"The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information."
"Learning Space as Creation Space
The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment-flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based-and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space.
The ability to rearrange furniture and technology quickly and easily will be highly desirable. Some project activities will need nothing more than comfortable furniture, food, and caffeine. Others will require sophisticated computational analysis and the ability to do rapid prototyping.
Acoustics will be a concern and will need to accommodate a wide range of activities. It seems likely that such space will support more than one team or activity simultaneously. That will be a highly desirable trait, fostering serendipitous discovery and innovation.
The ability to quickly and easily capture the group's activities and progress will also be desirable. An emerging class of powerful and effective collaboration tools enables project teams to save and store project elements, resources, concepts, plans, designs, models, and renderings-in short, all the "stuff" that a team might find or make."
Report on the findings of a trial at 3 unis of students using e-book readers. Main comment are that they are ok but rubbish for taking notes in the flexible way we do with paper.
Over time the learner has been the explorer of knowledge, its accumulator and skilled 'access-or'. In the 21st century challenges and demands are expanding and changing again. Our new society's environment is one of rapid communication, action and change, of intricate social activity and a huge potential for new knowledge.
What are the models of the learner for this brave new world? How can higher education create these models and support the learners who aspire to them? This paper postulates four models of the learner of the future:
* the collaborator: for whom networks of knowledge, skills and ideas are the source of learning
* the free agent: utilising flexible, continuous, open-ended and life-long styles and systems of learning to the full
* the wise analyser: able to gather, scrutinise and use evidence of effective activity and apply conclusions to new problems
* the creative synthesiser: able to connect across themes and disciplines, cross-fertilise ideas, integrate disparate concepts and create new vision and practice.
The paper describes an example of these kinds of learning and considers what they might imply for the development of learning in higher education in the coming century
"Using intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, simulations, and frequent opportunities for assessment and feedback, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) builds courses that are intended to enact instruction - or, more precisely, to enact the kind of dynamic, flexible, and responsive instruction that fosters learning."
Spaces for Knowledge Generation is an ALTC project which was undertaken as a partnership between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple and Kneeler Design Architects. The context of the learning experience necessarily changes over time, with technological, economic and social developments influencing the types of learning spaces learners and teachers require to achieve their learning outcomes, and this $220,000 project was designed to inform, guide and support sustainable development of learning and teaching spaces and practices, maximising flexibility so as to be used by as many disciplines as feasible. The project was based on the philosophy that constructivist approaches to learning, as well as to research and study, should make use of technologies and approaches that students favour, and that learning spaces should therefore be organised to accommodate learner-generated aspects of learning. Spaces for Knowledge Generation provides a model for designing student learning environments that is future-focused and sustainable for the medium term.
Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down.
How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed.
In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed
Two Potential Futures
Our forecast suggests that the learning ecosystem
is going to diversify, and indeed has already
started to do so. At the American Alliance of
Museums' convening on the future of education
Glimpses of the Future of Education
By Katherine Prince, Senior Director, Strategic Foresight, KnowledgeWorks
A detail of a KnowledgeWorks infographic on the future of learning. For the complete infographic go to knowledgeworks.
org/strategic-foresight.
1
®
Glimpses of Future Educationin September, I had the pleasure of
sharing two plausible scenarios for
how the future may take shape. We
could find ourselves living in:
* a vibrant learning grid in which
all of us who care about learning
create a flexible and radically
personalized learning ecosystem
that meets the needs of all
learners, or
* a fractured landscape in which
only those whose families have
the time, money and resources
to customize or supplement their
learning journeys have access to
learning that adapts to and meets
their needs.
"This time next year, your students will likely not remember a lot of the material you're trying to cover during this time, but they will remember the connection you built with them. They will remember your flexibility, generosity and compassion."