Interview with Stephen Downes
Jonathan Haber, Stephen Downes, Degree of Freedom, December 20, 2013

Audio interview of me conducted by Jonathan Haber. "Today, on a very special Degree of Freedom podcast we are joined by Stephen Downes, Senior Researcher for the National Research Council of Canada and one of the people behind the first thing ever called a MOOC. For further reading:
- Stephen’s Web – The outlet for Stephen’s prolific writing
- A backgrounder on Downes that appeared on Degree of Freedom
- A recorded interview with the first MOOC makers (from Ed Tech Talk, 2008)."

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"What Are Cultures of Learning" - Stephen Downes at altc2013
Stephen Downes, YouTube, December 20, 2013

Video (with slides) of my presentation in Nottingham in September. ""What Are Cultures of Learning" Keynote speech by Stephen Downes, Senior Researcher for Canada's National Research Council, at altc2013 Building new cultures of learning, the 2013 conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). Session given in Nottingham, UK, on Thursday 12 September 2013 at 14.00. For information about ALT go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/."

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Thriving Online – Rheingold’s Digital Literacies
Rob Watson, Rob Watson Media, December 20, 2013

I think we can all agree that literacies are more than just "a new set of ideas and affordances." But Rob Watson asks, "when did literacies become something that we practice, in the form of a skill, rather than something that we strive for? When did literacies stop being about understanding the intentions of the author and the meanings that are potential within a text, for which reflection and contemplation gave us the answer?" On the other hand, I would view literacies as being deeper than "about understanding the intentions of the author and the meanings that are potential within a text, for which reflection and contemplation gave us the answer."

For the record, Howard Rheingold's digital literacies are:

• Attention! The Fundamental Literacy.
• Calibrating Your Crap Detector: What You Pay Attention to After You Pay Attention to Attention.
• What It Takes to Participate in Participatory Culture—and What You Get Out of It.
• Clueing in to Collaboration: Making Virtual Communities, Collective Intelligence, and Knowledge Networks Work for You (and Us).
• What You Need to Know about Network Smarts—from Small Worlds to Privacy Settings, from Weak Ties to Social Capital.

And viewing this gives me context for Watson's criticisms, but underlines how literacy needs to be deeper that the determination of meanings within a text.

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e/merge Africa 2013 Needs and Priorities Survey Report
Jakob Pedersen, Tony Carr, Google Docs, December 20, 2013

Jakob Pedersen and Tony Carrsahre the results of this survey, with just under half the responses from South Africa and 90 percent of responses from Africa. Most were involved in e-learning and most had at least a masters. You can read the executive summary here, or the full report. Most were active in social media, few had taken a MOOC or used Google Hangout. They were looking for "course design topics, including investigations of best practices for creating blended and online courses; new teaching and learning practices applied in an online environment ; and the use and adaptation of open educational resources."

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Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, December 19, 2013

The main argument here is that education is way too complex to be 'solved' by an inventor with a single product. People have very different needs, and no single product can address them. Hence the comeuppance of Udacity and Sebastian Thrun. I think we all knew that. Buried in the article is this nugget: "The real revolution in software over the last decade has been in product design and development techniques that give us much better ways to understand the real and specific needs of well-defined classes of users. There is a range of these methodologies, but they all build from the common bedrock conviction that you don’t understand your users’ needs when you start." I think that's true - but it's still a challenge to convince software engineers to design iteratively, rather than to shoot for the finished product from the start.

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I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed
William Powell, The Guardian, December 19, 2013

Author William Powell recants. He writes, "the basic premise behind the Cookbook is profoundly flawed. The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence." Interestingly, he offers a book on education as the implicit refutation of that notion. "The premise is that all learning takes place in a social context, and that teachers with a high degree of emotional intelligence construct relationships with students that enhance learning." I was never in danger of being drafted, but my anger about war and violence and poverty and inhumanity is deep. Which is why I, too, work in education.

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