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This paper analyses the role of "disruptive" innovative technologies in higher education. In this country and elsewhere, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have invested significant sums in learning technologies, with Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) being more or less universal, but these technologies have not been universally adopted and used by students and staff. Instead, other technologies not owned or controlled by HEIs are widely used to support learning and teaching. According to Christensen's theory of Disruptive Innovation, these disruptive technologies are not designed explicitly to support learning and teaching in higher education, but have educational potential. This study uses Activity Theory and Expansive Learning to analyse data regarding the impact of disruptive technologies. The data were obtained through a questionnaire survey about awareness and use of technologies, and through observation and interviews, exploring participants' actual practice. The survey answers tended to endorse Disruptive Innovation theory, with participants establishing meanings for technologies through their use of them, rather than in keeping with a designer's intentions. Observation revealed that learners use a narrow range of technologies to support learning, but with a tendency to use resources other than those supplied by their HEIs. Interviews showed that participants use simple and convenient technologies to support their learning and teaching. This study identifies a contradiction between learning technologies made available by HEIs, and technologies used in practice. There is no evidence to suggest that a wide range of technologies is being used to support learning and teaching. Instead, a small range of technologies is being used for a wide range of tasks. Students and lecturers are not dependent on their HEIs to support learning and teaching. Instead, they self-select technologies, with use weighted towards established brands. The use of technologies

"A learning tool is a tool to create or deliver learning content/solutions for others, or a tool for your own personal or professional learning. Here is the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 as voted for by 582 learning professionals worldwide. Below is the slideset available via Slideshare and beneath it the textual list.  Other pages are available as follows:"

Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery, but to transform it. Online learning started by serving students for whom there was no alternative for learning. It got its start in distance-learning environments, outside of a traditional school building, and it started small. In 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. But by 2010, over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online-learning program. The preK-12 online population is now growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 43 percent-and that rate is accelerating.

What's your main purpose for blended learning? Is it improving learning resources efficiency/cost and time/access? Or is it improving the learning itself? Much of the attention and excitement about blended learning is on the former, with time-and-motion descriptions of where the teacher, the student, and the computer exist during the day.

"Duncan on Digital. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Tuesday for the nation to move rapidly from printed textbooks and toward digital ones, citing global competition among the chief reasons for doing so. The New Frontier. The Center for Digital Education and Converge released The Blended and Virtual Learning Frontier Report that reviews a nice summary of drivers, roadblocks and best practices as the nation moves forward to a "new frontier" of learning. Check out Caroline's piece on Acton Academy for a profile of a super cool blended school. Denver Blended Boost. A $2.1 million grant from Janus expand blended learning opportunities in Denver schools. Top Tweeting Teacher Offers Resources. Edutopia Blogger Lisa Dabbs noted that when it comes to blended learning "We are all new teachers" and offered a great list of resources."

a septième conférence annuelle de Plymouth (Royaume-Uni) sur le e-learning change de nom. Sous l'acronyme PELeCON, on lisait auparavant "Plymouth e-learning Conference". A partir de cette année, il faudra lire "Plymouth enhanced learning conference".  Le changement paraît trivial, mais il témoigne en fait d'une mutation considérable. "L'apprentissage augmenté" (enhanced learning, soit le e-learning nouvelle manière) remplace l'apprentissage électronique. Et miracle, le changement de sens fonctionne aussi avec l'acronyme français : la Formation Ouverte et À Distance peut devenir la Formation Ouverte et Augmentée, soit la FOA

he dramatic advancements in technology over the last 5 years have created an environment that could support learning that surpasses anything we would have seen, experienced or imagined before. While new technologies offer considerable opportunities for improved learning, their use however has remained as a plug-on to traditional teaching methods. In this article, we discuss the impact of reinvigorating two courses where the use of Mobile Web 2.0 (MW2.0) tools was embedded within the learning process with an aim of enabling learner-generated content and context. Students and staff in this collaborative project, from two different courses, were equipped with iPhone 4s and iPad 2s for the duration of the course (n= 36, 16-week semester). A participatory action research method was used to evaluate the project and to scaffold the staff into learning and teaching in the twenty-first century. The pedagogical approach underpinning this project and the design for use of MW2.0 tools are discussed. Examples of artefacts created by the students in the project are outlined and provide an overview of the different contexts students interacted in.

"One way to help students gain agency over their own education is through technology. Despite the Internet revolution, the field of K-12 education has been relatively slow to respond to digital media. That's why I paid a visit last week to the site of a promising experiment in digital learning in New York: the Bea Fuller Rodgers Middle School in Washington Heights. Last year, CFY, a nonprofit organization, provided home computers (and arranged for discounted broadband access) to every one of the sixth grade students in the school. (Almost all the school's families are Hispanics who qualify for the federal government's free or reduced lunch program. Currently, half of all Hispanics in the United States lack broadband.). In addition, CFY provided a four-hour training for the students and their parents in a free Web-based platform CFY developed called PowerMyLearning which contains 1,000 (soon to be 2,800) digital learning activities and games from across the Web that have been carefully selected and categorized by teachers and education specialists. Finally, CFY provided onsite training to the school's sixth grade teachers in how to integrate PowerMyLearning into their classrooms (practicing what educators call "blended learning"

Quand on parle de e-learning, de mobile learning, etc… Tout le monde considère que l'on parle d'objets précis et clairs pour tous. En réalité il semble que les conceptions, la signification attachées à ces mots soient d'autant plus mouvantes qu'ils sont apparus récemment dans le paysage culturel et social. Il ne suffit pas de donner une définition, encore faut-il aller plus loin dans la définition des « attributs » du concept pour tenter d'y voir plus clair. Il s'agit aussi de sortir ces mots et expressions nouvellement apparus de leur gangue d'illusions liées à l'idée de nouveauté, voire d'innovation qui les entoure. L'exemple du mobile learning illustre bien ce flou. De plus l'expression mobile learning nécessite un approfondissement tant ce que recouvre cette expression semble important dans la société actuelle et celle qui émerge avec le numérique.

"earning Un-Limited is a project that gives young learners the tools to freely and responsibly use technology to connect with their learning materials and learning communities anywhere, anytime. During the 2011-2012 school year, a class of 5th graders received Samsung Galaxy Tablets with mobile broadband data to use for learning as well as for their own purposes. These young students not only became savvy Internet and technology users, but shifted their learning from passively waiting for information from their teacher to actively seeking out answers as independent learners."

Digital Learning Now! (DLN) today released "Funding the Shift to Digital Learning: Three Strategies for Funding Sustainable High-Access Environments," the first in the DLN Smart Series of interactive papers that provide specific guidance regarding adoption of Common Core Standards and the shift to personal digital learning.

"If you're interested in human development, the opportunity set has never been more interesting. Search in the browser marked the beginning of anywhere/anytime learning opportunities, but the official beginning of the new era was a decade ago with the Wikipedia launch. As noted in the Lessons from SkillShare blog, anywhere, anytime learning sites have been popping up at an increasing rate. You can learn about rate of change and differential calculus on Khan Academy. Academic Earth was an early source of college knowledge. Udemy let anyone teach anything. Saylor.org and P2PU.org made it all free. Anya Kamenetz outlined the expanded post-sec landscape in DIY U last year. This year, massively open online courses (MOOC) from Coursera, Udacity, and Edx are all the rage. The aggregate impact is a dramatic increase in access to great content and great teachers."

"L'Asie enregistre actuellement une hausse significative de l'utilisation des tablettes numériques et des smartphones. En effet depuis quelques années, les marchés associés à ces deux produits explosent. Et même si dans cette partie du globe, le E-Learning n'est pas encore très répandu, les entreprises asiatiques utilisent déjà cette méthode de formation en ligne pour permettre à leurs employés de bénéficier de cours de langue. De même, comme l'Asie est l'endroit où l'on peut trouver le plus grand nombre d'utilisateurs de téléphones mobiles, la tendance du M-Learning (apprentissage grâce au téléphone portable) est entrain de devenir plus en plus prégnante."

A handful of smart people called yesterday in search of digital learning accelerants-an handful of initiatives that would speed the adoption of personal digital learning (print to digital, sequential to adaptive, time to learning, isolation to teams, static to mobile, short day/year to anywhere/anytime).  Here's six:

"The mobile learning revolution is creating a lot of buzz in the education world, and the benefits undoubtedly stand out. But nothing exists as a purely positive entity. While the movement toward "m-learning" (as those totally in the know call it) marks a change in how education approaches technological developments, anyone considering the developing tools needs to research the downsides before making the leap."

"PublicBroadcastingService(PBS) has a long standing reputation in the education community for providing quality news, media, material, and more for engaged learning. Today, PBS is leveraging front-edge tech - the flipped classroom, learning playlists, online professional development, games, and more - to research and refine quality content and delivery of learning for students, parents, and educators. Here are four ways PBS is innovating for students futures:"

How? It's part of a future trend I first identified back in the 1980s that we are now calling gamification, and today that growing trend is reaching a tipping point. If you think back, you'll see that many of the greatest technological advances in business have come from the world of kids and games. Actually, here's the exact flow of events: a concept or technology often begins with kids and the world of gaming. Some will start with the military, but it's amazing how many start with kids' games. From there it gains the attention of the adults in the business community as they learn how to adapt it to their needs, and finally it creeps into the education sector. So in many respects, the adults and the business world can learn much from the kids and their video games.

The Department of Education released a draft report about big data and education today. It's called "Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics," a title that's unlikely to win any converts to the notion of a data-curious* view of learning. Part of what's going to get stuck in the craw is that phrase "data mining," I reckon. Despite all the potential and all the buzz about (big) data, data-mining remains something with a fairly negative connotation. Advertisers. Political campaigns. Big government. All sifting through your personal data, trying to uncover the things that nobody knows about, trying to get you to buy or sell or vote. Add to that now the knowledge that every click we make online -- every YouTube view and Facebook like and Google query -- is eminently trackable, it's enough to make all those unsolicited phone calls and junk mail seem quite benign, not to mention old-fashioned.

Most learning goes on outside of school. Most learning goes on for personal reasons. What we're talking about are methods of recognizing that, and enriching the opportunities for people to engage in that. The ultimate outcome is to have lots of people in powerful positions in their communities who have engaged in this kind of self learning and they see this being respected. It'd be great to see, say, a local politician, who's a self taught person who's very very immersed in community issues and is proud of saying that they have taught themselves.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Inside Google's secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own.