High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Stephen Downes (born April 6, 1959) is a designer and commentator 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 a 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 Individual Blog award in 2005 for his blog OLDaily. Downes is Editor at Large of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning.