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how much training should be required prior to taking a job, and whether the investment of time and money spent on training should be optimized around the company or the employee, knowing there will always be some in-house training required.

When we look at the bigger picture of retraining for this and many other professions, knowing that people will be rebooting their careers far more often in the future, with time being such a precious commodity, how do we create the leanest possible educational model for jobs in the future?

On the other side of the equation are people who go through all the work of getting bachelor and master degrees and still not having the skills necessary to gain employment. Traditional colleges, for the most part, do a great job, but they are all oriented around seat time. They also come with the overarching philosophy that nothing of value can be learned in less than four years, a timeframe woefully out of sync with someone needing to change career paths. So at what point is education “too lean,” and conversely, when is it “too fat?”

But I do believe it is important to point out that a powerful emerging educational movement strengthens the currently dominant academic culture, perhaps making it more difficult for alternative voices to be heard.

The reality is that despite having talked about personalized learning for more than a decade, most schools and teachers have been slow to discover its potential through the use of the social web, interactive games, and mobile devices.

schools see the eruption of technologies and environments that allow for personalized learning as a "disruptive innovation

we need to fundamentally rethink what we do in the classroom with kids

Learners construct new knowledge, upon their own existing knowledge.  This is very individualised, and based on each learner’s past experiences, and ways of thinking.

Learning designers have some tricks to help deal with such diversity, such as researching your cohort, conducting a needs analysis, and ultimately categorising learners and focusing on the majority.

three approaches

iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation,

contextually-sensitive design principles and

current real-world problems

Large-scale learning environments are incredibly diverse: massive open online courses, intelligent tutoring systems, open learning courseware, learning games, citizen science communities, collaborative programming communities, community tutorial systems, and the countless informal communities of learners are all examples of learning at scale.

Diigo

Feel free to use Diigo

(25-29 Aug) Technology and NGL

Now social software is rather old, everyone knows about (even if they don’t use it), and not particularly exciting

ignore the new ‘cool stuff’ as somehow not ‘personal’ seems short-sighted.

ignore the new ‘cool stuff’ as somehow not ‘personal’ seems short-sighted.

To what extent do existing learning theories meet the needs of today’s learners, and anticipate the needs of learners of the future?

If older theories are to be replaced by connectivism, then what are the grounds for this measure?

If connectivism is to build on older theories, how is the integration of the old and new theories to be conducted?

This paper raises questions on levels of learner autonomy, presence, and critical literacies required in active connectivist learning.

In e-learning, two major traditions have been prevalent: one where connections are made with people and the other where they are made with resources (Weller, 2007)

since the emergence and proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their increasing encroachment on everyday life, boundaries between settings in which people learn and in which they use technology for other activities have blurred, and perspectives such as connectivism have emerged

teachers who are more inclined and better prepared for what are known as student-oriented teaching practices, such as group work, individualized learning, and project work, are more likely to use digital resources. But in many cases, teachers were not adequately prepared to use the kind of teaching methods that make the most of technology

Overall, the most successful plans were incremental and built on lessons learned from previous plans.

There is increasing recognition of the important role of teachers in education. But we need to go beyond the idea that teaching is an art that requires exceptional talent. There are exceptional teachers, but we need to support the professional development of all teachers, and we can do so if we invest in the scientific base of the teaching profession and empower those very exceptional teachers to become leaders who inspire other teachers.Technology offers great tools in this respect. I'm thinking of platforms for collaboration in knowledge creation, where teachers can share and enrich teaching materials; of the amount of data that can be collected to measure students' learning; or of the increasing use of blended learning models in teachers' training, in which online lectures are combined with individualized expert support and feedback from peers. Because they enable feedback loops between theory and everyday classroom practice and are supported by a network of like-minded peers, these models have been found to be much more effective than the traditional model of courses, workshops, conferences and seminars

digital natives and digital immigrants as defined by Prensky (2001).