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written exams will have been replaced by assessment through multimedia portfolios of student work. These will show not only students’ current knowledge and competencies, but also their progression over time, and a range of equally important skills, such as their ability to work collaboratively, self-management of learning, and general communication skills. Assessment will be mainly on a continuous, on-going basis.

Since content will be freely accessible, institutions’ reputation and branding will increasingly depend on the way they support learners. This will put much greater emphasis on instructors having good teaching skills as well as subject expertise.

t will become increasingly difficult for institutions to protect student data and their privacy. This may turn out to be the biggest challenge for students, institutions, and government

you are in a position to influence a different kind of vision

They will have lost students to more prestigious universities and high status vocationally oriented institutions using online and flexible learning to boost their numbers.

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

e expected to be

The following are several specific examples of what the open standards and services must enable to make this new architecture for learning a reality: Digital content and applications must be easily, quickly (ideally, within a few minutes versus months), and seamlessly integrated into any platform that supports a set of vendor-neutral open standards and, importantly, are not trapped inside a single platform. User, course, and context information must be synchronized among selected applications so that neither the manual transfer of information nor multiple logins to different applications are required—thus making set-up and use of new software much easier for all concerned. Data that describes usage, activities, and outcomes must flow from learning content apps to the enterprise system of record, learning platforms, and analytics platforms. Systems, services, and tools must be virtualized and must increasingly move toward the elastic computing model that enables sharing scenarios across systems or other federations of users.Imagine what would happen if CIOs could safely add services and applications in a matter of days instead of months, if instructors could seamlessly combine these tools into their courses with one click, and if analytics data would begin to flow immediately thereafter. This new IT architecture would revolutionize the support for academic technology in the same way that the app movement has revolutionized what is available on mobile devices. A key difference with the new IT architecture, however, is that these educational apps are built using standards adopted and managed by the educational community and would be connected into the educational enterprise IT infrastructure.

The rise of the MOOC illustrates how important innovations often happen outside of established channels: by faculty who, interested in innovation, put together their own technology solutions outside their college or university. This should be a wake-up call for the higher education community to do better. Enterprise IT organizations need to enable such innovation, not stand in its way.

is links to the point made by Goodyear et al (2014) Unless learning is very closely supervised and directed (which it rarely is), there will usually be some slippage between task and activity, for good and bad reasons. This is important to acknowledge, when designing, because what people learn is a consequence of their actual activity, and therefore only indirectly a result of the task set for them. Tasks are designable, activities are not – they are emergent. (p. 1

Goodyear et al (2014) pick up on the term affordance as both important, but also as “a term that is also very widely critiqued and contested” (p. 137). The idea is that particular technologies afford different possibilities dependent on people’s perceptions of a technology. But an affordance isn’t a single set of possibilities seen by every person. Taking what Goodyear et al (2014) describe as a “relational-materialist” the idea of affordance becomes much more complex and emergent.

poll.

“Attempts at integrating technology within education, however, have often focused on enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the status quo, replacing traditional instructional approaches with ones that are technologically reinforced, yet qualitatively similar” “Research continues to show that access to technology alone has limited impact on learning outcomes and instructional methods and is often used to support passive, teacher-centered, and didactic instruction”

learning is often seen as a single and sporadic classroom activity as opposed to an endeavor that is ongoing, lifelong, and independent of educational institutions and age

it is important for learners to understand, and instructors to acknowledge, that knowledge is distributed and that the instructor is not the sole source of knowledge on a topic

We should aspire for learning that changes the ways a learner acts in the world. We want learners to talk, discuss and share their learning with family and friends, rather than compartmentalising

“transformative learning experiences cannot be”imposed” on learners.” invited, and encouraged, and facilitated.

Siemens (2005) describes the following characteristics of connectivism: Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions

Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources

The near infinite potential of dancing with anyone, anywhere, anytime coupled with the vast sound tracks and light shows (open educational resources) accessible on the Net, demand that learning be an experience of connecting and applying resources, rather than memorizing particular tunes or steps. The art of improvisation, of learning to dance, becomes the life learning skill – accumulating static data or memorizing scripts becomes obsolete.

When I reflect on other courses of formal study that I have undertaken at this university there are a diverse array of online teaching practices evident. Some model, facilitate and challenge learning just like this one; while others have an approach of ‘here is the assessment, good luck…see you at the end’. I need to make sure that all of my teaching is supportive and challenging to students learning – there is limited learning with the ‘here is the assessment…enjoy’ approach.

‘As Student’

“It is through writing our ideas down that we make what we learn explicit, thus enabling us to “reflect upon it, and reanalyse it in light of new and sometimes conflicting information” (Goal et all., 2008).”

Riel and Polin reading is that we are a knowledge-based community given we “construct, use, reconstruct, and reuse knowledge in deliberate, continuous cycles” (p. 32).

‘As Student’

sharing our ideas in PCP is not scary and threatening, but can help ourselves and others. Everybody’s ideas seem obvious to them. What is obvious to me is amazing for someone else.

I continue to do my work, I tell my little tales and share my point of view. Nothing spectacular, just my little thoughts.

‘As student’ I was initially hesitant to share my thoughts opinions and ideas because I wasn’t sure if they were worthy of sharing. They are nothing different or innovative. But through engagement in Blogging and the non-threatening nature of the task – just blog, it doesn’t have to be perfect – has assisted a great deal. Overtime I have noticed that I am more comfortable sharing ideas.

feeding forward’, as identified by Downes (2011).

“We suggest three distinct but overlapping forms of learning within communities (task-based, practice-based; knowledge-based learning) and discuss practical design implications of these distinctions.”

learning theory has evolved from a cognitive theory of acquisition of knowledge to a social theory of increased participation in activity (Bruner, 1973; Cole, 1988; Lave, 1988; Mehan, 1983; Nonnan, 1980; Rogoff, 1994; Wertsch, 1997).

ntellectual development becomes a process of negotiation of meaning in everyday practice with others (Dewey, 1916; Vygotsky, 1978).

Learning occurs through engagement in authentic experiences involving the active manipulation and experimentation with ideas and artefacts – rather than through an accumulation of static knowledge (Bruner, 1973; Cole, 1988; Dewey, 1916).

Wenger (2000) uses the metaphor of a garden to describe the nature of support that works for something as delicate as a community of practice. You cannot, he says, make the flowers grow by pulling on their leaves. You can, however, keep the flower beds free of weeds and pests, ensure there is water and sunlight, and you can even apply some plant food. But the flowers must do their own growing. What does that sort of support for the flowerbed look like in an isolated and troubled profession such as teaching?

‘As Student’

‘As Student’

sharing our ideas in PCP is not scary and threatening, but can help ourselves and others. Everybody’s ideas seem obvious to them. What is obvious to me is amazing for someone else.

feeding forward’, as id

We suggest three distinct but overlapping forms of learning within communities (task-based, practice-based; knowledge-based learning) and discuss practical design implications of these distinctions.”

earning theory has evolved from a cognitive theory of acquisition of knowledge to a social theory of increased participation in activity (Bruner, 1973; Cole, 1988; Lave, 1988; Mehan, 1983; Nonnan, 1980; Rogoff, 1994; Wertsch, 1997).

tellectual development becomes a process of negotiation of meaning in everyday practice with others (Dewey, 1916; Vygotsky, 1978).

Learning occurs through engagement in authentic experiences involving the active manipulation and experimentation with ideas and artefacts – rather than through an accumulation of static knowledge (Bruner, 1973; Cole, 1988; Dewey, 1916).

Wenger (2000) uses the metaphor of a garden to describe the nature of support that works for something as delicate as a community of practice. You cannot, he says, make the flowers grow by pulling on their leaves. You can, however, keep the flower beds free of weeds and pests, ensure there is water and sunlight, and you can even apply some plant food. But the flowers must do their own growing. What does that sort of support for the flowerbed look like in an isolated and troubled profession such as teaching?

d social bookmarking in t

“Learners need to find their own unique pathway to transformative understanding of networked learning. There’s no simple and straightforward way to mastery that can be taught.”

‘The past always looks easy and the future always looks challenging’.

Our information overload is a filtering issue and we are having filter failure.

lexibility is the greatest strength.

online learning is that it is asynchronous and students can participate and engage with content anywhere, anytime. I believe the f

Siemens (2004) also notes that learning occurs in informal and non-formal learning contexts.

“Knowledge is contained in the links between interconnected nodes and learning is the creation of these connections and the ability to traverse these connections. “For an individual this is about growing the connections in the mind by growing the connections.”

Alec Couros pointed out in a keynote from FUSION 2013 that – “There is strength in weak ties. Our acquaintances, not our friends, are potentially our greatest source of new ideas and information” (paraphrased from Gladwell, 2010).

whenever you’re thinking about nothing in particular

Universities, businesses and government agencies all compete for cognitive “talent,” and they frequently rely on intelligence testing to help them find it. Meanwhile, the evidence that intelligence testing may not work as advertised has been growing

you have to think of intelligence — when defined as problem-solving ability — not as a singular quality but as a spectrum. On one end is deductive, rules-based reasoning and on the other is imaginative, possibilities-based improvisation

our apparently mindless moments are actually humming with cognitive activity. Instead of letting moments of free time slip away, they say, our brains “capitalize on them to consolidate past experience in ways that are adaptive for our future needs.”

Like any human performance metric — IQ, LSAT scores, batting averages — the imagination quotient is intended to predict a competitive advantage

“If you have an imaginative capability to envision future possibilities, alternatives and scenarios — that’s going to be predictive [of success] across the board,” he says.

t continues to play an important role in network forms of sociality because of the essentially one-to-one edges between nodes that lead to what Rainie and Wellman (2012) refer to as “networked individualism”—

However, one of their defining characteristics is that their members are, in principle and often in practice, listable.

People may be unaware that they are part of a set (e.g., people with a particular genetic marker), or they may identify with it (e.g., people who are fans of football or constructivist teaching methods).

Group-oriented systems tend to provide features like variable roles, restricted membership, and role-based permissions. Network-oriented systems tend to provide features like friending, linking, and commenting. Set-oriented systems tend to provide tools like topic- or location-based selections, tags, and categories.