X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Stephen Downes


George Siemens

In 2008, Siemens and Stephen Downes designed and taught a MOOC which was reported as a "landmark in the small but growing push toward 'open teaching,'" and has since offered various additional MOOCs which have gained popular worldwide attention.

MOOEC

CCK08, which was led by George Siemens of Athabasca University and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council, consisted of 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba, as well as over 2200 online students from the general public who paid nothing.

Sébastien Paquet

After his Ph.D., he joined the National Research Council of Canada where he worked with Stephen Downes before joining SocialText for a year in 2005.

XCRI

eLearning commentator Stephen Downes has criticised XCRI for developing a new XML specification rather than basing it on RSS, which would enable courses to be aggregated using existing technologies.


Encyclopedic knowledge

The idea of encyclopedic knowledge being re-constellated as a community of knowledge is central to the theory of Connectivism as established by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.


see also