Augmented reality: A great story triggers the mind — from arjenvanberkum.nl by Arjen van Berkum

Excerpts:

Augmented reality brings learning to life. Augmented reality enriches a live view of a real-life environment – the so called reality – with computer-generated input, that can consist out of sound, graphics, text, video, and GPS information. In other words, AR provides us with an enhanced view of the real world.

As Gaia Dempsey, Managing Director of DAQRI International, explains, “80% of the information that the brain takes is visual. So by providing information in a visual medium that also has the spatial nature of augmented reality, you’re giving the brain a very intuitive way of accessing knowledge.”

 

 

 

From the Inter-American Dialogue and the Inter-American Development Bank: A new foresight resource freely available to the public entitled, A Database of Reports on Global Trends and Future Scenarios.

This database includes nearly 800 foresight publications and reports from around the world, and it provides governments, banks, corporations, universities, think tanks, and other institutions continuous access to information and analyses on trends and future scenarios.

GlobalTrendsFutureScenariosDatabase2015

 

From DSC:
Given that the pace of change has changed & given that disruption seems to be upending one industry after another, futurism should be taught throughout K-12 & throughout higher education. (There are some programs out there within higher education, but not many.)

If more of us were trained in looking up to see what’s happening around us — or what’s about to happen around us — the chances of us being broadsided or surprised by something are greatly diminished. Also, we can better plan for — and create — our futures.

 

 

PRAISE: a social network for online music learning  — from ec.europa.eu
Community feedback and advanced analytics, combined with lesson planning and monitoring tools for teachers make this social learning platform, PRAISE, a step forward in collaborative online learning.

Excerpt:

Feedback is essential for learning,’ says Carles Sierra, Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council and coordinator of the PRAISE project. The project aims at filling a gap in online learning by creating a social network for music education with tools for giving and receiving feedback.

Using PRAISE’s Music Circle platform, music students can upload recordings of their playing and receive detailed feedback from other members of the community. Advanced tools let reviewers place their comments as annotations at exactly the right place in the audio signal representation.

‘Students’ peers can say “this crescendo is very nice” or “this passage is very expressive”,’ explains Professor Sierra. ‘This timeline of structured comments and this level of granularity have been lacking in online approaches to giving feedback on music.’

 

Also see their videos at:

 

praise-music-online-learning-july2015

 

From DSC:
Might the education system in Finland affect how innovative their citizens are?

It surely looks like it.


 

These are the most innovative countries in the world — from agenda.weforum.org

 

InnovativeCountries2015

 

 

From DSC:
Many times we don’t want to hear news that could be troubling in terms of our futures. But we need to deal with these trends now or face the destabilization that Harold Jarche mentions in his posting below. 

The topics found in the following items should be discussed in courses involving economics, business, political science, psychology, futurism, engineering, religion*, robotics, marketing, the law/legal affairs and others throughout the world.  These trends are massive and have enormous ramifications for our societies in the not-too-distant future.

* When I mention religion classes here, I’m thinking of questions such as :

  • What does God have in mind for the place of work in our lives?
    Is it good for us? If so, why or why not?
  • How might these trends impact one’s vocation/calling?
  • …and I’m sure that professors who teach faith/
    religion-related courses can think of other questions to pursue

 

turmoil and transition — from jarche.com by Harold Jarche

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

One of the greatest issues that will face Canada, and many developed countries in the next decade will be wealth distribution. While it does not currently appear to be a major problem, the disparity between rich and poor will increase. The main reason will be the emergence of a post-job economy. The ‘job’ was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over. From self-driving vehicles to algorithms replacing knowledge workers, employment is not keeping up with production. Value in the network era is accruing to the owners of the platforms, with companies such as Instagram reaching $1 billion valuations with only 13 employees.

The emerging economy of platform capitalism includes companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. These giants combined do not employ as many people as General Motors did.  But the money accrued by them is enormous and remains in a few hands. The rest of the labour market has to find ways to cobble together a living income. Hence we see many people willing to drive for a company like Uber in order to increase cash-flow. But drivers for Uber have no career track. The platform owners get richer, but the drivers are limited by finite time. They can only drive so many hours per day, and without benefits. At the same time, those self-driving cars are poised to replace all Uber drivers in the near future. Standardized work, like driving a vehicle, has little future in a world of nano-bio-cogno-techno progress.

 

Value in the network era is accruing to the owners of the platforms, with companies such as Instagram reaching $1 billion valuations with only 13 employees.

 

For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the knowledge economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization. 

 

Also see:

Will artificial intelligence and robots take your marketing job? — from by markedu.com by
Technology will overtake jobs to an extent and at a rate we have not seen before. Artificial intelligence is threatening jobs even in service and knowledge intensive sectors. This begs the question: are robots threatening to take your marketing job?

Excerpt:

What exactly is a human job?
The benefits of artificial intelligence are obvious. Massive productivity gains while a new layer of personalized services from your computer – whether that is a burger robot or Dr. Watson. But artificial intelligence has a bias. Many jobs will be lost.

A few years ago a study from the University of Oxford got quite a bit of attention. The study said that 47 percent of the US labor market could be replaced by intelligent computers within the next 20 years.

The losers are a wide range of job categories within the administration, service, sales, transportation and manufacturing.

Before long we should – or must – redefine what exactly a human job is and the usefulness of it. How we as humans can best complement the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence.

 

This development is expected to grow fast. There are different predictions about the timing, but by 2030 there will be very few tasks that only a human can solve.

 

 

2015SocialMediaImagesGuide

 

2015 Guide to Social Media Image Sizes – Infographic — from setupablogtoday.com by Jamie Spencer

Excerpt:

Get your social media platforms optimized with the right image sizes and stand out from the crowd. From Twitter and Pinterest to Instagram and Facebook image sizes, we have the complete guide right here in one clear infographic!

 

 

TwitterGraphics2015

 

 

Also see:

 

digital-social-mobile-2015

We Are Social’s comprehensive new report covers internet, social media and mobile usage statistics from all over the world. It contains more than 350 infographics, including global snapshots, regional overviews, and in-depth profiles of 30 of the world’s largest economies. For a more insightful analysis of these numbers, please visit http://wearesocial.sg/blog/2015/01/digital-social-mobile-2015/.

 

Automated, creative & dispersed: The future of work in the 21st century — from The Economist

 

FutureOfWork-TheEconomist-April2015

Date Published:
May 20th 2015

 

Excerpt:

The key findings are as follows:

  • In the next decade-and-a-half, digital technology will dissolve the concept of work as we know it.
  • The growing use and sophistication of automation will shift the emphasis of human employment towards creativity and social skills.
  • This new reality of work will require a new, more nurturing approach to management.

Contents

About the research
Executive summary
Introduction
Your workplace is… everywhere
The hospital of the future
Creative and social skills will dominate the automated world
The bank of the future
Well-being and employee development top the management agenda
The university of the future
The government of the future
Conclusion
Appendix: Survey results

 

 

This requires university workers to develop new skills, she says. Ms Shutt predicts that in the future lecturers will be encouraging more of their students to take work placements or even launch their own start-ups, and developing relationships that give industry a greater input
into the direction of research. “We need to develop skills in interaction with business and in preparing students for the work world.”

 

 

 

Rhizomatic, digital habitat – A study of connected learning and technology application — from researchgate.net by Thomas Kjærgaard & Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen, Institute of Philosophy and Learning, Aalborg University, Denmark

Keywords:
Rhizomatic learning, connectivism, digital habitat, inclusion, cooperative learning, community of practice.

1.0 Introduction
It is fair to claim that today’s college classrooms are technology rich; in our case almost every student brings his/her own laptop, smartphone and maybe tablet-computer to class every day. It is our experience that the technology richness doesn’t always contribute to the learning process, especially in presentation-oriented, teacher-centered teaching. The majority of the activities carried out on the computers are substituting paper based alternatives. In our case the technologies only rarely redefine the pedagogic design or the students’ behavior. The students in this study almost never use blogs (0%), social bookmarking (6%), twitter (0%) or multimodal note taking on smartphones. So they generally copy analogue behavior to the digital world. We believe that with the web-technology at hand today the possibilities for redefining the pedagogic design and the students learning processes are many. Because of that this study was designed as a synthesis of partially an attempt to redefine the utilization of digital tools according to their affordances, and partially to study a networking community of practice in a college classroom (Sorensen & Dalsgaard 2008). By combining digital tools that aspire to have great potential in teaching and learning activities that utilize the network structures that the students know already form their private lives we hope to make a strong connection that will generate a powerful pedagogic design. Furthermore the technology will show its general equity as more than just a note taking tool.

6.0 In conclusion
In the six classes that participated in this small study it seemed that many benefitted from the new technology-based way of collaborating. But it is still only a few groups that really worked as communities of practice in digital habitats, it seems that only very few possessed ‘network literacy’. Our survey showed that the students were not used to thinking of the internet as a place for not only searching information but also for processing information. The survey says that in the childhood homes of the students computers were used for entertainment (64%) and games (84%) and only 12% used computers for forums and blogs etc. Maybe we can’t use their childhood experiences with computer usage to explain their adult usage of computers in general but there is a connection between those students who come from families where internet forums and blogs were used to process information and those students current network literacy. The problem is that only three students came for such families, hence the foundation for stating anything general is way too insecure.

It would be interesting to investigate why some groups worked as communities of practice and why others didn’t. Unfortunately that was not within the scope of this study but it might be in future studies. It could seem like the groups that became communities of practice were the ones where the group members already knew how to learn in networks and which knowledge that was appropriate to ‘store’ in their group peers.

This notion, if it is meaningful on a larger scale, is similar to what Rheingold calls network literacy (Rheingold 2012).

Is the term ‘homo conexus’ describing the evolution of the homo sapiens into at more networking more knowledge sharing, more co-creating being? It seems to be what the literature on the field predict (Bay 2009, Rheingold 2012, Castells 2005, Siemens 2005). However in our small study it didn’t seem to be the case. We saw a glimpse of ‘homo conexus’ in some groups but the conclusion is that there is still quite a long way from the connected, networking homo conexus of the literature to an average student in our classes. The study shows that working in a technology rich, rhizomatic classroom demanded a lot form both teachers and students.

  • First and foremost both students and teachers have to acknowledge the principals of the rhizomatic approach. The pedagogic design must present a map of possibilities and not a fixed route. This is in itself a challenge for some students.
  • Then students and teachers have to be literate in the technologies.
  • Then students and teachers have to acknowledge that mastering learning is an important part of learning.
  • Then students and teachers have to understand and accept their new position in the learning process and in the didactic design

If those circumstances are present then the rhizomatic, digital habitat seems to be an interesting pedagogic design that could be investigated further. If we look at isolated instances (the Tabby Lou story, Gee 2012) it is evident that almost anything can be learned if you master learning in at network and that potential should be utilized in teaching.

 

 

EMLYON Business School to create a ‘Smart Business School’ via IBM Cloud — from finance.yahoo.com
New digital learning environment based on the SoftLayer infrastructure will personalize education experience globally

Excerpt:

ECULLY, France, Jan. 27, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) and EMLYON today announced a program to develop a ‘Smart Business School’ higher education environment that is capable of delivering personalized, on-demand business education on a global basis via the IBM Cloud. EMLYON will work with IBM to place educational innovation and digital entrepreneurship at the heart of its strategy, to create better outcomes for its students and a more engaging environment for its teachers.

The changes in the world of education given rising globalization forces, new uses related to digital content  and higher expectations of learners and teachers is putting a pressure on higher education. In response, EMLYON turned to IBM to transform the current ways in which their students are acquiring knowledge and skills to be better prepared for the world outside the classroom.

“What we believe is genuinely new about this initiative is that it will allow us to deliver content and coaching that are absolutely relevant to each participants’ needs and aspirations, wherever they are in the world and at every step on their career path,” said Bernard Belletante, dean of EMLYON. “So, in a similar way that users today can cherry-pick their entertainment, our community will be able to choose when, where and how much it learns.”

 

From DSC, a somewhat related comment to the above item…
Even if and when technologies such as IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Deepmind, or Amazon’s Echo get baked into MOOCs and/or other forms of online or blended learning, teachers/professors/trainers will still be critically important. They always have been and likely always will be.  However, the heavy lifting of learning a subject may be able to be done with such tools and technologies. Learners will then come to the Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) with their questions and requests for further guidance.

Along these lines, a somewhat-related graphic from a while back:

 

Watson-MOOCs-NewTypesCollaboration-DChristian-2-14-13

 

 

 

 

6 things you can learn from LeWeb Day One — from nextberlin.eu by Adam Tinworth

Excerpt:

1. The sharing economy is bigger than you think
2. The secret of wearable will be simplicity
3. We all wear clothes, but we don’t all wear jewellery or watches
4. Yandex started life searching floppy disks
5. The clock is ticking on the classic office suite of software
6. Games make you a cognitive superhuman

 

What is LeWeb?

Excerpt:

LeWeb in a nutshell
Founded in 2004 by French entrepreneurs Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, LeWeb is an internationally-renowned conference for digital innovation where visionaries, startups, tech companies, brands and leading media converge to explore today’s hottest trends and define the future of internet-driven business.

 
 Excerpt:

Our latest report explores the relationship between the corporate learning experience and the education system.‘Business and education’ addresses such issues as engaging Gen Y, MOOCs and corporate learning, academic research for learning strategy, and learning analytics and puts the commercial partner right at the heart of some of today’s most crucial conversations around learning.

 

BusinessAndEducation-Dec2014

 

Contents:

Introduction
Rebecca Stromeyer, Managing Director, ICWE GmbH
Jon Kennard, Editor, TrainingZone.co.uk
Ian Myson , Director of Partnerships and Product Management, CMI

Making the link between academia and corporate learning
Anita Pincas, Visiting Fellow, Institute of Education

Digital Higher Education through partnership
Gilly Salmon, Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of Western Australia
Ben Mackenzie, Director, Learning Transformations at Swinburne
University of Technology

Big Data and Analytics in Education and Corporate Learning
Ger Driesen, Consultant, Challenge Leadership Development Academy

How to engage Generation Y in the workplace
Martin Couzins, Founder, LearnPatch

Ten ways MOOCs can underpin your corporate learning strategy
Donald Clark, Founder, Epic Group Ltd

 

From DSC:
I’m posting this item in support of such collaborations. As I mentioned the other day, we need stronger, more well-thought out spectrums of growth/scaffolding and collaborations amongst the worlds of K-12, higher ed, and the corporate world.

 

Rome 320 AD – Interactive App — from indianajen.com by Jennifer Carey

Excerpt:

The app follows the lives of four Romans as they travel through the city on a summer day in 320 CE. You can explore 3D, interactive models of the city in high resolution and detail.

 

ROME-320AD

 

ROME-320AD-image

 

Also see:

 

 

World-of-Comenius-Oct2014

 

‘World of Comenius’ demonstrates powerful educational interaction w/ Leap Motion & Oculus Rift and Tomas “Frooxius” Mariancik

Excerpt:

We recently covered a (at that point unnamed) VR project by developer Tomáš “Frooxius” Marian?ík, the mind behind the stunning ‘Sightline’ VR series of demos. The project fused Leap Motion skeletal hand tracking with Oculus Rift DK2 positional tracking to produce an impressively intuitive VR interface. Now, a new video of the interface  shows impressive progress. We catch up with Tomáš to find out some more about this mysterious VR project.

Enter the ‘World of Comenius’
The virtual reality resurgence that is currently underway, necessarily and predictably concentrates on bringing people new ways to consume and experience media and games. This is where virtual reality has the best chance of breaking through as a viable technology, one that will appeal to consumers worldwide. But virtual reality’s greatest impact, at least in terms of historical worth to society, could and probably will come in the form of non-entertainment based fields.

 

 

Also see:

 

Stephen Downes: ‘This is the next era of learning’ — from online-educa.com

Excerpts:

This year we are building on work we have undertaken over the last few years to develop and deploy the next generation of learning technologies, which we are calling ‘learning and performance support systems’. This is the outcome of an internal prototype called Plearn – ‘Personal Learning Environment and Research Network’ – and develops the idea of learning support based on personal and individual needs. This is not simply ‘personalised’ learning, it is a step beyond that. Rather than offering a customised version of some generic offering, we propose to enable each learner to develop their own custom programme from the ground up.

Our application, which launches in a limited beta September 30, provides individual learners with the tools and support necessary to access learning from any number of providers – not just educational institutions, but also their friends and mentors, their current and future employers, community and social programmes, and much more. Built on current and evolving learning technology standards, it provides access to MOOCs, to traditional learning management systems, to stand-alone courses and software, and even to the world of the Internet of things.

At the core of LPSS is a system we call the ‘personal learning record’ (PLR). A person’s LPSS system keeps track of everything related to learning – exercises followed, tests taken, games and simulations attempted, work read – and stores that all in a single location. In this way, unlike a learning management system, it combines data from the learning environment, the work environment and even the social environment, thus enabling adaptive learning software to close the loop between learning and performance. The PLR is also combined with a learner’s personal library and their personal e-portfolio, and links to credentials offered by and stored by learning institutions, employers, and social network activities, such as badges.

 

Also see:

 

LPSS-Sept2014

 

With a shout out to
Ana Cristina Pratas for her Scoop on this

 

Also see:

online-educa-berlin-2014

 
 
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