A hugely powerful vision: A potent addition to our learning ecosystems of the future

 

Daniel Christian:
A Vision of Our Future Learning Ecosystems


In the near future, as the computer, the television, the telephone (and more) continues to converge, we will most likely enjoy even more powerful capabilities to conveniently create and share our content as well as participate in a global learning ecosystem — whether that be from within our homes and/or from within our schools, colleges, universities and businesses throughout the world.

We will be teachers and students at the same time — even within the same hour — with online-based learning exchanges taking place all over the virtual and physical world.  Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) — in the form of online-based tutors, instructors, teachers, and professors — will be available on demand. Even more powerful/accurate/helpful learning engines will be involved behind the scenes in delivering up personalized, customized learning — available 24x7x365.  Cloud-based learner profiles may enter the equation as well.

The chances for creativity,  innovation, and entrepreneurship that are coming will be mind-blowing! What employers will be looking for — and where they can look for it — may change as well.

What we know today as the “television” will most likely play a significant role in this learning ecosystem of the future. But it won’t be like the TV we’ve come to know. It will be much more interactive and will be aware of who is using it — and what that person is interested in learning about. Technologies/applications like Apple’s AirPlay will become more standard, allowing a person to move from device to device without missing a  beat. Transmedia storytellers will thrive in this environment!

Much of the professionally done content will be created by teams of specialists, including the publishers of educational content, and the in-house teams of specialists within colleges, universities, and corporations around the globe. Perhaps consortiums of colleges/universities will each contribute some of the content — more readily accepting previous coursework that was delivered via their consortium’s membership.

An additional thought regarding higher education and K-12 and their Smart Classrooms/Spaces:
For input devices…
The “chalkboards” of the future may be transparent, or they may be on top of a drawing board-sized table or they may be tablet-based. But whatever form they take and whatever is displayed upon them, the ability to annotate will be there; with the resulting graphics saved and instantly distributed. (Eventually, we may get to voice-controlled Smart Classrooms, but we have a ways to go in that area…)

Below are some of the graphics that capture a bit of what I’m seeing in my mind…and in our futures.

Alternatively available as a PowerPoint Presentation (audio forthcoming in a future version)

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— from Daniel S. Christian | April 2011

See also:

Addendum on 4-14-11:

 

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The anti-Blockbuster way: Disrupt your business rituals before someone else does — by Martin Lindstrom

 

 

Excerpt:

Over the years, I’ve worked with many companies who stubbornly believe their product couldn’t be beat. Some were right. Most were wrong. Very often, some of the world’s most iconic brands wake up to an extraordinary industry shift that takes them by surprise–but which, looking back, could have been predicted. The question is: wouldn’t it be better to intuit what the future may resemble before market forces and innovations “suddenly” wreak havoc with your company a few years down the line?

My advice? Throw a live-wire idea–or two, or three, or four–onto your boardroom table now. Get speculative. Get futuristic. Put on your Spock ears. Grab your TED microphone. There’s no other way to uncover how poised you are for a radical change in your industry’s future. If you’re a technology company, spend some time surfing the web in search of intriguing and even jarring slogans that could smash your entire category–such as Skype’s “The Whole World Can Talk for Free,” or Compaq’s “Has it Changed Your Life Yet?” Now try one or another of these slogans on for size. Do they transform the near and far edges of your business? Next question: Who got there first–you or someone else?

Which is why I recommend that you pre-order your own wake-up call today.

 

From DSC :
This goes for higher ed as well…

 

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From DSC:
The first article/item I want to comment on is:

A Potential Market for Courseware Developers — from Brandon-Hall.com by Richard Nantel

First of all, thanks Richard for tackling this subject and for putting a posting out there regarding it. For years, I’ve wondered what the best way(s) is(are) to pursue the creation of professionally-done, interactive, personalized/customized, multimedia-based, engaging content. It is expensive to create well-done materials and/or the learning engines behind these materials. Also, as at the faith-based college where I work, some colleges would want a very specific kind of content or take a different slant on presenting the content.  So the content would have to be modified — which would have an associated cost to it.

Some options that I’ve thought of:

  • Outsource the content creation to a team of specialists — at educationally-focused publishing companies out there
  • Outsource the content creation to a team of specialists — at other solution providers focused on education
  • Develop the content in-house with a team of specialists
  • Don’t create content at all, but rather steer people to the streams of content that are already flowing out there. Some content may be changing so fast that it may not be worth the expense to create it.
  • Have students create the content — that’s what school becomes. Learning enough to create/teach the content to others. (This would require a great deal of cross-disciplinary collaboration and cooperation amongst faculty members.)

As a relevant aside, I have held that if an organization could raise the capital and the teams to develop this type of engaging, professionally-done content — and scale the solution — they could become the Forthcoming Walmart of Education. The attractive piece of this for families/students out there would be that this type of education will come at a 50%+ discount.


The second article/item that caused some additional reflection here was the article at The Chronicle of Higher Education by Marc Parry entitled, Think You’ll Make Big Bucks in Online Ed? Not So Fast, Experts Say

What if the United States could reallocate even the cost of 1-2 high-end planes in the United States Air Force? Our nation could create stunning, engaging content that could reach millions of people on any given subject — as online learning has the potential to be highly scalable (though I realize that much of this depends upon how much involvement an organization wants to integrate into the delivery/teaching of this content in terms of their instructors’/professors’ time).

Anyway, Marc highlights some important points — that creating content, marketing that content, etc. can be expensive.

But I have it that if you don’t get into this online learning game, you won’t be relevant in the years to come. People want convenience and students’ expectations will continue to rise — wanting to learn on their own pace, per their own schedule, from any place and on any device; finally, they will want to have more opportunities to participate/collaborate/control their own learning experiences. (And this doesn’t even touch upon whether it will become even more difficult to get through “the gate”  — that is, getting the student’s attention in order to make it into their short-term memory, in hopes of then moving the lesson/information into long-term memory.)


Disrupt – Think the Unthinkable: A Book Review — from Gartner by Mark McDonald

There are many books that say you need to ‘disrupt’ your business to remain competitive.  There are almost no books that describe how you create disruption in a clear, concise and step-by-step manner.  Luke Williams’s book Disrupt – think the unthinkable to spark transformation is exactly this type of book.

It’s rare that a book discusses a complex issue, one with such potential for consulting jargon and confusion, and produces a clear, concise and actionable set of advice.  Rather than try to cloud the issue, Williams tackles it head on by giving you the tools and discussion how you think differently and turn that thought into action.  In a way this approach is disruptive in itself and that is a good thing.

Highly recommended as a useful and valuable book that takes the idea of disruption and gives you a way to think through it and put it into practice.  In less than 200 tightly written pages, Williams provides clear and compelling tools that you can use to help identify, classify, and find the opportunities for disruption in your products, services and organization.

If you want to truly engage students, give up the reins — from Ewan McIntosh

During the final half of 2010, I asked more than 1,500 teachers around the globe two questions: what are your happiest memories from learning at school, and what are your least happy experiences?

When I do the “reveal” of what I think their answers will be, every workshop has a “but how did he know?” reaction. It’s more akin to an audience’s response to illusionist Derren Brown than to the beginning of a day of professional development.

For teachers’ answers are always the same. At the top is “making stuff”, then school trips, “feeling I’m making a contribution” and “following my own ideas”. Their least happy experiences are “a frustration at not understanding things”, “not having any help on hand” and “being bored”, mostly by “dull presentations”. “Not seeing why we had to do certain tasks” appeared in every continent.
Most of these educators agreed that the positive experiences they loved about school were too few, and were outnumbered by the “important but dull” parts of today’s schooling: delivering content, preparing for and doing exams.

But while a third of teachers generally remember “making stuff” as their most memorable and happy experience at school, we see few curricula where “making stuff” and letting students “follow their own ideas” makes up at least a third of the planned activity.

More here…

Blockbuster’s largest shareholder calls Blockbuster worst investment ever made — from FastCompany.com by Austin Carr

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After years as Blockbuster’s largest shareholder, Carl Icahn, who at one point amassed some 17 million shares of the now-bankrupt company, has called Blockbuster “the worst investment I ever made.”

In a candid piece written for the Harvard Business Review, Icahn opens up about the rental giant’s struggles and failures in an ever-changing industry.

“[Blockbuster] failed because of too much debt and changes in the industry. It had too many stores, Netflix created a better business model, and then Redbox kiosks and the whole digital phenomenon eliminated the need for consumers to go to a separate DVD store,” Icahn wrote. “Maybe the board did make a mistake in picking Jim Keyes as [John] Antioco’s successor—Keyes knows retailing and did an excellent job with the stores, but he isn’t a digital guy.”

From DSC:
I write about Blockbuster — and I emphasize the items above — because Blockbuster did not respond to the changes that were occurring around them.

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What about those of us in higher education?
How’s our response(s) coming along?

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The pace has changed -- don't come onto the track in a Model T

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Staying Relevant

 

5/2/11 addendum:

4/7/11 addendum:


Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education — from Lloyd Armstrong, University Professor and Provost Emeritus at the University of Southern California

Although the absence of an upwardly scalable technology driver has rendered higher education impossible to disrupt in its past, we believe that online learning constitutes such a technology driver and will indeed be capable of disruptively carrying the business model of low-cost universities up-market.

MBA Curriculum Changes: Wharton, Yale, and Stanford Lead the Pack — from knewton.com by Christina Yu

Excerpt (citing article from a  U.S. News article):

“Rather than consider pre-digested summaries of company situations, students tackle ‘raw cases’ packed with original data. Instead of being presented with an income statement, for example, they must mine the considerably bulkier annual filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission for data. The raw cases ‘push us to understand,’ says second-year Yale student Jason Hill. ‘They purposely put in more material than you could ever look at, but you have to learn where to look.’” (emphasis DSC)

From DSC:
I found this to be a good, interesting post. I just had a couple of thoughts that I wanted to throw out there re: it.

In looking at trends from an 80,000-foot level, I’d vote for MBA programs integrating much more of the tech-know-how — and/or appreciation of what technologies can bring to the table — as well as teaching grad students about some of the tools/technologies that are emerging these days (and I’d bet that the leaders/schools mentioned in this article are already doing this) .

I remember an instructor years ago — at SFSU’s MSP Program — saying that bots and agents will be the key to making decisions in the future, as there will be too much information for a person to sift through. The streams of content need to be tapped — but in efficient ways. So perhaps the logical step here is for MBA students to learn what bots/agents are, how to use them, and what their applications might be in making business/strategic decisions.

The most successful organizations of the future will be well-versed in technologies and what the applications/benefits of these technologies are. My bet? If you don’t have a technologist at the power table of your organization, the outlook doesn’t look very bright for your organization in terms of surviving and thriving in the future. Organizations will also need to be willing to take risks and move forward without having a full cost-benefit analysis done — as many times these don’t work well or are not even possible when implementing tech-based endeavors/visions.

Also relevant here:

 

Customized Schooling — from edweek.org by Rick Hess

Excerpt:

So, if you’re ready to get your geek on, have I got a treat for you. Harvard Education Press has just published Customized Schooling: Beyond Whole-School Reform. The book, edited by Bruno Manno and [Rick Hess], is an attempt to pull together a bunch of sharp thinking on how we get past just trying to “fix” schools–or to merely give families a choice between school A and school B–and how we start to think about using new tools, technologies, and talent to transform the quality of teaching and learning.

School turnarounds are a swell idea, and will occasionally work. And I’m broadly in favor of choice-based reform as a useful way to open up systems to new providers and permit schools to sharpen their focus. But these measures retain and even enshrine the assumptions of the 19th century schoolhouse, and those assumptions seem an unlikely answer to the challenges of the 21st century. (For my full riff on this score, go peruse last fall’s The Same Thing Over and Over.)

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Customized Schooling book

Contents

Introduction
Bruno V. Manno and Frederick M. Hess

1 Creating Responsive Supply in Public Education
Kim Smith and Julie Petersen

2 Reframing the Choice Agenda for Education Reform
Chester E. Finn Jr. and Eric Osberg

3 The Rise of Global Schooling
Chris Whittle

4 Multiple Pathways to Graduation
Tamara Battaglino and JoEllen Lynch

5 The Evolution of Parental School Choice
Thomas Stewart and Patrick J. Wolf

6 Education Tools in an Incomplete Market
Douglas Lynch and Michael Gottfried

7 A Typology of Demand Responders in K–12 Education
Joe Williams

8 Price Competition and Course-Level Choice in K–12 Education
Burck Smith

9 The Data Challenge
Jon Fullerton

10 Will Policy Let Demand Drive Change?
Curtis Johnson and Ted Kolderie

Conclusion
Frederick M. Hess and Olivia Meeks

 

From DSC:
In my recent class at Capella University, one of the last discussion board questions asked:

  • Do you think learning theory should be more explicit in official discussions of policy?

What a great question! My answer was yes, as it makes sense to me to guide educational reform by what is best for the students…for learning. Hopefully, we can make informed decisions. Though I’ve learned that there is no silver bullet when it comes to learning theories, each learning theory seems to be a piece of the puzzle for how we learn. Graphically speaking:


If viewing the above graphic on the Learning Ecosystems blog (vs. in an RSS feed/reader):
You may need to right-click on the above image and save it, then open it.

Such theories should have a place when policies are drafted, when changes are made. But I don’t often hear reference to the work of Thorndike, Bandura, Vygotsky, Gagne, Kolb, etc. when legislative bodies/school boards/or other forms of educational leadership are exploring future changes, directions, strategies. What is it that these people were trying to relay to us? What value can we gleam from them when we form our visions of the future? How does their work inform our selection of pedagogies, tools, organizational changes?



What's the best way to deal with ever-changing streams of content? When information has shrinking half-lives?

From DSC:
After looking at some items concerning Connectivism*, I’ve been reflecting upon the following questions:

  • What’s the best way for us to dip our feet into the constantly moving streams of content?
    (No matter the topic or discipline, the streams continue to flow.)
  • What’s the optimal setup for K-12 based “courses”?
  • What’s the optimal setup for “courses” within higher education?
  • How should L&D departments deal with this phenomenon?
  • How do publishers and textbook authors want to address this situation?

Thinking of Gonzalez (2004; as cited in Siemens (2005)) description of the challenges of rapidly diminishing knowledge life:

“One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD). To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”

Stephen Downes addresses this and points to a possible solution to this phenomenon in his presentation from 3/15/11 entitled “Educational Projection: Supporting Distributed Learning Online.”

Excerpt/slides:

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I need to put more thought into this, but wanted to throw this question out there…more later…

 

 


* From DSC: Some of the items I looked at regarding Connectivism — some directly related, others indirectly-related — were:


Siemens, G.  (2005).  Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age.  Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.

Downes, S.  (2005).  An introduction to connective knowledge.  Retrieved from http://www.  downes.  ca/post/33034.  Downes noted that this was published in Hug, Theo (ed.  ) (2007): Media, knowledge & education – exploring new spaces, relations and dynamics in digital media ecologies.  Proceedings of the International Conference held on June 25-26, 2007.  November 27, 2007.

Kop, R.  & Hill, A.  (2008).  Connectivism: Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past? International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, v9 n3 p1-13 Oct 2008.

Tracey, R.  (2009). Instructivism, constructivism or connectivism? Training & Development in Australia, December, 2009. p08-09, 2p.  Retrieved from EBSCOhost. ISSN 0310-4664.

Kerr, B.  (2007).  A challenge to connectivism.  Retrieved at http://learningevolves.  wikispaces.  com/kerr.

Sims, R.  (2008).  Rethinking (e)learning: A manifesto for connected generations.  Distance Education Vol.  29, No.  2, August 2008, 153–164.  ISSN 0158-7919 print/ISSN 1475-0198 online.  DOI: 10.  1080/01587910802154954

Lisa Dawley.   (2009).  Social network knowledge construction: emerging virtual world pedagogy.  On the Horizon, 17(2), 109-121.   Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals.  (Document ID: 1880656431).

Hargadon, S.  (2011).  Ugh.  Classic politics now extends to social networking in education.  Retrieved from http://www.  stevehargadon.  com/2011/03/ugh-classic-politics-now-extends-to.  html.

Cross, J.  (2001).  Crowd-inspired innovation.  Retrieved from http://www.internettime.com/2011/03/crowd-inspired-innovation.

Rogers-Estable, M..  (2009).  Web 2.0 and distance education: Tools and techniques.  Distance Learning, 6(4), 55-60.  Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals.  (Document ID: 2017059921).

Marrotte-Newman, S..  (2009).  Why virtual schools exist and understanding their culture.  Distance Learning, 6(4), 31-35.  Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals.  (Document ID: 2017059881).

Hilton, J., Graham, C., Rich, P., & Wiley, D. (2010). Using online technologies to extend a classroom to learners at a distance.  Distance Education, 31(1), 77-92.  Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals.  (Document ID: 2074810921).

Attwell, G. (2010). Personal learning environments and Vygotsky. Retrieved from http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/04/personal-learning-environments-and-vygotsky.

How Netflix innovates and wins — from Forbes.com by Chunka Mui

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Netflix illustrates a design principle that any company aspiring to succeed at disruptive innovation must adopt. It has four parts:

  1. Think Big
  2. Start Small
  3. Fail Quickly
  4. Scale Fast

Hastings pursued his big idea, streaming video, even though it would render obsolete his wonderfully successful, highly tuned, mail-based system for distributing DVDs.

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From DSC -- This looks like a learning ecosystem to me...

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