"he Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."
On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, and on April 3, 2008, less than five years later, it became the largest music retailer in the US, with 50 million customers and 4 billion songs sold. Then about two years down the road, this past February, Apple more than doubled that sales figure to 10 billion songs. This is what I consider to be disruptive change.
As educators, we must ask: Could there be a parallel in our own industry, or the potential for other disruptive changes ahead? What might higher education look like in a future filled with disruptive change?
a quick historical review of the digital revolution shows us: huge increases in data speeds and transfer rates, exponential growth in computer power, massive increase of storage capacity—again, all while the technology is getting cheaper and smaller.
In a 1960s lecture hall you might typically find TV monitors
Then if you jump 30 years into the future, to the 1990s, you find that analog technology was replaced by digital technology: projection systems that were considered very, very sophisticated at that time.
ask yourself: What did not change? The instructors still lectured, delivering in a broadcast/absorb model the very same way they did in the 1960s. In terms of learning, this was just a little bit of a shift. While the digital revolution disrupted so much of our society and our lives, it impacted education only in small, incremental ways. And generally, that is still true today in 2010.
I often make the argument that over the past 50 years, we’ve been primarily focused on automating education
but we haven’t really geared up to change or transform the basic way we’re teaching
Open Education Trends
At the core of the open content movement in higher education are illustrious efforts that have been going on now for almost a decade, to make high-quality university-level course materials free and openly available to the world, via the web.
Connexions has focused on building an environment that allows experts to collaborate on developing textbook content.
People have raised questions about the sustainability of open content models.
But what we’re starting to see now—and it is still relatively early in the unfolding story of open content—is a commercial ecosystem beginning to grow up around existing open content.
Impact of Open Content
We’re on the verge of seeing the cost of education content fall dramatically. The $150, $200 textbook model, I believe, is simply unsustainable, and we are going to see that model fall apart in the not-too-distant future.
I also think we may see an important movement toward best-of-breed content.
For example, I might put out a particular piece of educational material. Someone may take that material, modify or tweak it, and bring his own innovation to it. Over a relatively short period of time, we end up with high-quality, innovative, best-of-breed materials.
We’re entering an age when it’s becoming more and more ridiculous that our faculty are, every year, re-creating Econ 101 over and over again at our institutions.
largest population of users of MIT/OCW materials are not educators, and they’re not students. They are self-directed learners. They’re people who are coming to MIT because they have a passion to learn something.
Personal and Open Learning
Let’s move on and look at learning technology trends, especially the emergence of the personal learning environment [PLE] and the open learning network [OLN], e-portfolios, and the semantic web.
you’re probably aware of the “post-LMS era” that people feel we’re entering.
I have yet to find a standard definition of the PLE, but some of its characteristics include that it tends to be a highly customized environment, built by the learner himself.
Learners use web 2.0 tools to aggregate content and connections—so you can gather information from many sources, while at the same time making connections with other people around that content.
we see that while the LMS has been out there and in development for 10-20 years or so, it has really been built just to support status quo teaching—lecturing and very traditional forms of education—while personal learning environments like mine tend to be much more open and participatory, as well as learner-centric.
The question becomes: Will the LMS and the PLE diverge?
The idea here is to leverage some of the open standards that are emerging—the IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability standards, plus standards outside of education like the open social API standards from Google—and to use these standards to allow us to mash up the LMS and personal learning environment.
Next, electronic portfolios: Since 2003, the use of e-portfolios on our campuses has tripled.
Reflection is a critical component of any really good e-portfolio implementation; it’s a great way for students to engage in learning.
A missing piece, I would argue, especially on the reflective side of e-porfolios, is a credentialing model. A new credentialing model will open the doors for better uses of e-portfolios, and possibly unlock the floodgates of disruption in fundamental education practices.
Dr. D
Hello,
My primary research interests are measuring the impacts of culturally relevant digital audio workstation environments for learning and exploring the uses of Web 2.0 technologies for learning.
While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption
that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body
of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one
form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and
iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative
knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous
digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority
is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.
This new media
environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching
methods and philosophies.
Our physical structures were built
prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed
to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive
structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple
with the emerging possibilities.
Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic
technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor
at the front of the room.
The “message” of this
environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that
information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come
to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for
good information, and that good information is beyond discussion
(that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In
short, it tells students to trust authority and follow
along.
Most of our assumptions
about information are based on characteristics of information on
paper.
Even something as
simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more
than one place at one time
Blogging
came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of
information.
Wikipedia
has taught us yet another lesson, that a networked information
environment allows people to work together in new ways to create
information that can rival (and even surpass) the content of experts
by almost any measure.
Our old assumption that information is hard
to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our
hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can
find us.
It is like continuously working with thousands of
research associates around the world.
Unfortunately, many
teachers only see the disruptive possibilities of these technologies
when they find students Facebooking, texting, IMing, or shopping
during class.
We have had our why's,
how's, and what's upside-down, focusing too much on what
should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why
altogether.
All of this vexes
traditional criteria for assessment and grades. This is the next
frontier as we try to transform our learning environments.
Content is no longer king, but many of our tools have
been habitually used to measure content recall.
Maintaining student engagement within large lecture environments has never been an easy proposition. This 6-month study analyzed student surveys and test scores taken before and after the implementation of a variety of digital technologies designed to increase engagement and retention in lecture settings. While student responses indicated an appreciation for the inclusion of multimedia within daily lessons, this study found no statistical evidence that such resources increase student achievement. A review of the literature suggests that the lack of observable gains in student grades after implementation could be related to an uncoordinated deployment of said technologies. The author intends to repeat this analysis in the coming school year with a more considered deployment of multimedia and Internet based resources.
argues that teachers are at the center of the problem and that the solution is charter schools.
But it’s wrong to blame teachers, who are usually a) underpaid, and b) striving to do the best with the limited resources they are given. Nor does the research show that charter schools achieve better outcomes. The root of the malaise in our schools is the outmoded model of pedagogy. Teachers and text books are assumed to be the source of knowledge. Teachers “teach” – they impart knowledge to their students, who through practice and assignments learn how to perform well on tests.
This is the very best model of pedagogy that 18th century technology can provide. It’s teacher-centered model that is one way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. It’s time for a rethinking of the entire model of learning. We need to move to a customized and collaborative model that embraces 21st century learning technology and techniques. This is not about technology per se – it’s about a change in the relationship between the student and teacher in the learning process.
Are we willing to accept that an Industrial Age form of education isn’t much good for children who have to work in a digital age?
Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.
The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.
too often, in the American and Canadian school system, teachers still rely on the traditional model of education. Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.
First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.
simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.
"The goal of the 'Scenejo' project is to provide an experimental platform for 'Interactive Digital Storytelling', which can be used to experience emerging dialogues or conversations between a number of virtual and human actors."
"Zbang integrates all your online activity into a single place, allowing you to seamlessly work across different platforms, without having to flip from one site to the other.
By using Zbang's interface, you can share your digital content with your friends via social media venues and collaborate with colleagues.
Join the growing Zbang community to enjoy a simple, intuitive and effortless experience. "
"This course examines the theoretical foundations for best practice in teaching the 21st century Jewish learner. Educational theory will be applied to the analysis of critical elements of Web 2.0 inspired learning, including connectivity, communication, collaboration, problem solving, transformational play, creative expression and customization. Class work is be based on hands-on exploration of various digital applications that will provide the backdrop for analysis. Participants are challenged to envision educational solutions that align Jewish education with the social and technological developments of the 21st century. Registration in this course is limited to graduate education students."
While out in the wild, the scientists — skeptics included — noticed something significant happening on the third day they couldn't use their hand-held devices, computers and mobile phones. "You start to feel more relaxed. Maybe you sleep a little better. Maybe you don't reach for your phone pinging in your pocket," Richtel says. "Maybe you wait a little longer before answering a question. Maybe you don't feel in a rush to do anything — your sense of urgency fades." Richtel terms it the "three-day effect."
"When you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you get a ring — you get what they call a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline," he says. "Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're conditioned by a neurological response: 'Check me check me check me check me.' "
how do we transition new bloggers from the “That’s cool!” or “Me too!” kinds of fluff responses to meatier responses that are likely to foster extended conversations, invite dynamic classroom connections, and push literacy skills to the next level?
Provide students with examples.
Include reflection and self-evaluation as part of the blogging process.