Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

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Vision Statement

Stephen Downes works with the Digital Technologies Research Centre at the National Research Council of Canada specializing in new instructional media and personal learning technology. His degrees are in Philosophy, specializing in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. He has taught for the University of Alberta, Athabasca University, Grand Prairie Regional College and Assiniboine Community College. His background includes expertise in journalism and media, both as a prominent blogger and as founder of the Moncton Free Press online news cooperative. He is one of the originators of the first Massive Open Online Course, has published frequently about online and networked learning, has authored learning management and content syndication software, and is the author of the widely read e-learning newsletter OLDaily. Downes is a member of NRC's Research Ethics Board. He is a popular keynote speaker and has spoken at conferences around the world.

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Stephen Downes, stephen@downes.ca, Casselman Canada

Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
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The highlight of this post is a link to Audrey Watters saying I told you so. But the main point is Martin Weller saying "we should assume that generally tech revolutions in education end in a whimper, not a bang. Set your expectations accordingly." Yeah, there's a lot of "I told you so" going around about the demise of Udacity (though it's easy to forget that Coursera is chugging along) and to be sure there's nothing about the Udacity business model that is particularly attractive. If I had a main message to offer, it would be something like "most edtech revolutions aren't edtech revolutions at all". They're inventions of a fickle press that likes to fawn on elite university stars. No. Real edtech is the tens of thousands of people creating and posing new learning content everyday, not only on institutional platforms but also on blogs, video sites, social media, podcasting platforms, and wherever. Mostly nobody's writing about them nothing real in this field happens without them.

Today: 39 Total: 382 Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/03/15 [Direct Link]
Hashnode Creates Scalable Feed Architecture on AWS with Step Functions, EventBridge and Redis
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Hashnode is a social network and blogging platform for developers (though of course it could be used for other functions as well). This article describes how Hashnode developers built a scalable event-driven architecture (EDA) for composing feed data for thousands of users. What I found interesting was not only how they composed the feed, but how the feed is actually built ahead of time so it's ready for the users when they login. That makes a lot of sense, actually, though it means your feed is being rebuilt over and over even you don't login. By contrast, it feels (though I couldn't say either way) as though Mastodon only builds the feeds when users login. Less overhead. Slower responses.

Today: 37 Total: 312 Rafal Gancarz, InfoQ, 2024/03/15 [Direct Link]
What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools
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This is a great high-level overview of what's out there in the world of open source AI tools. Even though it covers a lot of ground, it's a quick read. No doubt there's so much more that could be said. Most useful is the introductory description of the 'AI stack' - "4 layers: infrastructure, model development, application development, and applications." We see the most open source projects at the application layer, and the further down the stack the harder it is for individuals to make contributions. Still, there's a ton of room here for individual innovators. Also from the same author: Machine Learning Developments and Operations (MLOps) Guide. See also: collection of open source and/or local AI tools and solutions.

Today: 49 Total: 501 Chip Huyen, 2024/03/15 [Direct Link]
Sketchplanations - A weekly explanation in a sketch
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Alan Levine shared this link today. At first I was just going to look and move on, but after spending fifteen minutes reading these one-panel cartoon explanations I feel I have to link to it here. Most of the explanations are of phenomena I'm already familiar with, but they could be quite educational for someone with less experience, and they have the virtue of being accurate and illustrative. Recommended; have a look, at least.

Today: 43 Total: 480 Sketchplanations, 2024/03/15 [Direct Link]
Should you order learning content by relevance or create structured pathways?
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This is advertorial content, so read it with a grain of salt. Still, it raises an interesting question, quoting a LinkedIn post from Nick Shackleton-Jones on why we shouldn't organize content using pathways, and offering a counter in the form of another LinkedIn comment and a study the author (putatively) conducted on his own. For my own part, I don't see why you couldn't do both. A lot of the time (such as when I was trying to use public and private keys yesterday) there's a logical order of things. I follow pathways a lot when I'm learning about tech. What I don't want, though, is to be locked into pathways. Make them a suggestion, not a requirement.

Today: 39 Total: 315 Chris Littlewood, Filtered, 2024/03/15 [Direct Link]
Trung Dong's Aerial Street Photos Highlight the Fruit Merchants of Hanoi — Colossal
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It's a really slow news day (hey, it happens) so here are some pictures of fruit vendors in Hanoi. Also, if that's not enough, here's Stephen D'Onofrio's Fruit Art from Kottke.

Today: 6 Total: 296 Grace Ebert, Colossal, 2024/03/14 [Direct Link]

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

Copyright 2024
Last Updated: Mar 17, 2024 12:37 p.m.

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