Presentation
Notes for UNCTAD's Advisory Group
Stephen Downes, December 10, 2013, United Nations Committee on Trade and Development, Geneva, Switzerland, by Google Hangout

In this presentation for UNCTAD's Advisory Group on "Developing skills, knowledge and capacities through innovation: E-Learning, M-Learning, cloud-Learning" I outline major forms of open online learning, contrasting between formal and informal learning mechanisms, publishing and community-based production models, and forms of recognition and certification. The audio has a lot of echo (feedback from the other venue) - I'm getting a transcript made.

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Presentation
MOOC Research Institute Panel on Supporting Learners
Stephen Downes, December 10, 2013, MOOC Research Institute 2013, Arlington, Texas

In this discussion a panel of MOOC experts explored questions surrounding supporting learning online. Some widely varying perspectives, ranging from preparing students to work without a curriculum to student support software in an xMOOC. Panelists included myself, Sandi Boga from Athabasca, and Amy Collier from Stanford (with whom I had some nice snappy exchanges).

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Unbundling Higher Education, A Doubly Updated Framework
Michael Staton, M. P. Staton, December 11, 2013

The subject of unbundling of education has been of interest to be over the years, from the Future of Online Learning to the Role of the Educator. This post takes a more structured (or at least, a more square) look at the subject. This redraft of Staton's model takes a more learner-centered approach to the subject. "In the end, people are buying knowledge and the process of acquiring knowledge," he writes. "They are not buying the Content Loop.  The Content Loop is what content providers create to ensure they acquire the knowledge they need."

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Curiosity and the Joy of Index
Chris Lott, Ruminate, December 11, 2013

I once wrote a two-line poem to the effect that I realized how much I love to sort my stuff. This article reminds me of that poem (which is otherwise forgettable). Chris Lott writes, "James Delbourgo’s essay The Triumph of the Strange is a clever and fascinating rumination on the concept and politics of curiosity in history and art." It is all that, but it ends with the growing disparity between the capacity to know and the need to know.

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A BBC Broadcast on Computing: The Joy of Logic
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Blog, December 11, 2013

How could you go wrong? "‘The Joy of Logic’ also hails logic’s all-time heroes: George Boole who moved logic beyond philosophy to mathematics; Bertrand Russell, who took 360+ pages but heroically proved that 1 + 1 = 2; Kurt Godel, who brought logic to its knees by demonstrating that some truths are unprovable; and Alan Turing, who, with what Cliff calls an ‘almost exquisite paradox’, was inspired by this huge setback to logic to conceive the computer."

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