What Glass does offer, Vanden Heuvel said, is a shift in perspective, particularly because teachers can use it as a tool to engage students faster and more easily than before. After returning from Geneva, Vanden Heuvel launched a YouTube channel devoted to his experiments with science–and Glass–called STEMBite. To date, in more than two dozen videos, he’s guided viewers through the physics of ball spin on the tennis court to the polarization of light through (appropriately enough) a pair of glasses.
“What I’m excited by making these videos is not only that they’re filmed with Google Glass, but they’re high engagement videos, so they’re meant to be really short and to get kids to think about how math and science is all around,” he said. “I suppose I could have done that before, but it’s just so easy now.”
Per Hanna Brown:
“I’ve had videos in my classroom before–that’s not a novel thing–but I’ve never been able to take a video from my eye perspective,” said Hannah Brown, another early Glass adopter who works as a high school art teacher at Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an all-online statewide charter school in Ohio.
From DSC: Virtual field trips, mobile learning, videoconferencing, web-based collaboration, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and other topics come to my mind when I see this.
Wearable sensors are the latest tech-related fashion craze, but not just for consumers. Businesses could soon make use of sensors affixed to hats, watches, glasses, and more. Equipped to provide workers with much-need data about the surrounding environment, these devices may soon invade the job and redefine the workplace—much like tablets and smartphones did just a few years back.
Naturally, businesses have been discussing how something like Google Glass could be used at work. Even the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon has the potential to extend to wearable technology, with workers bringing their personal smart watches and glasses for use at work. However, the potential for wearable sensors could be much greater, with specific applications created for targeted industries.
From DSC: Some serious potential for mobile/distance learning here. What if, instead of a surgeon, that person was an archaeologist on a dig speaking to students in their living rooms, on mobile devices, and/or in classrooms somewhere else…? An electrician fixing a broken transformer on the electrical grid and talking through what she is fixing…? The possibilities are numerous.
Gallup has a silver bullet for solving many of the world’s problems. Here it is: Every student in the world, from pre-K to higher ed, needs:
Someone who cares about their development
To do what they like to do each day
To do what they are best at every day
That’s it.
…
This insight is rooted in Gallup’s most important findings — everyone in the world wants a good job, and no one ever became successful by trying to improve their weaknesses. They became great by playing to their strengths and leveraging their innate talents. These two findings have absolutely everything in common with the new bill of rights.
… Gallup estimates that — at most — 30% of the United State’s workforce is actively engaged in their work. We also know the outlook is pretty miserable in schools; in elementary school,engagement peaks at 76%, but then decreases each year students are in school — down to 61% in middle school and then 44% in high school. If schools focused on students’ strengths rather than their weaknesses, students would be more engaged throughout their entire education.
I’d like to add that beyond foundational knowledge/skills, our time is best spent developing our passions, gifts, and abilities — applied towards read-world issues, problems, fun.
I see a Watson-type-of-tool as being a key ingredient for future MOOCs and the best chance for MOOCs to morph into something very powerful indeed— offloading the majority of the workload to computers/software/intelligent tutoring/learning agents, while at the same time allowing students to connect with each other and/or to Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) as appropriate.
The price of education could hopefully come way down — depending upon the costs involved with licensing Watson or a similar set of technologies — as IBM could spread out their costs to multiple institutions/organizations. This vision represents another important step towards the “Walmart of Education” that continues to develop before our eyes.
Taking this even one step further, I see this system being available to us on our mobile devices as well as in our living rooms — as the telephone, the television, and the computer continue to converge. Blended learning on steroids.
What would make this really powerful would be to provide:
The ability to create narratives/stories around content
To feed streams of content into Watson for students to tap into
Methods of mining data and using that to tweak algorithms, etc. to improve the tools/learning opportunities
Such an architecture could be applied towards lifelong learning opportunities — addressing what we now know as K-12, higher education, and corporate training/development.
From DSC: The massive convergence of the telephone, the television, and the computer continues. How that media gets to us is also changing (i.e. the cord cutting continues).
What types of innovative learning experiences can be crafted as “TV” becomes more interactive, participatory, and engaging? What happens if technologies like WebRTC make their way into our browsers and we can videoconference with each other without having to download anything?
What doors open for for us when Google, Apple, or an Amazon.com delivers your “shows” vs. NBC/ABC/CBS/etc.?
The items below cause me to reflect on those questions…
Here’s a fun combination to ponder: The world’s most powerful media company and America’s most popular sport.
That could happen if Google buys the rights to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, the all-you-can-eat subscription-TV service currently owned by DirecTV.
Netflix inks exclusive deal for first-run Weinstein films— from cnet.comThe Internet’s biggest on-demand video service will stream movies from the indie film studio before any other pay-TV providers starting in 2016, the same year it kicks off a similar Disney deal.
The new learning dashboard is your personal homepage on Khan Academy. The dashboard gives you an easy way to find the best next things for you to do. It has a bunch of really cool things designed to help you learn math, and soon other subjects, really well on your own or with a coach.
From DSC: This is the type of innovation that makes online/blended learning even more powerful/useful.
The New York Times has now opened a channel at the website If This, Then That (IFTTT). For journalism hackers and tinkering readers, this is fine news.
IFTTT is elegantly useful and usefully elegant. For a variety of sites and services (Evernote! Instagram! Dropbox!), IFTTT combines “triggers” and “actions,” so that when one thing happens on one service, something else happens on another.You can say,if I take a picture on Instagram, then automatically save it to Dropbox.
From DSC: How might this concept be used in conjunction with digital playlists/learning? If I finished the XYZ module over here at U of X, then start ABC over here at ___.
Apple gears up for the video discovery wars — from fastcolabs.com by Michael Grothaus Think Apple’s Matcha.tv acquisition was about its programming guide service? You’re probably wrong. There’s a new war brewing in online video: helping users find the stuff they want.
From DSC: Instead of discovering videos only, how about discovering items along the lines of what you are trying to learn more about? i.e. Matcha.tv meets Google Alerts meets IBM’s Watson.
The Coming Big Data Education Revolution — from by Doug Guthrie Big data, not MOOCS, will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve outcomes for individual students
Excerpt (emphasis):
Don’t get me wrong, online learning will fundamentally transform higher education, bridging distances and creating access in ways that have not been possible before. But, in this arena, MOOCs are not a transformative innovation that will forever remake academia. That honor belongs to a more disruptive and far-reaching innovation – “big data.” A catchall phrase that refers to the vast numbers of data sets that are collected daily, big data promises to revolutionize online learning and, in doing so, higher education.
Big data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students. By designing a curriculum that collects data at every step of the student learning process, universities can address student needs with customized modules, assignments, feedback and learning trees in the curriculum that will promote better and richer learning.
Nathan Weber for The New York Times Listeners use a Bible app during a sermon at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
EDMOND, Okla. — More than 500 years after Gutenberg, the Bible is having its i-moment.
For millions of readers around the world, a wildly successful free Bible app, YouVersion, is changing how, where and when they read the Bible.
Built by LifeChurch.tv, one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced evangelical churches, YouVersion is part of what the church calls its “digital missions.” They include a platform for online church services and prepackaged worship videos that the church distributes free. A digital tithing system and an interactive children’s Bible are in the works.
…
This month, the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox.
President Obama vowed Wednesday that he would soon unveil a plan to promote significant reform in higher education — with an emphasis on controlling what colleges charge students and families.
“[I]n the coming months, I will lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for middle-class students and their families. It is critical that we make sure that college is affordable for every single American who’s willing to work for it,” said Obama, in a speech at Knox College.
…
“Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money, to keep up with costs that are going up 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for,” Obama said.
From DSC: At a $175 billion per year support for postsecondary education, if the Federal Government starts redirecting this flow of $$$…I’ll bet we’ll see some change…and rather quickly I might add.
The Walmart of Education (as predicted back in December 2008) is now here, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. To what will we change? At least one major piece of the answer to that question is that we will see the continued — but increasing — use of teams of specialists that will be commissioned to create low-cost, highly-engaging content. Though expensive to create originally, such teams will more than make their money back because of the massive number of students such “courses” will serve.
…I wanted to offer another idea that might help fund engaging, multimedia-based, online-based learning materials: (NOTE: The figures I use are not accurate, but rather, they are used for illustration purposes only.)
Let’s reallocate funds towards course development, and then let’s leverage those learning materials throughout the world!
.
For students: Bring costs waaaayyyyy down and access waaayyy up!
Plus, no more defaulted loans, students could experience richer content, students wouldn’t have to wait as much on financial aid decisions. There would be fewer financial aid headaches; and the resources devoted to figuring out & processing financial aid could be reduced. The issue will be how an institution can differentiate itself in such a new world…but that issue will have to be dealt with in the future anyway.
Educators have known for 30 years that students perform better when given one-on-one tutoring and mastery learning—working on a subject until it is mastered, not just until a test is scheduled. Success also requires motivation, whether from an inner drive or from parents, mentors or peers.
Will the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) quash these success factors? Not at all. In fact, digital tools offer our best path to cost-effective, personalized learning.
I know because I have taught both ways.
…
Inspired by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s comment that “learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks,” we created a course centered on the students doing things and getting frequent feedback. Our “lectures” were short (two- to six-minute) videos designed to prime the attendees for doing the next exercise. Some problems required the application of mathematical techniques described in the videos. Others were open-ended questions that gave students a chance to think on their own and then to hash out ideas in online discussion forums.
…
That is why a properly designed automated intelligent tutoring system can foster learning outcomes as well as human instructors can, as Kurt van Lehn found in a 2011 meta-analysis in Educational Psychologist.
From DSC:
A potential learning scenario in the future:
“Learning Agent, go find me a MOOC (or what the MOOC will morph into) about ________.” Similar to a Google Alert, the Learning Agent returns some potential choices. I select one. .
Once there… “System, let’s begin.” I begin taking the online-based course — which is stocked full of a variety of media, some interactive, that I get to choose from for each module/item based upon my personal preferences — and the intelligent tutoring system kicks in and responses at relevant points based upon my questions, answers, responses. The system uses AI, data mining, learning analytics, to see how I’m doing. It tracks this for each student. Humans regularly review the data to begin noticing patterns and to tweak the algorithms based upon these patterns. .
If at any time I find the responses from the automated intelligent tutoring system confusing or weak, I will:
Make note of why I’m confused or disagree with the response (via an online-based form entry on the page; this feedback gets instantly sent to the Team of Specialists in charge of the “course.” They will use it to tweak the course/algorithms.)
Ask to speak with a person, at which point I am asked to choose whether my inquiry would best be handled by a Subject Matter Expert (SME) at $___/hour/request (more expensive price) or by an entry-level tutor (at a lower $___/hour/request). I then enter into a videoconference-based tutoring session with them, and they can access my records and even take over my screen (if I let them). Once I get my questions answered, I return to the course and continue.
From DSC: A twist on the above scenario would be if a cohorted group of people — not age-based — met in a physical place/room and were able to bounce ideas off of each other before anyone ante’d up for additional expenses by contacting a tutor and/or an SME. They could even share the expenses of the “call” (so-to-speak).
What is MTEVIDEO? The Motion Touch Enabled Video platform allows you touch on the things that interest you as they move within video, adding them to your personal boutique so you can learn, shop, and share from any MTEVIDEO whenever you want.
From DSC: I sure hope that we can use these sorts of tools, concepts, and technologies within the educational/training-related realms! More choice. More control. Participation. Interactivity. Engagement.
Take for example today’s news that Apple will begin selling video advertisements served by iAd through iTunes Radio loaded on Apple TVs. This is only the first move for Apple in this space, and others like Samsung and Google are already investing heavily in connected TV app advertising.
From DSC: Why post this? Because:
It lays out future directions/careers related to Programming, Computer Science, Data Mining, Analytics, Marketing, Telecommunications, User Experience Design, Digital and Transmedia Storytelling, and more .
It leads to “Learning from the Living [Class] Room”
.
From DSC: And if this does take off,
$14 billion won’t begin to capture the profits from this new industry. It will be far larger than that.
Relevant addendum on 6/27/13:
The future of cinema is on demand — from bitrebels.com by Ben Warner (From DSC: Having just paid $32 for 4 people — 3 of whom were kids — to see Monsters U, I believe it!) .
![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg)
