What is “disruptive change”?

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?

Can a videogame teach you to be a better person? Given that many centre around shooting people in the face, that might seem ridiculous. But games have been used for centuries to teach skills: it is theorised that chess was developed as a training tool for Persian army officers.

Information and communication technology (ICT) education is failing UK students and the country's technology industry as a whole, but a curriculum that includes video game-related subjects could help resolve the matter, experts say.

The lecture format is an institution at most universities and as money gets tight, it’s also is a favourite way for schools to spread thin resources. Despite its long history, University of Guelph business dean Julia Christensen Hughes argues the traditional lecture is not the best way to learn, pointing to decades of research.

What’s wrong with lectures?

When the lecture model began, the Internet didn’t exist or even the printing press. It was an oral tradition for transferring knowledge. Now information is ubiquitous. If you are curious about something you just Google it.

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.

You might come across a video that drags on for several minutes before anything cool and funny happens. In such videos, it’s better to bookmark that point where the fun begins and then share it. This is what Blipsnips does.

The tool requires registration to begin with.

I've never seen anything like this: The Earth captured in time lapse by an astronaut at the International Space Station, cruising at 17,239 miles per hour—that's 7.7 kilometers per second, or 4.7 miles per second.

This resource will direct you to a variety of resources on this approach, the research behind it, and how you can use it in your class to transform your students into engaged and interested independent thinkers.

You can now see the text that other editors are highlighting as they select it. So if someone is about to delete something on your screen or drag text somewhere else, you’ll see them highlight that text before anything changes.

an article from Newsweek titled “the Creativity Crisis“. It begins with the assertion that for the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining.

The Newsweek article cites a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. And yet it is declining (apparently), both in society as a whole, and in our schools in particular. The authors identify two of the possible reasons for the decline…

the impact of television and the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities

So, what in the world does this look like?  How is the Moodle set up?  Though we’re not quite ready to offer guest access to the Moodle yet, I thought I’d give a sneak-peak of some examples of what we’re doing.

One feature we’ve added recently, and as instructors are having a blast with, is in-class achievements.  For example, we challenged students to successfully “friend” each of their classmates in the game.

Augmented reality (AR) according to Ronald Azuma, Research Leader at Nokia Research Centre, is "an environment that includes both virtual reality and real-world elements. For instance, an AR user might wear translucent goggles; through these, he could see the real world, as well as computer-generated images projected on top of that world." (Azuma, 1997).