Alex Peek blog

List of posts    Blog archive    About

 

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Stephen Downes: personal education

This post is a collection of quotes from Stephen Downes about personal education in a lecture with the Chang School in 2015. I recommend watching to the interview at this link. There are 8 quotes listed below chronologically.

 

1. "What is the best model for learning? What is the best organization? What is the best structure? What is the best design? What is the best, indeed technology?" (1:11)

 

2. "The right model is to stop attempting to design learning and education and technology for people, and to create mechanisms that enable them to do it themselves." (5:08)

 

3. "We have to look at learning as something that is not done for us but is something that we do... We have to look at education as a reclamation project of owning our own learning again." (6:17)

 

4. "Personalized is something that people to do for you. Personal is something you do for yourself." (7:24)

 

5. "[Personal] is built and based on your own needs and desires and its self-organizing."(7:59)

 

6. "Reclaimed learning is network learning. Instead of all meeting together in a common institution, in a learning management system, we connect directly to each other peer to peer in networks of our own design, our own creation." (8:46)

 

7. "Think of [collectivism] as the projection of one's own neural network out into the social network." (11:59)

 

8. "[Cooperation] is a meeting of people who exchange mutual value but they come from a different place. They're trying to do different things. They're interacting in a syntactic way when each person has their own content, their own idea of reality, their own way of thinking, their own things that they want to do." (14:30)