long speaking tour in Australia, Stephen Downes gave the Buntine Oration, a biennial talk delivered to the at the Australian College of Educators and the Australian Council of Educational Leaders conference in Perth. In this oration, Downes highlighted the weaknesses of traditional approached to learning management systems and learning design, and proposed an alternative approach to educational their and content delivery based on network structures as enabled, for example, by the internet. View the text of the Buntine Oration at http://www.downes.ca/post/20
2005 – E-Learning 2.0
In this paper Stephen Downes outlined an approach to online learning based on the use of social media tools such as blogging and social networks, and rooted as much in creativity and communication among students as in the consumption of educational content delivered by learning management systems. The title of this approach, e-learning 2.0, was a combination of the terms e-learning and web 2.0, both coined in the previous decade. E-Learning 2.0 was and continues to be the most popular paper ever published by the Association of Computing Machinery in E-Learn Magazine. Read E-Learning 2.0 on the ACM site at http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1104968
2005 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
In December 2004 George Siemens coined the term ‘Connectivism’ to refer to network learning. Since this term encompassed his work as well, Stephen Downes has since then been recognized as one of the leading voices of connectivism. While Siemens presents connectivism primarily as a theory of pedagogy, Downes also employs it as a means of describing ‘connective knowledge’, and in his paper An Introduction to Connective Knowledge describes the connection between network theories of knowledge and network theories of learning and pedagogy. Read the paper here: http://www.downes.ca/post/33034
2008 – First Massive Open Online Course
Collaborating with George Siemens, Stephen Downes designed and ran the world’s first massive open online course (MOOC). Titled ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’, the course was offered as a means of demonstrating the principles of connectivism through an actual example of a connectivist course. http://connect.downes.ca/ The course was run again in 2009, 2011, and 2012. In addition, Downes and Siemens collaborated with others (notably Dave Cormier and Rita Kop) to offer a number of additional courses in the years that followed, including courses on personal learning environments critical literacies, and change in education. https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/3-cck08---the-distributed-courseThe MOOC model was replicated at Stanford in 2011 and became widespread throughout the education world by 2012.
2009 – Speaking in LOLCats
Through a series of talks and presentations Stephen Downes formalized a theory of critical literacies characterized by the example of ‘speaking in LOLCats’. Literacy, according to does, consists not merely in the capacity to understand and communicate in text-based languages, but is an instance of a wider set of capacities to understand and communicate using a wide variety of media (including photos of cats) based on a set of underlying competencies based on pattern recognition, adaptation and inference. See a presentation related to the topic at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/233
2011 – Synergic3
In collaboration with the Université de Moncton and Desire2Learn, Stephen Downes led the research in the Synergic3 project, a collaborative workflow and authoring system eventually implemented as part of the Desire2Learn learning management system. Downes in particular contributed a distributed digital rights management system and helped defined the rule-based weak workflow system and metadata extraction. The work enabled Desire2Learn to rebound and grow significantly in the competitive LMS market, and Downes was named in two patents related to the project.See this summary of Synergic3: http://www8.umoncton.ca/synergic3/index.php
2012 – Moncton Free Press
Moncton Free Press was created as an online newspaper cooperative in response to the need for an outlet for alternative voices in the city of Moncton. Downes designed and built the Moncton Free Press website and was a learning member of the team that defined the objectives of the cooperative from its launch until his departure from Moncton in 2017. Moncton Free Press was unique in its use of social media aggregation to develop a comprehensive form of community-based online journalism. https://www.monctonfreepress.ca/
2014 – Learning and Performance Support Systems
Building on work undertaken in an internal NRC project called ‘Plearn’, 2010-11, Stephen Downes took the leadership of this research program (more commonly referred to as LPSS). The program has to date included a capacity-building MOOC project in French, with the Organisation international de la francophonie, an Arab literacy project development report with the Arab League Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ALECSO), a badges project with the Privy Council office, work in activity recording with CAE, and more. LPSS launched in September, 2014and finished in 2018. See the launch site at http://lpss.me and the program site at http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/solutions/collaborative/lpss.html
2016 – Open Educational Resources (OER)
In 1995, Stephen Downes authored one of the first OER, Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies. https://fallacies.org. In 2006, Downes authored and presented Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources for OECD. In 2009, he published the seminal Downes-Wiley debate on OER licensing. https://www.downes.ca/files/books/Downes-Wiley.pdf In 2016 Downes co-authored Référentiel de compétences - ressources éducatives libres, a project to develop a set of competencies for etachers related to OER, in collaboration with UNESCO and the l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) à Paris en Nov. 2016. https://ifadem.org/sites/default/files/divers/guide_rel_web.pdf. Additional work includes informal collaboration with the Hewlett Foundation, membership in the Creative Commons 'Open Education Platform', and ongoing contribution to the OER community. Downes continues to this day to be recognized and one of the leaders of the OER movement (https://oerknowledgecloud.org/search/node/Downes), which has saved students millions of dollars over the last decade.
Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca
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