From DSC:
A paraphrased excerpt:
When I watch my teenagers do their math, they use their laptops, smartphones (to text their friends), and they watch YouTube videos to explain how to do the problems.
This statement made me reflect on the vision that I’m pursuing re: the use of second screen apps in learning as it relates to Learning from the Living [Class] Room.
The video was interesting to watch, and the topic grabbed my eye — i.e., will MOOCs impact MBA programs and if so, what might the potential scenarios look like?
I appreciated the excellent example of peering into the future, developing some scenarios, and planning for those scenarios NOW.
Also see:
- Would graduate school work better if you never graduated from it? — from thechronicle.com by Steve Kolowich
Excerpt:
Learning continues long after college ends. What if being enrolled in college was also a lifelong condition?
That is how Christian Terwiesch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, thinks graduate business programs might work in the future.
He and a colleague, Karl T. Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at Wharton, have published a paper on how the ascent of short video lectures—the kind popularized by massive open online courses and Khan Academy—might change the cost and structure of top business programs like Wharton’s. The short answer is that they probably won’t, at least not anytime soon.
…
The business school eventually might have to provide chunks of its curriculum on demand over a student’s whole career, he said, rather than during a two-year stretch at the beginning.
From DSC:
I like that question — Would graduate school work better if you never graduated from it? — as it speaks to me of tapping into the streams of content that are constantly flowing by us now…and doing so throughout our lifetimes. That’s one possible scenario for the delivery mechanism for some of our educational programs in the future.
Graduate School 2.0: Three ways to put technology to work for graduate student success — from evolllution.com by Susan Aldridge | President of Drexel University Online, Drexel University
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Podcasting and Vodcasting
Although these digital techniques are becoming a popular enhancement for “flipping” classrooms and furnishing supplemental course materials, they’re also a great way to teach professional skills. For example, Karl Okomoto created LawMeets, an online moot court experience for budding transactional attorneys who, up until now, have been expected to learn the art of negotiation by reading textbooks and listening to lectures.
As a result, law students across the country can now use this unique virtual platform to practice and perfect their deal-making skills, by posting videos of themselves counseling their moot clients, which are peer-reviewed through a digital voting device. Top-rated performances are then critiqued by seasoned attorneys, who furnish a demonstration video of their own. Equally important, professors in other law schools are incorporating these online exercises into their own classroom activities, with excellent results, while Okomoto is making plans to deploy his platform for role-playing job interviews and salary negotiations.
By the same token, an inventive cardiologist and professor at the Temple University School of Medicine employed podcast technology to help students learn how to listen for heart murmurs. Appropriately called Heartsongs, this MP3 teaching tool provides audio recordings of common murmurs, complete with running commentary — and, so far, its track record is nothing short of amazing. Among the medical students and residents using it, diagnostic accuracy rates have skyrocketed to 90 percent compared to the average of 20 to 30 percent.
Goodbye, TV Channels—And Hello, TV Apps — from readwrite.com by Adriana Lee
How a small change in language represents a universal shift in the television experience.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
But television is evolving. Increasingly, it’s all about the apps now—browsable, downloadable, interactive TV applications. You can thank the swelling ranks of streaming services and devices for that.
The software applications they’re delivering to our living rooms are growing in number and prominence. And they’re starting to eclipse the passive, one-way broadcasts we once fought over for two-way, interactive experiences that let you share democratically among multiple users (née viewers) across mobile devices and computers.
…
According to research firm NPD Group, the smart television business has begun to boom. In the beginning of 2013, there were 140 million Internet-ready TVs in American homes. By 2015, it will grow 44 percent, to 202 million. And by that time, nearly two-thirds of them will actually be connected to the Internet, compared to just 56 percent now.
…
How they connect is important. When it comes to television, “apps” are where it’s at, not ye olde “TV channels.” It’s just a shift in language, true—but it’s also a shift in thinking.
In a multi-screen future, phones don’t control TVs, TVs control phones — from foxnews.com by Alex Tretbar
Excerpt:
Right now, most “second-screen” usage is more distracting than it is enriching, but that’s about to change. Soon your tablet will spring to life when you tune into your favorite show, and you’ll have more opportunities than ever to engage. The million-dollar buzzword here is Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR. But, before we get too far into that, let’s start at the beginning: the screen itself.
…
Navin wants his apps to automatically deliver content viewers might otherwise seek out manually. This might mean recommendations, related video, social-media discussions, or even a simple plot synopsis.
What television will look like in 2025, according to Netflix — from wired.com by Issie Lapowsky
Excerpts:
People have traditionally discovered new shows by tuning into the channels that were most aligned with their interests. Love news? Then CNN might be the channel for you. If it’s children’s programming you want, Nickelodeon has you covered. And yet, none of these channels can serve 100 percent of their customers what they want to watch 100 percent of the time.
According to Hunt, this will change with internet TV. He said Netflix is now working to perfect its personalization technology to the point where users will no longer have to choose what they want to watch from a grid of shows and movies. Instead, the recommendation engine will be so finely tuned that it will show users “one or two suggestions that perfectly fit what they want to watch now.”
“I think this vision is possible,” Hunt said. “We’ve come a long way towards it, and we have a ways to go still.” He said Netflix is now devoting as much time and energy to building out that personalization technology as the company put into building the infrastructure for delivering that content in the first place.
…
“The stories we watch today are not your parents’ TV,” Hunt said, “and the stories your kids watch in 2025 will blow your mind away.”
And by the year 2025, he told his audience, everyone will own a smart TV.
TV transformed by smart thinking — from theaustralian.com.au/ by
Excerpt:
As LG puts it, your apps to the right of the cards are “the future” — what you will watch, while the display of your recently used apps, to the left of the cards, is “the past” — so the launcher is an amalgam of your past, present and future viewing activity
From DSC:
“…everyone will own a smart TV by 2025.” Well, maybe not everyone, but many of us will have access to these Internet-connected “TV’s” (if they are even called TV’s at that point).
I hope that Netflix will license those personalization technologies to other vendors or, if not, that some other vendor will create them for educationally-related purposes.
Can you imagine a personalization engine — focused on education and/or training — that could provide the scaffolding necessary for learning about many topics? i.e. digital playlists of learning. Streams of content focused on education. Such engines would remember where you left off and what you still need to review…what you have mastered and what you are still struggling with…what you enjoy learning about…your learning preferences…and more.
Addendum:
How Samsung is enabling the future of social TV — from lostremote.com by Natan Edelsburg
Augmented Reality: 32 resources about using it in education — from mediaspecialistsguide.blogspot.com by Julie Greller
Excerpt:
According to Webster’s Dictionary, augmented reality is “an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device (as a smartphone camera); also : the technology used to create augmented reality.” Think of it as a type of virtual reality, using the computer to copy your world. You are probably familiar with a tool created by Google which falls into this category: Google Glass. Although augmented reality has existed for a long time, we as teachers are only now grasping how to use it in the classroom. Let’s take a look below.
Harvard MOOCs up ante on production quality — from educationnews.org by Grace Smith
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
It’s called HarvardX, a program begun two years ago, that films professors who are creating lessons that act as an adjunct to their coursework. The catch is, the production value is equally proportioned to the subject matter. The underproduced in-class lecture being filmed by a camera at the back of the lecture hall is being updated, in a big way.
Two video studios, 30 employees, producers, editors, videographers, composers, animators, typographers, and even a performance coach, make HarvardX a far cry from a talking head sort of online class.
The Harvard idea is to produce excellent videos, on subject matters that might be difficult to pull off in a lecture hall or class. Then, to bring these videos into the class for enrichment purposes. An example is Ulrich’s online class, “Tangible Things”.
Also see:
Sea change of technology: Education — from the Harvard Gazette, Christina Pazzanese, May 26, 2014
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
After centuries of relative torpor, technology breakthroughs have begun to reshape teaching and learning in ways that have prompted paradigm shifts around pedagogy, assessment, and scholarly research, and have upended assumptions of how and where learning takes place, the student-teacher dynamic, the functions of libraries and museums, and the changing role of scholars as creators and curators of knowledge.
“There are massive changes happening right now,” said Robert A. Lue, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and faculty director of HarvardX (harvardx.harvard.edu). “What has brought it into particularly tight focus now is that the revolution in online education has raised a whole host of very important questions about: What do students do with faculty face-to-face; what is the value of the brick-and-mortar experience; and how does technology in general really support teaching and learning in exciting, new ways? It’s been a major catalyst, if you will, for a reconsideration of how we teach in the classroom.”
…
Classrooms of the future are likely to resemble the laboratory or studio model, as more disciplines abandon the passive lecture and seminar formats for dynamic, practice-based learning, Harvard academicians say.
“There’s a move away from using the amphitheater as a learning space … toward a room that looks more like a studio where students sit in groups around tables, and the focus is on them, not on the instructor, and the instructor becomes more the ‘guide outside’ rather than the ‘sage onstage,’ facilitating the learning process rather than simply teaching and hoping people will learn,” said Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
It’s a shift that’s changing teaching in the humanities as well. “It’s a project-based model where students learn by actually being engaged in a collaborative, team-based experience of actually creating original scholarship, developing a small piece of a larger mosaic — getting their hands dirty, working with digital media tools, making arguments in video, doing ethnographic work,” said Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, an arts and humanities research and teaching unit of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
From DSC:
HarvardX is a great example of using teams to create and deliver learning experiences.
Also, the “Sea change…” article reminded me of the concept of learning hubs — whereby some of the content is face-to-face around a physical table, and whereby some of the content is electronic (either being created by the students or being consumed/reviewed by the students). I also appreciated the work that Jeff Schnapp is doing to increase students’ new media literacy skills.