About Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes (born April 6, 1959) is a designer and theorist in the fields of online learning and new media.

Born in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) Downes lived and worked across Canada before joining the National Research Council of Canada as a senior researcher in November 2001. Currently based in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the Institute for Information Technology's e-Learning Research Group, Stephen has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata as well as the emerging fields of weblogs in education and content syndication. Downes is widely accepted as the central authority for online education in the edublogging community. He is also widely accepted as the originator of ELearning 2.0. Downes was the winner of the [http://incsub.org/awards/2005/winners-announced/|Best Individual Blog award] in 2005 for his blog OLDaily (see below). Downes is Editor at Large of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning.

Downes ran for Mayor of Brandon in 1995, when he was working at the Assiniboine Community College. A member of the New Democratic Party, he ran on a platform to the left of incumbent mayor Rick Borotsik.