Back to the early days of the web with Docker and Jupyter Notebook

Since I love all things virtual, I really looked forward to the video conversation between Stephen Downes, the facilitator of our course E-learning 3.0 (#el30), and Tony Hirst from the Open University in the UK about virtual boxes and containers. The Open University is all about distance learning. People bring… Continue reading

An Experience API for learning everywhere (also in virtual worlds)

I never heard about Experience API (xAPI) but now I did thanks to a video conversation between education expert Stephen Downes and Shelly Blake-Plock, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Yet Analytics in the course #el30. xAPI is a new specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data… Continue reading

Learning, Connectivism, AI, Virtual Environments

I’m still thinking about the video-conversation of Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Maybe we could change the title of the course from the rather bland ‘E-Learning 3.0, Distributed Learning Technology’ to ‘Human Learning in the Age of Machine Learning’. After all, Connectivism, the learning theory developed by Stephen en George,… Continue reading

What and how to learn and teach in times of Artificial Intelligence?

The education theorists, practitioners and technologists George Siemens and Stephen Downes united again for the course E-Learning 3.0. Stephen was in a hotel room in Toronto and George somewhere in Australia, but the wonders of YouTube made them unite (after a search for the light switches). In my earlier posts… Continue reading

A MOOC about distributed e-learning

I’m learning about the decentralized web these days. I even made a very simple site using The Beaker Browser and files in the dat-format. On that site I keep track of my adventures in decentralized land. I’m pretty excited to learn that the education expert Stephen Downes is launching a MOOC… Continue reading

What I learned after all those online courses

Listening to Stephen Downes discussing Massive Open Online Courses (see previous post) I felt the need to make an overview of the online courses I participated in during these last few years. Downes inspires me a lot and I fundamentally agree with the discintions he makes between connectivist MOOCs which are… Continue reading

MOOCs explained (by Stephen Downes)

Stephen Downes, the Canadian MOOC-pioneer (Massive Open Online Courses), delivered a talk in Armenia and as usual he generously shares the recording and the slides. My own MOOC-experiences started in 2008 with CCK08, facilitated by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Back then we lived in full euphoria about the power… Continue reading

Bringing together distributed learning

One of the important topics at the connectedcourses is… how to connect all the posts on the many platforms learners use. Facilitator Alan Levine mentions on his blog cogdogblog a few ways to aggregate content, two seem particularly interesting: gRSShopper by Stephen Downes, the guy who introduced me and so… Continue reading

Half an Hour: International MOOCs Past and Present

Stephen Downes on Half an Hour now has a list with international Massive Open Online Courses.  Let’s not forget: there is more out there than the xMOOCs such as offered by Coursera, edX and Udacity – the connectivist courses offer a very different learning experience, based on distributed platforms, the… Continue reading