Stephen Downes

"They were supposed to be educational communities, not hypertextbooks," writes Michael Burnam-Fink. Needless to say, I am in broad agreement with this post (though I wouldn't characterize connectivism as "flaky"). "A pair of Canadian academics developed the MOOC in 2008 as a proof of concept of their connectivist theory of education. Drawing from neuroscience and computer networking, connectivism postulates that knowledge is distributed across human and nonhuman nodes in a network."