Access :: Future Practical Advice on How to Learn and What to Learn Stephen Downes National Research Council of Canada Access :: Future Stephen Downes 2 Access :: Future Practical Advice on How to Learn and What to Learn Stephen Downes Copyright (c) 2011 This work is published under a Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike C C B Y-N C-SA This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. View License Deed | View Legal Code Access :: Future Stephen Downes 3 Learning Today Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 5 The Purpose of Learning ............................................................................................................................... 7 Things You Really Need To Learn .................................................................................................................. 9 The Mark of Wisdom .................................................................................................................................. 19 Critical Thinking in the Classroom ............................................................................................................... 23 Necessary and Sufficient Conditions ........................................................................................................... 36 Not All... ...................................................................................................................................................... 42 Educational Blogging ................................................................................................................................... 43 Your Career ................................................................................................................................................. 74 Managing Your Blog Entry: 11 Better Tips .................................................................................................. 75 Blogs in Education ....................................................................................................................................... 79 How To Write Articles Quickly and Expertly ............................................................................................... 82 Principles for Evaluating Websites .............................................................................................................. 91 Applying Critical Reasoning ....................................................................................................................... 101 How Do You Know? ................................................................................................................................... 103 Having Reasons ......................................................................................................................................... 114 How Memory Works ................................................................................................................................. 118 How The Net Works .................................................................................................................................. 126 An Operating System For The Mind .......................................................................................................... 134 Personal Knowledge: Transmission or Induction? .................................................................................... 144 Virtues Education ...................................................................................................................................... 150 Free Learning and Control Learning .......................................................................................................... 155 The Science of Learning ............................................................................................................................ 169 E-Learning 2.0 ........................................................................................................................................... 177 To The School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates .............................................................................................. 185 The Issues in Front of Us ........................................................................................................................... 189 The Form of Informal ................................................................................................................................ 195 Uniqueness and Conformity ..................................................................................................................... 201 New Technology Supporting Informal Learning ....................................................................................... 203 How I Would Organize A Conference ....................................................................................................... 217 Access :: Future Stephen Downes 4 What I Learned in High School .................................................................................................................. 219 My Personal Passion Trajectory ................................................................................................................ 223 My Academic Upbringing .......................................................................................................................... 228 Social Media and Me ................................................................................................................................. 230 Seven Habits of Highly Connected People ................................................................................................ 234 The Reality of Virtual Learning .................................................................................................................. 238 Nine Rules for Good Technology .............................................................................................................. 257 What Not To Build ..................................................................................................................................... 262 Ten Futures ............................................................................................................................................... 272 Access :: Future Stephen Downes 5 Introduction In the preparation of a volume such as this there is always for me the sense that I am giving up on the content. The flaws in the material are there for all to see, and while no doubt a few years of additional research and writing would immeasurably improve the work, other matters and other issues press me for time, until, inevitably, there is nothing left to do but to tie the collection together and send it forth. Some of my most popular work is in this collection. From the outset, what I sought to do was to combine some of my most useful work for learners ʹ my guides to learning and blogging, for example ʹ with my less formal works on education. The effort here is to present a case for a type of learning by producing a volume that is also an instance of that learning, and that has as its subject the content of that learning. It is hard ʹ or should be hard ʹ to tell where the material addressed to learners ends and where the material addressed to teachers begins. The subject of this work is, first and foremost, thinking and learning, and it is this subject that ought to interest most both teachers and learners. If we can see that learning and reasoning are part and parcel of the same activity, and that it is an activity, then, i think, the most elusive aspect of education has been overcome, and learning can begin. This is not an academic work. Goodness knows the world needs one, if only to address these issues to academics, who might not read them otherwise, but I am not the person to write such a work. For me, writing ʹ far from the finely honed craft of the technician and the artisan ʹ is most akin to breathing, something I do in the course of every day, without too much regard to whether I get it right, the purpose being primarily to interact with the world rather than erect some edifice to seek homage from it. This work is fast, it is loose, it works at and harries themes rather than pronouncing on them, it is colloquial, it is rooted in practice and pragmatism far more than theory, and it has no doubt all been written before by someone who should receive far more credit than I. The most praising and damning thing that can be said of this work is that it is composed of blog posts. That is not strictly true ʹ there are some transcripts from some of my talks as well ʹ but it`s close enough to true to be worth mentioning. It can be argued, on the one hand, that the blog post lacks the careful reflection and precision of an academic work. On the other hand, from my perspective, such reflection and precision are fictions in and of themselves. No less care is taken in the writing of these posts, but it is a care of a different sort, a care that attends much more to genuine voice and authentic experience than to methodological rigor and (pseudo-)scientific objectivity. Taken together, these posts represent a treatise, an approach to thinking and learning, and if they lack a careful definition statement, summarization of canonical literature, and body of evidence in test subjects