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This is a key component of the Semantic Web because IPAs will make the intelligent connections between content, mapping relationships, and alerting users and systems to content that previously would not have been identified, or if recognized, would have been discovered accidentally by searching or user recommendation. The Web will essentially be building correlations between defend types of learning interaction regardless of whether the user is online.

The potential of the Semantic Web could actually revolutionize the learning experience. Roger Schank, who helped found the Learning Center at Carnegie Mellon University, designed a new methodology that eliminates classes, tests, lectures, and even programs themselves.

Schank argues the most effective way to teach new skills is to put learners in the kinds of situations in which they need to use those skills, and to provide mentors who help learners as and when they need it. Effective learners come to understand when, why, and how they should use skills and knowledge. They receive key just-in-time lessons, in such a way that learners will most likely remember the information later when they need it. In a Semantic Web context, learning would be continuously invigorated with the obvious benefits being an increase in the quality of content and the sophistication of student interactions.

The prospect of applying semantic concepts to learning administration as well as direct pedagogy could offer benefits to the institution and the learner.

educational organizations should keep data secure while addressing issues around open access, though in principle the way would be clear to integrate systems across intranets and extranets.

Government agencies and lawmakers need to engender the broad necessity and the vision as well as provide adequate support and development mechanisms for those institutions and innovators wishing to further semantic applications within e-learning. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the learners and tutors must embrace the new opportunities and pedagogical frontiers that a web of meaning could ultimately deliver.

Tom explained that innovation falls squarely in quadrant 2 of Steven Covey’s matrix: it’s “Important”, but “Not Urgent”. For example, we absolutely have to have a new math/science/reading/social studies program. The teachers can’t teach without one, so picking a new one is going to fall in quadrant 1, and ultimately, innovation gets put off until tomorrow. However, innovation has an urgency all its own and those that don’t place innovation as a priority will find themselves displaced.

his is a good example of the difficulty people face in conceptually realizing the advantages of bold innovation: we naturally assume that slow steady progress will be best (as we are taught from an early age, when the tortoise wins the race).

The time for innovation is now, as Stephen described (and Marco Torres’ slide below emphasizes), “learning is at a crossroads:” we’re looking at a choice between productivity and new approaches, those new approaches being: student portfolios; making huge leaps in our model of education, not tiny steps forward; working to produce ingenious, engaged, inspired, surprising, collegiate students; and developing learning experiences that are open-ended, project-focused, multidisciplinary.

I can’t remember who said this first but, “technology is just an amplifier” - technology doesn’t change the quality of teaching or learning, it will only amplify it, either in a positive or negative way. What we need to be looking at is changing our approaches to learning, not modifying our curriculum to a “newer” version of what we’ve already had for the past 20 years.

bsolutely fabulous. This is great stuff. I just wrote a post on Thursday arguing that the “learning management system” paradigm prevents innovation and change. If we don’t break out of it, we’re destined to get out-innovated, as you suggest.

I came across a great quote from Frank Tibolt this morning: “We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.”

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” - Alan Kay

Through experimental investigation, Bloom found that “the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average” of students who studied in a traditional classroom setting with 30 other students

here is, at its very core, a problem with the LMS paradigm. The “M” in “LMS” stands for “management.” This is not insignificant. The word heavily implies that the provider of the LMS, the educational institution, is “managing” student learning. Since the dawn of public education and the praiseworthy societal undertaking “educate the masses,” management has become an integral part of the learning. And this is exactly what we have designed and used LMSs to do—to manage the flow of students through traditional, semester-based courses more efficiently than ever before. The LMS has done exactly what we hired it to do: it has reinforced, facilitated, and perpetuated the traditional classroom model, the same model that Bloom found woefully less effective than one-on-one learning.

Because the LMS is primarily a traditional classroom support tool, it is ill-suited to bridge the 2-sigma gap between classroom instruction and personal tutoring.

undamentally human endeavor that requires personal interaction and communication, person to person.

We can extend, expand, enhance, magnify, and amplify the reach and effectiveness of human interaction with technology and communication tools, but the underlying reality is that real people must converse with each other in the process of “becoming.”

n the post-LMS world, we need to worry less about “managing” learners and focus more on helping them connect with other like-minded learners both inside and outside of our institutions.

We need to foster in them greater personal accountability, responsibility and autonomy in their pursuit of learning in the broader community of learners. We need to use the communication tools available to us today and the tools that will be invented tomorrow to enable anytime, anywhere, any-scale learning conversations between our students and other learners

However, instead of that tutor appearing in the form of an individual human being or in the form of a virtual AI tutor, the tutor will be the crowd.

The paradigm—not the technology—is the problem.

Building a better, more feature-rich LMS won’t close the 2-sigma gap. We need to utilize technology to better connect people, content, and learning communities to facilitate authentic, personal, individualized learning. What are we waiting for?

The more students have an opportunity to read, speak and write the more they are going to understand the power of words.

The moment students craft words meant not just for the teacher and a few other peers, but for the wider world, is the moment students learn that a misplaced, mispronounced, or misspelled word has consequences far beyond a grade. These authentic learning opportunities are crucial to prepare students for the new realities of a more global and transparent world.

Students (and teachers) need to understand that everything they do communicates, whether they know what they are communicating or not.

Once students really figure out who they are and what they stand for then they can more comfortably be themselves. However, an important social skill that many students have difficulty grasping is knowing appropriate social norms in various settings.

Anyone can be a teacher... if you are alert and willing to learn from others. We need to teach students to be alert and willing to learn from sources other than textbooks. We need to teach students how to create and cultivate learning from a personal learning network, in order to extend the traditional capabilities of school from the limited hours of the school day to the unlimited hours beyond the school day. The informal classroom of life offers lessons far more valuable than the classroom if only we are open to learning from each other each and every day.