In the spirit of test-and-learn, we created “Lean In and Learn IT,” an interactive digital program that provides a deep dive into one key IT strategy each month. Topics include digital and architecture, agile and DevOps, cloud, big data, and cybersecurity.
Based in our virtual collaboration platform, each topic features a kick-off video followed by a drip of content and interaction, including snackable articles, video clips, quizzes, and prizes to keep the team engaged. The month wraps up with a webcast focused on a key business application of the strategy, featuring subject matter experts both from within the IT organization and our business partners.
The involvement of partners is key, as our surveys tell us that few things motivate our teams as effectively as seeing the impact of their work.
From DSC: In our future learning experiences, I wonder what taking a break might look and sound like…? That is, we’re going along learning something from/with others (virtually/digitally) and then the teacher, professor, Subject Matter Expert (SME), trainer, or whoever says to take a break. What could happen then?
In the online/digital/virtual-based realm, that could mean that you have the option to set your “break” setting to bring up Spotify, or Vimeo, or YouTube, or Pandora, some VR-based app, other. The lights in your “learning space” could dim and the music could come on. Or you reach for a VR headset and watch a sunset or position yourself by a picturesque brook. Or your favorite podcast/vodcast picks up where you left off.
Hmmm…should be some interesting innovation and affordances along these lines.
“Never in my 33 years of teaching did I ever think it would be like this,” the Muskegon High School teacher said of virtual learning, which the district is using this semester to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
“It’s a huge learning curve.”
With Michigan K-12 schools back in session for the fall – some virtually, some in-person, and some a mix of both – students aren’t the only ones doing the learning this year. Amid this unprecedented school year, teachers are learning some new things along the way, too.
…
3. Virtual learning has exposed the depth of Michigan’s digital divide Systemic gaps in technology access among school districts around the state left thousands of students at a disadvantage this year, despite efforts by educators to fulfill short-term connectivity needs during virtual learning.
From DSC: These are just a couple of reasons that I say that Rome wasn’t built overnight. But it’s great to see that tools are being added to teaching toolboxes and learners’ toolboxes as well:
“It’s easy for them to get onto Zoom now, they can go onto Google Classroom and go into the lesson right along with us,” she said. “I’m surprised at how smooth it’s running now.”
This month, the big surprise is that there’s no significant technology news about COVID. And there is more news than ever about legislation and regulation. I suspect that the legal system will be a big driver for technology over the next year. Another trend that doesn’t quite count as technology news but that definitely bears watching is that college enrollment in the US is down. Grad schools are up, 4 year colleges are down slightly; the big hit is in 2 year colleges. COVID is probably the biggest contributing factor, but regardless of the cause, this is an inauspicious trend.
NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Beginning on February 2-4, 2021, Legalweek(year) will bring together thousands of legal professionals for a series of 5 innovative virtual legal events that tackle the changing legal landscape and provide actionable insights to help legal leaders restructure, rebuild and reinvigorate today’s law firms and legal departments. The Legalweek(year) virtual series aims to serve as the anchor for the legal community during an unprecedented time, as well as a guide throughout the coming year to inform legal professionals of emerging trends, cutting edge legal technology and expert analysis of the tectonic shifts in the industry.
From DSC: Per Wikipedia, this is a 1910 Model T that was photographed in Salt Lake City:
From DSC: The Ford Model T didn’t start out looking likea Maserati Gran Turismo from 2021!Inventions take time to develop…to be improved…for new and further innovations and experiments to take place.
Thinking of this in terms of online-based learning, please don’t think we’ve reached the end of the road for online-based learning.
The truth is, we’ve barely begun our journey.
Two last thoughts here
1 ) It took *teams* of people to get us to the point of producing a Maserati like this. It will take *teams* of people to produce the Maserati of online-based learning.
2) In terms of online-based learning, it’s hard to say how close to the Maserati that we have come because I/we don’t know how far things will go. But this I do know: We have come a looooonnnnnggggg ways from the late 1990s!If that’s what happened in the last 20 years — with many denying the value of online-based learning — what might the next 5, 10, or 20 years look like when further interest, needs, investments, etc. are added? Then add to all of that the momentum from emerging technologies like 5G, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, bots, algorithms, and more!
From DSC:
To drive the point home, here’s an addendum on late 9/29/20:
From DSC: What if each learner/person/student could have a lifelong, cloud-based “tribute” site?
What if you could hire a career coach to sift through the tributes to find common themes?
From DSC: I recently asked friends and family to help me celebrate a significant birthday for my wife by creating a tribute for her — using a service calledTribute.co.It was a fun, meaningful, relational experience — it opened the doors to some great communications.
Here’s a video that describes what aTributeis (from the company of that same name).
So I put out potential suggestions for what I hoped that we could relay to my wife, and people contributed their videos. Then a person at Tribute edited the videos to come up with a highlight reel. They also presented to my wife all of the videos, not just the highlight reel.
That got me to wonder,“What if each learner had a cloud-based, lifelong tribute site that parents, guardians, grandparents, teachers, coaches, musical directors, pastors, friends, and others could leave encouraging and instructive messages on? Or when they note something that might be of use later on in terms of career selection, they could “jot it down.” For example:
[First-grade teacher] “I noticed Anne that when we did the art projects, you were enthralled with any sort of creative endeavor or project. We almost lost you in another world!”
[Family member] “Tony, I’ve noticed ____. Here’s something to consider for your future pathways. Would you be interested in exploring _____ — such as if we signed you up for some lessons in that area?”
[Eight grade teacher] “Eloise, I saw that your engagement level skyrocket when we studied ____, especially when you did the project on ___.”
[Basketball coach] “Chan, I appreciated your hard work in practice today. Keep up the good work and you will be a super player! You are fast, strong, and seem to have a competitive spirit about you. Consider making a workout chart and charting out the workouts that you do each day. Monitor your progress over time. As of today, here are some apps to do just that: ___.
[Pastor] “So glad Amanda that you were able to join us on our youth group visit to ___. I appreciated your end-of-the-day reflections on the experiences of the day. I also appreciated your hard work helping others.”
[Friend] “It was great horsing around on Garageband with you today Zach. I look forward to diving into iMovie next with you. Let’s create a movie for each other. You seem to have a very creative side to you.”
[High school CS Teacher] “Keep up the good work programming Jeremy! I hope that you will consider going into some type of job that uses critical thinking, mathematics, problem-solving — perhaps it will be programming, perhaps it will be engineering, or something else.”
[College professor/advisor] “You mentioned that you hate college to me the last two times we met. You don’t seem happy studying ___. Have you considered ____?”
[Tennis coach] Remember to bend those knees…get low. Keep your eyes on the seams of the ball.”
The idea behind such a service would be to offer encouragement, feedback, (if carefully put) constructive criticism, a message that “I’m on your team”…and/or…”Here’s what I see in you.”
Additional functionality/options
Contributors:
Like Twitter imposes a limit on characters, there could be options to impose a time limit on the length of a video, ability to add more than one video, and/or set a limit on how many videos someone can upload
If submitting a written piece, the option would be there to limit the number of characters and/or the word count.
From learners themselves (to their own tribute)
No time limit, no word count or character limit
Would act like a multimedia-based diary/journal of learning
Option to select whether might be worth re-listening to for career selection purposes.
8 innovative virtual learning design tips to engage your remote teams — from elearningindustry.com by Shannon Hart Virtual learning is an essential component in the Learning and Development toolkit, and it is widely used for training and educational purposes. It is not, however, always high quality or effective. Here are some design tips from the instructional and visual perspectives to give your virtual learning a real boost.
Excerpt:
With more employees working remotely than ever before, it is crucial that we create learning assets that really engage. Let’s talk about two aspects of design that are equally important if you want to provide virtual learning that really gets results—Instructional Design and visual design.
From DSC: Notice the variety of necessary skillsets involved in Shannon’s article! This is one of the reasons I’m for the use of team-basedcontent creation and delivery.
THOROUGHLY MODERN MEDIA: This spring, a college theater course about women’s voting rights aimed to produce a new play about the suffrage struggle. When the pandemic scuttled those plans, professors devised a new way to share suffragist stories by creating an interactive, online performance set in a virtual Victorian mansion. And their students were not the only ones exploring women’s voting rights as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Then the pandemic hit. Students left Radford and Virginia Tech. Live theater was canceled.
But the class wasn’t.
“Neither of us ever said, ‘Forget it,’” Hood says. “Our students, they all wanted to know, ‘What are we doing?’ We came to them with this insane idea.”
They would create an interactive, online production staged in a virtual Victorian mansion.
…
“Stage performance is different than film or audio. If you just have audio, you only have your voice. Clarity, landing sentences, really paying attention to the structure of a sentence, becomes important,” Nelson says. “Students got a broader sense of the skills and approaches to different mediums—a crash course.”
From DSC: Talk about opportunities for interdisciplinary learning/projects!!! Playwrights, directors, actors/actresses, set designers, graphic designers, fine artists, web designers and developers, interactivity/interface designers, audio designers, video editors, 3D animators, and more!!!
From DSC:
Some of the following questions came to my mind recently:
In this age of the Coronavirus, how can we think differently about learning experience design (#LXD)?
How can *teams* of people come together to reimagine what learning could look like in the future? Who might be some new players at the table? More students? Artists? Actors? More animators? More technicians and people from A/V? Specialists in XR? Corporate trainers coming together with Instructional Designers from higher ed and from K-12? #learningecosystems#future
How can we better tighten up the alignment between K-12, higher ed / vocational programs, and the corporate world?
How can we make self-directed learning more prevalent (which would release an enormous amount of energy & creativity)?#heutagogy
Maybe those aren’t even the right questions…
If not, what do you think? What questions should we be asking about learning these days?
The main thing we need to remember is that this space no longer serves as an accessory to face-to-face teaching. It is now our main contact point with learners, so it needs to play different roles: communication channel, learning path, interaction platform and community space. Teachers therefore need a certain degree of freedom to design this space in the best way that suits their teaching style and philosophy as well as their course content and learning objectives.
…
What became obvious in the past months is that when it comes to teaching and learning fully online, the learning experience design aspect, including look, feel and logic of the platform from the users’ perspective- be it teachers or students-, are at least as important as the content.
Radar trends to watch: August 2020 — from oreilly.com Trends in COVID-19, AI, data, robotics, programming, VR, technology and society, and security.
Excerpt:
A promising new voice separation model allows voice recognition to distinguish up to five voices speaking simultaneously without knowing the number of speakers in advance.
7 Steps to Making Your School’s Website Accessible to All— from thejournal.com by Ali Arsan With districts around the country relying on their websites to convey essential information to their communities, accessibility is more important than ever.
If you haven’t been the victim of racism, imagine stepping into someone else’s shoes and experiencing it first hand. Imagine being transported into the realities of harassment.
Morgan Mercer combined insights from these immersive experiences into a venture-backed startup, Vantage Point. As a female founder, fundraising was a challenge but the Los Angeles venture launched in 2017 with a few clients and a beta product.
Participants have independent and collective experiences with facilitation to move conversations forward. After an immersion, participants respond to tough questions like, “Do you have privilege in that situation that a person of color might not?”
“Existing meeting interfaces had been designed with a singular goal, to simply enable virtual conversations. How could we build a meeting interface from the ground-up that intentionally facilitates engaging, productive, and inclusive conversations?”
