This post asks the question, How does the order of questions in a test affects how well students do? The answer is “significantly.” The post points to a paywalled study that shows, fairly conclusively, that starting with simpler questions in a typical academic quiz (on average) i … | Continue reading
Warm off the press, and with copious thanks and admiration to Junhong Xiao for the invitation to submit and the translation, here is my paper “The problematic metaphor of the environment in online learning” in Chinese, in the Journal of Open Learning. It is based on my OTESSA Jou … | Continue reading
The Intertwingled Teacher These are the slides from my opening keynote at SITE ‘24 today, at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. The talk was based closely on some of the main ideas in How Education Works. I’d written an over-ambitious abstract promising answers to many questions and … | Continue reading
A week or so ago, early (for me) on a Monday morning, Professor David Webster and I had a conversation about generative AI, which was recorded as the first of a podcast series on the topic, hosted by the University of Liverpool. Here is that podcast. In it we explore both the dar … | Continue reading
Here is a paper from the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education by my friend Gerald Ardito and me that presents a slightly different way of thinking about teaching and learning. We adopt a broadly complexivist stance that sees environments not as a backdrop to learning but as … | Continue reading
Since 2018, Terry Greene has been producing a wonderful series of podcast interviews with open and online learning researchers and practitioners called Getting Air. Prompted by the publication of How Education Works, (Terry is also responsible for the musical version of the book, … | Continue reading
Since 2015 Kay Guccione and Matthew Cheeseman have been editing the wonderful Journal of Imaginary Research (tagline “Writing Without Discipline”) that, once a year, publishes fictional research abstracts by fictional researchers. Each issue has a theme, and Volume 9’s is “Deal o … | Continue reading
These are the slides that I used for my talk with a delightful group of educational leadership students from TAMK University of Applied Sciences in Tampere, Finland at (for me) a somewhat ungodly hour Wednesday night/Thursday morning after a long day. If you were in attendance, s … | Continue reading
Well, this was definitely going to happen. The system discussed in this Wired article is a bot (not available to the general public) that takes characters from the absurdly popular Bluey cartoon series and creates personalized bedtime stories involving them for its creator's chil … | Continue reading
Here are the slides from my presentation at AU’s Lunch ‘n’ Learn session today. The presentation itself took 20 minutes and was followed by a wonderfully lively and thoughtful conversation for another 40 minutes, though it was only scheduled for half an hour. Thanks to all who at … | Continue reading
A month or two ago I shared a "warts-and-all" preprint of this paper on the risks of educational uses of generative AIs. The revised, open-access published version, The Human Nature of Generative AIs and the Technological Nature of Humanity: Implications for Education is now avai … | Continue reading
My book has been set to music! Many thanks to Terry Greene for converting How Education Works into the second in his inspired series of podcasts, EZ Learning - Audio Books with Beats. There's a total of 15 episodes that can be listened to online, subscribed to with your preferred … | Continue reading
Source: Downes.ca ~ Stephen’s Web ~ How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique I somehow missed this when it was first posted, despite fairly avidly following OLDaily and keeping my eyes wide open for commentary on How Education Works. My only excuse is that I was t … | Continue reading
Here are the slides from my keynote today at ICSET 2023 in Taiwan (I was online, alas, not in Taipei!). I will try to remember to update this post with a link to the recording, when it is available. The themes of my talk will be familiar to anyone who follows my blog or who has r … | Continue reading
Here is a preprint of a paper I just submitted to MDPI's Digital journal that applies the co-participation model that underpins How Education Works (and a number of my papers over the last few years) to generative AIs (GAIs). I don't know whether it will be accepted and, even if … | Continue reading
This is a great series of brief interviews between Tim Fawns and an assortment of educators and researchers from across the world on the subject of generative AI and its impact on learning and teaching. The latest (tenth in the series) is with me. Tim asked us all to come up with … | Continue reading
Research, Writing, and Creative Process in Open and Distance Education: Tales from the Field is a great new book about how researchers in the field of open, online, and distance education go about writing and/or their advice to newcomers in the field. More than that, it is about … | Continue reading
I have lived in Canada for over 16 years so I was surprised when, a few months ago, a conference-friend whom I had not seen for many years contacted me to ask whereabouts in Malaysia I lived. I believe that they were misremembering a connection from a conversation long ago in whi … | Continue reading
My beautiful, witty, talented brother Bob died unexpectedly in his sleep a week ago today. He was 67. I still cannot find the words to express the loss. From the day I was born Bob was always there, and he remains a huge part of me. He was variously my role model, my confidante, … | Continue reading
“Shaping the Future of Education: Exploring the Potential and Consequences of AI and ChatGPT in Educational Settings” by Simone Grassini is a well-researched, concise but comprehensive overview of the state of play for generative AI (GAI) in education. It gives a very good over … | Continue reading
Hard copies and e-book versions of How Education Works are now available, and they are starting to turn up in bookstores. The recommended retail price is CAD$40 but Amazon is selling the Kindle version for a bit less.Here are a few outlets that are selling it (or order it from yo … | Continue reading
About 10 years ago I submitted the first draft of a book called "How Learning Technologies Work" to AU Press. The title was a nod to David Byrne's wonderful book, "How Music Works" which, as my own book is about more than just education, is about much more than just music.Pulling … | Continue reading
Technological Distance Here are the slides from my talk today at OTESSA ’23. Technological distance is a way of understanding distance that fits with modern complexivist models of learning such as Connectivism, Heutagogy, Networks/Communities of Practice/Rhizomatic Learning, and … | Continue reading
Dave Cormier is a wonderfully sideways-thinking writer, such as in this recent discussion of the myth of learning styles. Dave's post is not mainly about learning style theories, as such, but the nature and value of myth. As he puts it, myth is "a way we confront uncertainty" a … | Continue reading
This is a remarkable paper, pubished in the Asian Journal of Distance Education, written by 35 remarkable people from all over the world and me. It was led by the remarkable Aras Boskurt, who pulled all 36 of us together and wrote much of it in the midst of personal tragedy and t … | Continue reading
I am pleased to announce my latest paper, published openly in the Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, which has long been one of my favourite distance and ed tech journals. The paper starts with an abbreviated argument about the technological nature of education draw … | Continue reading
The undergraduate students union, Canadian Union of Public Employees, and Athabasca University professional and faculty association have now all come out with strongly worded public statements protesting the recent firing of Peter Scott and the process used to pick and hire the n … | Continue reading
You may have heard that the president of Athabasca University, Peter Scott, was replaced yesterday with Alex Clark, erstwhile Dean of the Faculty of Health Disciplines at AU.This was a complete surprise to everyone at AU (apart from Alex), very much including Peter. None of the m … | Continue reading
These are the slides from my keynote today (or, in my land, yesterday) at Confluence 2023, hosted by Amity University in India. It was a cloud computing conference, so quite a way outside my area of greatest expertise, but it gave me a chance to apply the theory of technology de … | Continue reading
These are the proceedings of OTESSA '22. There's a good mix of research/theory and practice papers, including one from me, Rory McGreal, Vive Kumar, and Jennifer Davies arising from our work on trying to use digital landmarks to make e-texts more memorable. It was a great confere … | Continue reading
I asked ChatGPT to write me a story about a robot teaching children to be human. This is what it came up with...Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there lived a robot named Zephyr. Zephyr was unlike any other robot, as it had been programmed with the ability to think and feel l … | Continue reading
This might be the most important book in the field of open, distance, and digital education to be published this decade. Congratulations to Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Insung Jung, the editors, as well as to all the section editors, for assembling a truly remarkable compendium of pr … | Continue reading
This is a link to my latest paper, published in the closing days of 2022. The paper started as a couple of blog posts that I turned into a paper that nearly made an appearance in the Distance Education in China journal before a last-minute regime change in the editorial staff led … | Continue reading
There has been an interesting brief discussion on Twitter recently that has hinged around whether and how people are ‘good’ at learning. As Kelly Matthews observes, though, Twitter is not the right place to go into any depth on this, so here is a (still quite brief) summary of my … | Continue reading
This is an awesome article, and I don't care whether the story of Loab is real, or invented as an artwork by the artist (Steph Swanson), or whatever. It is a super-creepy, spine-tingling, thought-provoking horror story that works on so many different levels. The article itself is … | Continue reading
I have frequently written about the need to decouple learning and credentials, so I love this approach to doing so from Brunel University. It fully decouples learning and credentials by offering ungraded study blocks (in North America the equivalent of courses, in the UK the equi … | Continue reading
ICEEL 22 keynote Here are the slides (11.2MB PDF) from my opening keynote yesterday at the 6th International Conference on Education and E-Learning, held online, hosted this year in Japan. In it I discussed a few of the ideas and consequences of them from my forthcoming book, How … | Continue reading
If you use an Adobe product (I don't know why you should - they are over-priced rubbish) you will find that some old Pantone spot colours in your own images (no matter how old) will be replaced with black when you load files using them, unless you pay Pantone US$21/month for the … | Continue reading
Voluntourism, geoarbitrage, and digital nomadsReasons to be Cheerful is among my first ports of call for news most mornings because I hate to start the day on a negative or banal note. The news is mostly good, but it's never trivial, cute, or frivolous. This article from a few we … | Continue reading
Students are now using AIs to write essays and assignments for credit, and they are (probably) getting away with it. This particular instance may be fake, but the tools are widely available and it would be bizarre were no one to be using them for this purpose. There are already f … | Continue reading
The staff and students of AU are currently on tenterhooks, awaiting the results of the AU Board of Governors' briefly postponed deliberations on how it responds to the Albertan government's demands on AU's future, so I have (personally) held back a bit on further commenting or ad … | Continue reading
Today I sent this letter from staff at Athabasca University to the Albertan Advanced Education Minister and Board of Governors of the University, cc'd to various government & opposition politicians in Alberta, and a few selected journalists:I strongly support the university’s con … | Continue reading
I've said this before but it needs more emphasis. In the past week or so it has become increasingly clear that the real agenda of the Albertan government is not (directly) to forcibly move 500 unwilling AU staff to the town of Athabasca. That's just smoke and mirrors intended to … | Continue reading
My heart briefly leapt to my throat when I saw Thursday's Globe & Mail headline that the Albertan government had (allegedly) dropped its insane plan to force Athabasca University to move 65% of its workforce to the town of Athabasca. It seemed that way, given that the minister fo … | Continue reading
This is my latest paper, Learning, Technology, and Technique, in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (Vol. 48 No. 1, 2022). Essentially, because this was what I was invited to do, the paper shrinks down over 10,000-words from my article Educationa … | Continue reading
Dear Demetrios NicolaidesYou say,“I’ve offered to provide any kind of assistance that the university needs. They haven’t asked for any.”This is very kind! I am sorry for all the very, very, very bad thoughts I have been thinking about you and your party. So, all we had to do was … | Continue reading
This video from Peter Scott, president of Athabasca University, is a clear, eloquent, and passionate plea to save our university and the education of its students from imminent destruction at the hands of a brutal, self-serving, short-sighted government. Please watch it. Please a … | Continue reading
Athabasca University's Digital Governance Committee recently got into a heated debate about whether and why we should support Zoom. It was a classic IT manageability vs user freedom debate and, as is often the way in such things, the suggested resolution was to strike up a workin … | Continue reading