On 04/14/2010,
in learning ecosystem,
by Daniel Christian
On 04/14/2010,
in CMS/LMS, higher education, learning ecosystem, online learning,
by Daniel Christian
On 03/24/2010,
in data related items, learning ecosystem, pace of change, publishing, research,
by Daniel Christian
Real-time scholarship — from academicevolution.com by Gideon Burton
“The tools are only getting better and better for discovery, networking, data mining, networking, collaborating, representing findings and disseminating learned communication. I pity my colleagues trapped in the print paradigm. By the time a journal article appears (or even an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education), what they report on will be secondary to the real conversation. The real scholars are the real-time scholars (emphasis DSC). We use legacy knowledge systems and respect them for what they do, but we don’t wait for them to fossilize the conversation; we’re too busy growing live knowledge with the more intellectually agile tools of mobile phones, microblogging, and live update streams.”
From DSC:
Gideon Burton expresses my viewpoints on this topic as well. The pace of exchanging information and learning about new information has picked up considerably. Those who rely on getting their information via printed journals are going to be at least 1 step behind. (This goes for textbooks as well.)
But my larger concern here is that if we aren’t connected in real-time to a global network of colleagues and peers, our knowledgebases may be a version or two behind — and worse yet, we may be relaying inaccurate information. We need a real-time, up-to-date, ever-growing, ever-adapting learning ecosystem.
Once again I ask, “Can you hear the engines roaring? As for myself, I’m trying not to come out onto the racetrack in an old “Model T”, as I have a significant co-pay on emergency room visits!
On 03/24/2010,
in cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, future, future of higher education, global / globalization, higher education, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, pace of change, strategy, UK,
by Daniel Christian
Becta is Fit for the Future (March 2010)
This project will identify opportunities that technology will bring to education over the next few years…
Fit for the future is an exciting new project which aims to identify the opportunities and challenges that technology will bring the education and skills sectors over the next 5-6 years and work with leaders, practitioners and the technology industry to develop practical, real-world solutions.
The rapid pace of change and innovation in technology means that the education and skills sector constantly needs to adapt to the technical and social impact of new developments. Fit for the Future is about looking several years ahead and making decisions today that will make us ready for tomorrow’s world (emphasis DSC — and a quick comment: this is a very smart strategy).
The project began in Autumn 2009 and will run until Summer 2011. Becta is currently working with key leading educationalists, technologists, thinkers and experts to develop propositions in response to the key trends identified in the DCSF-funded programme Beyond Current Horizons.
Focusing on five themes, the ideas that these response groups generate will then be tested in real-world situations to assess if and how they could work on a wider scale.
The five themes are:
Theme 1 – Learners’ personal cloud: this theme explores the capacity of learners to constantly connect or engage with a network or school at any time or place and investigates their experiences and expectations of personal virtual environments and personalised data.
Theme 2 – Learning beyond a single setting: this theme looks at how learning is increasingly taking place across multiple institutions or places (school, home libraries, museums, employers) and explores how technology can support this in a revised 14-19 curriculum.
Theme 3 – Making the most of data: looks at how technology can be used to make better use of the huge amount of data that is constantly generated in the life of a learner and increasingly being used to build profiles about them.
Theme 4 – New Knowledge Skills: Our future economy will be heavily reliant on innovation, research and development, problem solving and digital capability. This theme aims to better understand what competencies, skills and knowledge will be required of both students and teachers, particularly in relation to STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).
Theme 5 – Education across borders: Learners and educators now have access to resources not just from their immediate surroundings but from across the globe. This theme explores the potential creation of educational franchises across national boundaries supported by technology-based resources and networks.
ATG: ‘We’ll Bring the Teachers to You’ — from homecaremag.com
ROCKY HILL, Conn. — Education and information served up however you want it — that’s ATG Rehab’s vision for its new comprehensive rehab education program, one aspect of which launched on Thursday.
“We want to bring education in different forms and formats, in person and online, both free and for a charge, in a Webinar form, in an online form, tailored or specialized,” said Jerry Knight, president of northwestern regional operations for ATG Rehab, a top nationwide complex rehab provider.
The company, which has 26 locations in 21 states and is still growing, is partnering with the University of Pittsburgh, the International Association for Continuing Education and Training, manufacturers and clinical experts to offer everything from online modules and Webinars to in-person and in-facility training.
Envisioning the post-LMS era: The Open Learning Network — from Educause Quarterly by Jonathan Mott
Learning management systems (LMSs) have dominated the teaching and learning landscape in higher education for the past decade,1 with a recent Delta Initiative report indicating that more than 90 percent of colleges and universities have a standardized, institutional LMS implementation.2 LMS-related decisions continue to rank among the most pressing IT issues for campus leaders and administrators, as explained in EDUCAUSE Review’s “Top-10 IT Issues, 2009,” which lists several challenges associated with LMS implementations, including:
- Acquisition strategies
- Adapting LMSs to local needs
- Managing rising costs
- Maintaining system stability and integrity
- Integrating LMSs with other campus tools and data3
While the LMS has become central to the business of colleges and universities, it has also become a symbol of the higher learning status quo. Many students, teachers, instructional technologists, and administrators consider the LMS too inflexible and are turning to the web for tools that support their everyday communication, productivity, and collaboration needs. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, microblogging tools, and other web-based applications are supplanting the teaching and learning tools previously found only inside the LMS.
The dilemma thus created is succinctly summarized in the “Top-10” report:
Although the LMS needs to continue serving as an enterprise CMS [course/content management system], it also needs to be a student-centered application that gives students greater control over content and learning. Hence, there is continual pressure for the LMS to utilize and integrate with many of the Web 2.0 tools that students already use freely on the Internet and that they expect to find in this kind of system. Some educators even argue that the next requirement is a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that interoperates with an LMS.4 (emphasis DSC)
Where the LMS is vertically integrated and institutionally centralized, the PLE is the educational manifestation of the web’s “small pieces loosely joined,” a “world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance, and time.”5 Proponents assert that the PLE’s greater flexibility, portability, adaptability, and openness make it far superior to the LMS as a teaching and learning platform. The PLE is not without its weaknesses, however. Potential security and reliability concerns abound. This conundrum leaves higher education with what appears to be an unsatisfying either-or choice that requires significant tradeoffs whichever path we choose.
In an increasingly sophisticated technology environment, however, I contend that we can bring together — or mash up — the best of both the LMS and the PLE paradigms to create a learning platform more ideally suited to teaching and learning in higher education — an “open learning network” (OLN) (emphasis DSC). An OLN is intended to be, at the same time:
- Secure and open
- Integrated and modular
- Private and public
- Reliable and flexible
The framework outlined in this article provides a blueprint for developing what KnowledgeWorks calls a “lightweight, modular infrastructure” with built-in resilience to meet the dynamic needs of today’s “learning agents.”6
The OLN has three key features:
- It is malleable.
- It leverages technologies that did not exist when the LMS was born in the late 1990s.
- It strikes a manageable balance between imperatives of institutional networks and the promise of the cloud (emphasis DSC).
On 03/04/2010,
in disruption, education technology, innovation, learning ecosystem,
by Daniel Christian
three pressing challenges — 2/26/10 posting from D’Arcy Norman dot net
Three pressing challenges for learners in creating and using technology in an educational context.
2. overwhelming options
3. literacy
4. Solution?
The only solution I can think of is to just dive in. To live with a whole bunch of technologies. To not see them as separate, distinct, or extra, but rather as just the way things work. Write a blog. Publish a newsletter. Manage a wiki. Shoot some video. Post photos. Just spend time doing it. Manage your own personal cyberinfrastructure. Build your personal learning environment. Engage your personal learning network(s). They are there already, you just need to tap into them (emphasis DSC as this describes a Learning Ecosystem).
Excerpt below is from:
Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie – March 2, 2010.
#608 – Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
54,885 Readers – http://www.masie.com – The MASIE Center.
Host: Virtual Leadership LAB & Seminar – Saratoga Springs
Video learning in so many modes:
I am struck by the wide variety of uses for video in learning that are on our menu as designers. As I inventory how we are using video at The MASIE Center, the list is long and growing
– Video “YouTube” Story Segments.
– Video PodCasts.
– Video Reports – Webcam Captures.
– Produced Video for Learning Modules.
– Skype (on every one of our desks at work)
– Webinar Video Elements.
– High Definition Video Conferencing (up to 4 Megs)
– Telepresence Video (Beyond 6 Megs).
– Flipcam and iPhone Video Clips
– Webchat Video.
– Video Capture of Seminars and Classrooms.
– Video Keynotes Live and Asynchronously.
– Video Guests in Workshops and Conferences.
– Video Coaching.
The introduction of video into almost every aspect of our learning and work tasks is profound and “disrupting”. As designers, we must experiment with these formats – looking for evidence and appropriate use cases and examples of when not to use video. Rising bandwidth, lowered equipment costs, ease of editing and growing expectations of learners will make video a profound component of our learning efforts going forward.
From DSC:
Wow. As you can see from the above listing (and this is a highly-targeted listing in terms of the scope it addresses, as it focuses just on video), there are so many ways to deliver content, to teach, to dialog, to share information, to learn…and these methods are constantly changing…thus the name of this blog, Learning Ecosystems.
On 02/26/2010,
in learning ecosystem,
by Daniel Christian
Toward a new ecosystem of learning: Reflections on the Digital Media and Learning Conference — from spotlight.macfound.org
Highlights include talks on the participation gap by S. Craig Watkins, and Sonia Livingstone on learning and risk taking.
“We were lucky enough to spend a few days in San Diego last week at the first Digital Media and Learning Conference supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Hub at University of California, Irvine. Lucky not only because it was 70 degrees in February (apologies to those of you still digging out from this month’s blizzards) but because listening to smart people in academia, government and technology talk about a burgeoning digital ecosystem is our idea of a good time. We came away with lots of material for future Spotlight features. Here’s some of what we heard at the conference and what we continue hear around the web upon our return…”
On 02/17/2010,
in elearning, learning ecosystem,
by Daniel Christian
E-learning ecosystem in organizations — from Michael Hanley
Which included this reference/definition:
An ecosystem is a system whose members benefit from each other’s participation via symbiotic relationships (positive sum relationships). It is a term that originated from biology, and refers to self-sustaining systems (emphasis DSC).
On 02/12/2010,
in CMS/LMS, learning ecosystem,
by Daniel Christian
Global success, Global failure of the CMS/LMS needs to stop — from Drupal Education for Educators
I know you’re saying “but Bryan, didn’t you mean just the Drupal solution”, no. Drupal is not the answer. Plone, WordPress, Moveable Type, Joomla, PHPNuke, Moodle, NOTEPAD is not the answer. We need to start looking at systems development based on a services and scalability perspective. No one system is going to solve that problem (emphasis DSC). We need to start looking at what systems do well and then play to those strengths in the creation of a service.
So, what I’ve proposed above is more of a communication between and across systems. Things like single sign on systems and simple modules within each project could allow users to flow seamlessly between them. RSS and XMLRPC calls could allow session / user display data to flow seamlessly across each. The most important thing though is that any system can be any CMS/LMS choice. Example of that….
- Core LMS / data system is Moodle
- CMS is Drupal
- SMMS is Drupal
- Syllabus system is WordPress
- Communications system is Plone
- Blogging platform is moveable type
- Wiki collaboration via Wikispace (emphasis on bulleted points: DSC)
On 02/10/2010,
in CMS/LMS, learning ecosystem,
by Daniel Christian
From DSC:
I ran across this 10/4/07 NITLE keynote presentation from Jason Cole (one of the co-authors of Using Moodle, 2nd ed.) and on slide 4/46 he mentioned the following: (the bulleted text is his, the graphic and callouts are mine)
On 02/09/2010,
in education technology, elearning, engagement / engaging students, expectations, game-changing environment, generational differences, hybrid learning, informal learning, internet, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, mobile learning, more voice more choice more control, online learning, student-related, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, telecommunications,
by Daniel Christian
From DSC:
I signed up and downloaded a whitepaper from intelliresponse.com entitled, “Going Mobile: Web Self-Service for Students — Learn how higher education institutions can embrace the new multi-channel eco-system for student self-service (via Mobile, Social Media, Web)”.
I thought it was interesting how the term eco-system weaved its way through this company’s marketing literature. But it also relayed some more data on the increasing amount of mobile devices out there (now and expected in the near future). If we were to substitute the word “learning” in place of the words “self-service”, this topic becomes very relevant to this blog.
Here are a couple graphics from the paper:
