Group items tagged

barriers to the creation of content and information

This timeline has enabled anyone with access to an internet connection to create and share information.

The barriers of expense and technical expertise - such as printing presses - are now lowered to the ease of creating a blog or podcast.

validating information accuracy

increased ease of content creation is the ability for conversations to occur,

in both real and delayed time, on a global level. Through tools such as mobile phones, Skype[2], video conferencing, instant message, and microblogging tools such as Twitter[3], conversations are no longer confined by space and time

For many individuals, the reduced cost of information communication technologies reduces the economic barrier of participating in global conversations.

While technology is the undercurrent that has influenced much of the development in society and our ability to communicate, share, and create content, technology creates a different dimension not fully reflected in those advancements.

unattainable due to cost and access

Knowledge - the core product and source of engagement in education - has become increasingly fluid

What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual. (p. 207)

Border-less education - such as is evident by global universities like Open University (UK) and Athabasca University (Canada) Private for-profit - as defined by organizations such as University of Phoenix and Laureate Education Corporate universities - such as Defense Acquisition University. (Scott, 2002, pp. 4 - 5)

vital combat of lucidity

his era of complexity, or as defined by Barnett (2004) - supercomplexity - requires a transition from an epistemological to an ontological emphasis. The development of specific skills and mindsets becomes as critical as, or even more so, than the possession of existing knowledge.

adoption of innovation and systemic views of change.

A view of change is required that moves beyond Christensen's (1997), Moore's (1999), and Senge et al.'s (1999) models and begins to addresses the impact of trends and innovations on the spaces and structures of learning.

New trends drive innovation

when educators, school systems, and research groups begin to adopt new approaches for learning.

Yet, in spite of small-scale innovation, new methods typically do not result in new spaces and structures of learning. As noted by David (1990), new innovations are adopted in the context of existing physical spaces.

Given the opportunities of technology to extend access to content, experts, and peer learners, does an existing classroom model still make sense? Do one-instructor classrooms need to give way to more diverse approaches of many instructors and many peer learners? How should curriculum be developed? How much structure needs to be applied to this type of model in the development of curricula and in the planning of instruction? Does instructional design similarly need to be rethought?

complex problem solving through collaboration, and new relationships between educational institutions and society are all possible as systems ch

catalyst and push-back factors

Social pressures were building that resulted in the eventual eruption of political reorganization.

Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition

Yet learning occurs in many places, formats, and process

limitless dimensions exist in our learning (

n addition to formal education, learning occurs through games and simulations, mentoring and apprenticing, performance support at the point of a learning need, self-learning that arises through critical and creative thinking, communities of practice and personal learning networks, as well as the many informal learning situations that arise through conferences, reading, volunteering, and hobbies.

(a) long-term trends influencing information creation, interaction, and technological change; (b) the nature of systemic change; and (c) the multi-faceted, dimension-less nature of learning. Consideration can now be given to a creative exploration of what educational structures might look like if created on the premises presented thus far.

Space - whether physical or virtual - can have an impact on learning. It can bring people together; it can encourage exploration, collaboration, and discussion. Or, space can carry an unspoken message of silence and disconnectedness. More and more we see the power of built pedagogy (the ability of space to define how one teaches) in colleges and universities. (para 1)

carrier of patterns of previous reasoning

hierarchical mindset exists with regard to educational content

classification schemes of individuals such as Aristotle and Linnaeus

The multi-faceted aspects of learning - the criticality of context, the importance of social interaction and negotiation, the need for active "doing" - are all of such nebulous character that they fail to avail themselves to classification

structure content and interaction into hierarchical structures.

an environment that fosters and supports the formation of communities and networks (Siemens, 2003).

suggests a certain view of

learning

Learning is seen as bounded, structured, managed by a single expert (the teacher),

different affordances

ecology of learning with

They arise in a space that both supports and confines their creation. The last decade has generated much thought on networks. A range of researchers from physics, mathematics, and sociology (Barabasi, 2002; Watts, 2003; Wellman, 1999) have explored the nature of networks and how they are a central component in all aspects of society, biology, and physics. The centrality of networks as an organizing scheme is also reflected in education, teaching, and learning (Siemens, 2006) under the concept of connectivism. Connectivism is essentially the assertion that knowledge is networked and distributed, and the act of learning is the creation and navigation of networks. The distributed nature of knowledge and the growing complexification of all aspects of society require increased utilization of technology to assist our ability to stay current, manage information abundance, and solve highly complex problems.

Davidovitch (2007) suggested, "The call for a new pedagogy to accompany new instructional technologies, however, has largely remained unanswered."

duplicate the structure of a classroom, little innovation is seen

pedagogy of oppression

discussion of participatory pedagogies

Learners are able to contribute to existing curricula.

progressively rigid intellectual property laws or increased emphasis on learning outcomes

an attempt to create an educational system that recognizes the fluidity of learning and knowledge,

When a transition is made to networked models of learning, learners are able to form relationships with peers and experts from around

MIT's OpenCourseWare

A fluid network of relationships

Accreditation is a value statement.

learner has sufficiently engaged with the knowledge of a domain to be worthy of a particular designation

Some prefer a high degree of social interaction, while others prefer a more individual approach.

The motivation of peer-contact and schedule of learning activities and events may provide critical support to ensure learners do not drop out of their

Existing services like Diigo[8], Amazon[9], Digg[10], and StumbleUpon[11] provide a glimpse of what a rating system might

brokering

funding model of universities relates to providing support for educators and i

societies to participate in the information and knowledge age. The critical challenges facing humanity are many. A highly connected and well educated populace appears to hold the greatest prospect for meeting these challenges.

e primacy of the educator and the role of the learners as receptive agents

learning management systems

Subscription fees to

as a source of guidance

I assume that individuals will enrol in this course to pursue a personal need/ambition

In my last post, I introduced Helsper and Enyon’s (2009) idea that exposure to, and experience using, various digital technologies can have more of an influence that generation age on determining whether a person has the characteristics of a digital immigrant or a digital native. Of course, nothing is ever so clear cut. In his blog, Wesley Fryer discusses this, and expands the immigrant vs native classification into four categories, as shown below.

Goodyear, Carvalho and Dohn (2014, p 140) state that networked learning “ is no longer exotic”, however, I would argue that this very much depends on on one’s own perspective, which in turn would be shaped by personal experience and knowledge (aka the whole digital landscape debate).

(see Koutropoulis, 2011) Prensky’s division

about herself in the capacity of being a student,

smiss this message

researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, who’ve been experimenting with computer-based learning for years, have found that when machine-guided learning is combined with traditional classroom instruction, students can learn material in half the time.

Top schools like Yale, MIT and Stanford have been making streaming videos and podcasts of their courses available online for years, but MOOCs go beyond this to offer a full-blown interactive experience.

Teens now approaching college age are members of the first generation to have grown up conducting a major part of their social lives online. They are prepared to engage with professors and students online in a way their predecessors weren’t

What is emerging is a global marketplace where courses from numerous universities are available on a single website. Students can pick and choose the best offerings from each school; the university simply uploads the content.

The era of online education presents universities with a conflict of interests—the goal of educating the public on one hand, and the goal of making money on the other.

One potential source of cost savings for lower-rung colleges would be to draw from open-source courses offered by elite universities. Community colleges, for instance, could effectively outsource many of their courses via MOOCs, becoming, in effect, partial downstream aggregators of others’ creations, more or less like newspapers have used wire services to make up for a decline in the number of reporters.

To borrow an analogy from the music industry, universities have previously sold education in an “album” package—the four-year bachelor’s degree in a certain major, usually coupled with a core curriculum. The trend for the future will be more compact, targeted educational certificates and credits, which students will be able to pick and choose from to create their own academic portfolios.

The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate.

Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though “most popular” may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous).

Because much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again on video, demand for instructors will decline. 

Large numbers of very intelligent and well-trained people may be freed up from teaching to do more of their own research and writing. A lot of top-notch research scientists and mathematicians are terrible teachers anyway.

Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise.

if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate. 

Approach writers you admire.

Make sure that your work is in a somewhat similar vein.

Comment in a friendly and funny way on their posts and blogs.

Re-post their important announcements.

Be an active participant in author groups. Like this one!

Leave only sincere, glowing reviews on Amazon/Goodreads etc.

Go to author readings.

Be yourself. It’s okay if you’re shy.

Do not send private email messages to writers asking questions you could have answered yourself using Google.

Do not complain publicly when people don’t respond to your unsolicited overtures.

Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

He acknowledges that there’s a human tendency towards homophily, flocking together in groups united by race, gender, belief, socioeconomic status, etc.

ooking for solutions and common ground by trying to get to the facts.

To have a good conversation, you need to have 99% similarity and 1% difference.

When data.gov released sets of government information, they didn’t clean or normalize it ahead of time – they released raw data. They concluded that it was better to put the data out there than to constrain themselves to information that was consistent and known, for the simple reason that this constraint would have slowed them down badly. Darwin would not have agreed – he spent seven years on one fact.

It may be the one approach that’s scaleable

why were old knowledge systems so fragile?

hese systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world.

Micro-Colleges are any form of concentrated post-secondary education oriented around the minimum entry point into a particular profession. With literally millions of people needing to shift careers every year, and the long drawn out cycles of traditional colleges being a poor solution for time-crunched rank-and-file displaced workers, we are seeing a massive new opportunity arising for short-term, pre-apprenticeship training.  Many Micro-Colleges will fall into the category we often refer to as vocational training, a term poorly suited for the professional craftsmen, artisans, and technicians they will be producing. Since status and credentialing are critical elements of every career choice, any training producing specialized experts will need to come with industry-recognized certifications and titles.

The Micro-College approach to training brewmasters would be an intense 2-4 month training program with a designated apprenticeship period learning on the job.

Since my coursework happened in the pre-computer era, most of the skills I needed after computers were introduced were primarily self-taught.

Perhaps the most valuable courses with long-term relevance were classes in writing, English, speech, art, design, and the special research projects that forced me to find my own answers and write a final report. The art helped me understand that engineering was a form of creative expression.

If the school were tied to an industry-specific apprenticeship program with a near-perfect handoff between academia and real-world work happening inside the industry, what would a super-lean engineering program like this look like?

It’s easy to imagine that as traditional colleges see their student base decline, many will begin to partner, merge, and purchase fledgling Micro-Colleges and begin incorporating these new areas of study into their own catalog of course offerings. 

Since existing colleges bring with them credit-granting accreditation, along with status, credibility, and the ability to offer student loans, in-house Micro-Colleges will likely become a rapidly growing part of campus life. Many colleges will find the Micro-College niche they take on to be the key differentiator between them and other schools.  Using the school-within-a-school approach, core Micro-College programs will become feeder mechanisms for additional types of credentialing.