From DSC:
Here are some items related to what I call “Learning from the Living Room” — a trend that continues to develop that involves:

  • Using high-end, personalized, multimedia-based, interactive, team-created content — packed with new reporting tools for better diagnostics/learning analytics — available via a cloud-based “education store”/marketplace/exchange
  • Web-accessible content that’s available 24x7x365
  • The power of social networks/learning
  • Riding the wave of the massive convergence of the computer, the telephone, and the television.

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Smarter TV: Living room as digital hub from Samsung and Microsoft to Apple and Google — from wired.com by Tim Carmody
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
  • In the future, the living room will replace the home office as most households’ home for the stationary personal computer. Instead of printers and mice and other corded accessories, networked appliances and post-PC machines share data with one another and with the cloud. Play and productivity both become decentered; gaming and entertainment might be on a tablet or a television, with recipes at the refrigerator, a shopping list for the smartphone, and an instructional video on the television set. All of these experiences will be coherent, continuous and contextual. And like the personal computer at the height of Pax Wintel, the living room will be a platform characterized by triumphant pluralism.“The thing about the living room is that it’s universal; everyone in the household uses it,” Samsung VP Eric Anderson told me at today’s event. “We know that we’re not going to capture every single member of the household. In my family, my wife and my daughter are Apple, me and my sons are Android,” he noted, pointing out that the majority of devices introduced today can interact with either mobile platform.

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The modern mechanics of app stores: today, tomorrow and connected TV — from guardian.co.uk by Dean Johnson

Excerpt:

What’s next for app stores?
It’s time for each platform to up its game – smart TVs are coming. The small and medium screen experience will shortly be translated to the bigger screen as connectivity and discoverability takes on even greater importance.

Google and Apple will further interweave themselves into our daily lives as iOS and Android seamlessly combine our smartphones and tablets with our new smartTVs. Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) and the programmes themselves will suggest related content, from apps to music to film to books. This must all be presented in an approachable, then browsable manner to encourage additional discovery.

The quest for the perfect meta-data will become increasingly important and voice commands will need to deliver the best search results with the minimum of fuss. This time next year, the battle of the app stores will be fought on the move, on the desktop and on the living room wall.

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Samsung Launches Smart TVs With Gestures, Voice Control — from by Douglas Perry

Excerpt:

A Kinect-like feature is made possible via camera and microphone integration that comes standard with the LED ES7500, LED ES8000 and Plasma E8000 models. According to Samsung, consumers can launch apps such as Facebook or YouTube, or search the web via voice commands. Waving the hand will move the cursor and select links. The TVs integrate a Samsung dual-core processor as well as a new Webkit-based web browser to improve overall performance. The high-end 7500 and 8000 TVs ship with a remote with an integrated touchscreen. A wireless keyboard that is compatible with Samsung’s TVs as well as the Galaxy Tab tablet is sold as an option.

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New TV experiences through companion apps — from moxie pulse

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When Ivory Towers Fall: The Emerging Education Marketplace — from The World Future Society by Thomas Frey

Excerpt:

Throughout history, education has been formed around the concept of “place.”  Build fancy buildings, attract world-renowned scholars, and you have a college or university.  This model works well in a culture based on teaching. Over the coming years, with our hyper-connected world, we will be shifting to a learning model.  While “place” will still matter, it will matter differently. Teaching requires experts; learning only requires coaches.  The two primary variables of time and money will drive the new education marketplace, and the four primary trend lines will involve…

Addendum 3/9/12:

Udemy’s Faculty Project nabs 50,000 students and an Ivy league professor — from gigaom.com by Ryan Lawler

Excerpt:

About six weeks ago, educational video startup Udemy launched its Faculty Project, a nonprofit program for distributing streaming university curriculum online. Early results have been pretty successful, with more than 50,000 students signing up for the program. But that’s not all: the Faculty Project is also bringing on ever more prestigious faculty, with its first Ivy League professor soon coming on board.

In contrast to Udemy’s for-profit platform, which enables teachers to create online courses and charges for access to them, the Faculty Project is a free offering that is designed to connect students from around the world with university faculty for high-quality courses online.

Unified opens an online university for social media marketers — from TechCruch.com by Anthony Ha

 

unifiedsocial.com

Services > Unified University

The social media landscape is complex and constantly evolving, leaving top global brands and agencies with the challenge of staying on top of the latest trends and best practices. Unified University is a first of its kind – an all-encompassing training, continuing education and certification program, complete with access to the industry leading best practices knowledge base. Unified University is designed to help marketing and agency executives become experts and internal thought leaders on social strategies, platform insights, earned media measurement, and more.

Through Unified University’s comprehensive training program, a social team can get certified on the Unified Social Operating Platform and learn about the latest advances in social advertising. Certification ensures that a team is up to date on the latest options within the social web, including the benefits of advertising across social ecosystems including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon and more.

Teams learn that brands may require very different strategies to ultimately achieve similar results. Unified University assures that teams know how to strategically represent brands across all social options while delivering high quality results and maximum ROI.

From DSC:
Is this a part of the future? If higher ed doesn’t respond more forcefully, I’d say so.

Along these lines, from page 408 of the Steve Jobs book:

One of Job’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you can’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said.

Innovate. Reinvent. Staying relevant. This goes for the accreditation agencies as well.

 Also see:

 

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Staying Relevant

Who decides what gets sold in the bookstore? — from paidcontent.org by Seth Godin

Excerpt:

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books [at Amazon.com] I mention in the bibliography.

 

From DSC:
By the way, some nice quotes from the Stop Stealing Dreams page:

  • The economy has changed, probably forever.  School hasn’t.
    .
  • Our kids are too important to sacrifice to the status quo.

From DSC:
This is exactly what I was getting at with The Forthcoming Walmart of Education (2008) and it points out, again, that innovation is much faster and stronger in the online world than it is in the face-to-face world. The tools being developed to engage, track, diagnose, and adapt continue to be developed. What may have once been poo-pooed continues to pick up steam. (Christensen, Johnson, & Horn are right on track.) The trend will be towards more team-based endeavors that can be made available at a greatly reduced price. They will be multimedia-based, highly-interactive, and state-of-the-art (technically and pedagogically).

Treating Higher Ed’s ‘Cost Disease’ With Supersize Online Courses — from The Chronicle by Marc Parry

Excerpt (with emphasis from DSC):

Professors should move away from designing foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the basis of “intuition,” she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.

“We’re seeing failure rates in these large introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody,” Ms. Thille says. “There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where they start—to be able to successfully complete.”

Her approach brings together faculty subject experts, learning researchers, and software engineers [from DSC — a TEAM-based approach] to build open online courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills. As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.

From DSC:
Such learner profiles will most likely reside in the cloud and eventually standards will be established to insert new data into these profiles. The access to view/edit these profiles will be controlled by the individual learners (hopefully!).  What if learners could selectively grant corporations access to this type of profile as their new resume?

For items concerning team-based approaches, see this recording (June 2009) as well as this collection of items.

For items concerning consortia and pooling resources, see here and here.

 

 

Does The Online Education Revolution Mean The Death Of The Diploma? — from fastcoexist.com by Michael Karnjanaprakor, CEO of Skillshare
As the options for self-education explode, what does a college education mean? And how can we measure what a good education is?

Excerpt:

What we’re witnessing is a bottom-up revolution in education: Learners, not institutions, are leading innovation.

From DSC:
I post this in hopes that those of us working within higher education will strive all the harder to:

  • Create innovative solutions
  • Reinvent ourselves
  • Stay relevant
  • Reduce the costs of obtaining an education

 Also see:

TEDxAshokaU — Arizona State University on  February 10, 2012
…the TEDxAshokaU event featured leaders speaking on the topic of “Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education”.

Speakers

  •     Barbara Bush, President & Founder, Global Health Corps
  •     Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University
  •     Desh Deshpande, Co-Founder & Chairman, Sycamore Networks
  •     Anne Dwane, CEO, Zinch
  •     Liz Dwyer, Education Editor, GOOD Magazine
  •     Abby Falik, Founder & CEO, Global Citizen Year
  •     Dale Stephens, UnCollege
  •     Christer Windeløv Lidzélius, CEO & Principal, KaosPilots
  •     Greg Van Kirk (MC), Co-Founder, The New Development Solutions Group
  •     George Glickley (MC), Co-Founder, The New Development Solutions Group
  •     John Cooper, TEDx faculty wildcard
  •     Fernando Padilla, TEDx student wildcard

 

GoodSemester.com

 .

https://www.goodsemester.com/?p=featuretour

From DSC:

  • Tie this type of cloud-based platform in with learning analytics, new types of certifications/assessments/badges, web-based learner profiles, and the ability to continue building your own cloud over a lifetime, and you may find yourself enjoying a very powerful learning ecosystem!!!

 

 

A dangerous game — from learning with ‘e’s by Steve Wheeler

Excerpt:

This got me thinking that many of the world’s education systems are a little like the eating game of Meze. We pile the students plates high with content. Content of every kind is presented to be consumed, and the poor students don’t stand a chance. Many are overwhelmed by the amount of content they need to learn, and the pace at which they have to learn it. Even while they are struggling their way through an overburdened ‘just in case’ curriculum, still more content continues to arrive at an alarming pace. Some learners cry out for mercy, but they are still compelled to consume the content, because later, they are required to regurgitate it in an examination to obtain their grades. The examinations bear no resemblance to that which will be required of them in the real world. No wonder so many wish to leave the table early. What can teachers do to obviate this problem? Some are making a difference, reinterpreting the curriculum they are given by enabling activities and creating resources that facilitate student centred learning. Learning at one’s own pace, and in a manner that suits the individual will overcome some of the problems of overload, but more needs to be done. Things are changing, but they are changing slowly, too slowly for many people’s tastes. It’s a dangerous game we are playing in education. Isn’t it about time we stopped?

An infographic series on the current crisis facing higher education — from educationnews.org

  • Video
  • Infographic Part I
    A breakdown re: how an economic bubble forms, expands, and bursts; a comparison of the higher ed bubble to the housing bubble, and a look at the first major contributor to college’s bubble behavior: the rising cost of tuition.
  • Infographic part II:
    Analysis of the second and third big factors in blowing up the higher ed bubble: the student loans crisis, and the unforgiving post-graduation job market.

 

 

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