From DSC:
When I first saw the graphs (below) from Mary Meeker’s 2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update — as a technologist — my mind/focus went to the increasing pace of change/adoption of technologies. But another way to view these graphs would be to ask:

 

What does this say about society’s expectations? About society’s use of technology?
Are folks willing to wait around as long as they used to? Apparently, not as much these days.

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RateOfAdoption1-Meeker2013

 

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RateOfAdoption2-Meeker2013

 

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RateOfAdoption3-Meeker2013

 

10 ways the role of web designer is changing — from creativebloq.comby Sush Kelly

From DSC:
In my experience, there are numerous demanding aspects to being or becoming a web designer, as you have to:

  • Purchase the necessary software and hardware as well as find the funding for a hosting service / Internet service provider in order to start gaining some serious experience (at least for a good share of us that was/is the case); this is an expensive proposition if you want to do things well these days
    .
  • Constantly keep learning about new things — as the pace of change on the web is staggering
    .
  • Design for an ever increasing amount of devices — though responsive design is changing this situation up quite a bit
    .
  • Give up control at times (i.e. not like the print world)
    .
  • Deal with extremely unrealistic expectations from clients, corporations, and hiring managers/personnel who often don’t know what’s actually involved; what they often ask for is a designer, a programmer, a project manager, an account manager and more all wrapped into one position (and forget about a well-laid out career track as in the golden corporate days of old.  You have to make your own career and hope that you can survive the ever changing landscapes — as well as get through a fair amount of age-discrimination and people who don’t want to pay you for all the hard-earned experience you’ve gained.)

College branding: The tipping point — from forbes.com by Roger Dooley

Excerpt:

Change is coming to this market. While there are multiple issues of increasing importance to schools, two stand out as major game-changers.

 


From DSC:
Important notes for the boards throughout higher education to consider:


Your institution can’t increase tuition by one dime next year. If you do, you will become more and more vulnerable to being disrupted. Instead, work very hard to go in the exact opposite direction. Find ways to discount tuition by 50% or more — that is, if you want to stay in business.

Sounds like the scene in Apollo 13, doesn’t it? It is. (i.e. as Tom Hanks character is trying to get back to Earth and has very little to do it with. The engineers back in the United States are called upon to “do the impossible.”)

Some possibilities:

  • Pick your business partners and begin pooling resources and forming stronger consortia. Aim to reduce operating expenses, share the production of high-quality/interactive online courses, and create new streams of income. Experimentation will be key.
  • Work with IBM, Apple, Knewton and the like to create/integrate artificial intelligence into your LMS/CMS in order to handle 80% of the questions/learning issues. (Most likely, the future of MOOCs involves this very sort of thing.)
  • Find ways to create shorter courses/modules and offer them via online-based exchanges/marketplaces.  But something’s bothering me with this one..perhaps we won’t have the time to develop high-quality, interactive, multimedia-based courses…are things moving too fast?
  • Find ways to develop and offer subscription-based streams of content


 

How NOT to design a MOOC: The disaster at Coursera and how to fix it — from onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com by Debbie Morrison

Excerpt/update:

Note: I’m also enrolled in Coursera’s E-learning and Digital Cultures, with University of Edinburgh, which is so far excellent.  What I wrote in this post is exclusive to the course Fundamentals  of Online Education: Planning and ApplicationI also completed Introduction to Sociology, through Coursera last year which was quite good.

Update:  This course is  now ‘suspended’. Participants received this email February 2,  at 4:17 pm (PST).  “We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.”

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From DSC:
There will be many more disasters I’m sure. But as with learning, failure is to be expected (some would say mandatory) and learning is messy. This is especially true when technological change and innovation are moving at ever-increasing speeds.

The questions that comes to my mind after reading this are:

  • We still need to experiment — but how do we experiment with MOOCs on a smaller scale?
  • How can we keep things manageable?
  • Can bloggers help in sharing what’s working and what’s not? (Like Debbie did.)

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

 

 

The coming automatic, freaky, contextual world and why we’re writing a book about it — from scobleizer.comby Robert Scoble

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

First, the short version of today’s news. Shel Israel and I are collaborating on a book, titled, The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Life and Work.

The long version:

A new world is coming. It’s scary. Freaky. Over the freaky line, if you will. But it is coming. Investors like Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen are investing in it. Companies from Google to startups you’ve never heard of, like Wovyn or Highlight, are building it. With more than a couple of new ones already on the way that you’ll hear about over the next six months.

First, the trends. We’re seeing something new happen because of:

  1. Proliferation of always-connected sensors.
  2. New kinds of cloud-based databases.
  3. New kinds of contextual SDKs.
  4. A maturing in social data that nearly everyone is participating in.
  5. Wearable computers and sensors like the Nike FuelBand, FitBit, and soon the Google Glasses.

 

Also see:

0117_InternetofThings_Feat

 

Also see:

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EnteringTheShiftAge-Houle-Jan2013

 

Book Description
Release date: January 18, 2013

The Information Age? Think again.

Change is everywhere: how we communicate, what we do for a living, the values we hold, the way we raise our children, even the way we access information. Thanks to a global economy, the force of the Internet, and the explosion of mobile technology, we have—almost imperceptibly—been ushered into a new era, the Shift Age, in which change happens so quickly that it’s become the norm.

Man-made developments—such as tools, machines, and technology—defined previous ages, but the Shift Age will be defined by our own power of choice. In Entering the Shift Age, leading futurist David Houle argues that we are going through a major collapse of legacy thinking, eroding many of the thought structures that have defined the last two hundred years of humanity. Houle identifies and explains the new forces that will shape our lives—including remote workplaces, the cloud, “24/7” culture, speed-of-light connectivity, creativity, and the influence of Millenials and Digital Natives—for the next twenty years.

In this eye-opening book, Houle navigates this pivotal point in human history with clarity and anticipation, focusing on the power of human consciousness and the direct influence we can impart on everything from healthcare to media to education. According to Houle, we are more independent than ever before. We are in control.

There’s no “going back” to the way things were. Reality is changing ever faster, and ENTERING THE SHIFT AGE is your guide to keeping up.

 

From DSC:
Though I haven’t read the book, I would probably take a different angle/perspective on some things here.  Yet, this work seems important in that it addresses the constant change — and pace of change — that we find ourselves and our world in.

 

Less is more — from Harold Jarche

Excerpts:

If you were to sum up the psychology of learning in three words, it would be ‘less is more’. Donald Clark

In FrogDesign’s presentation on Design is Hacking How we Learn, slide #27 clearly shows where the emphasis of our learning efforts should be, and where organizations should place the most support and resources: practice.
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how we learn

 

 

From DSC:
In the corporate world, my thought is to provide the training as to where and how employees can get/stay in the know — especially by encouraging the use and ownership of blogs, social media, and developing/leveraging their personal learning networks.  But also to provide the infrastructure and tools — the plumbing if you will — to allow for people to quickly connect with each other and to easily share information with each other (i.e. to develop their own learning ecosystems). Formal classes won’t cut it. As Harold and other members of the Internet Alliance have long been saying, it’s about informal learning. (Speaking of his Internet Alliance colleagues, Charles Jennings recently discussed how the pace of change is affecting the corporate world big time; and, just as in higher ed, being able to adapt is key to staying relevant.)

As a relevant aside…my issue with my Master’s Program in Instructional Design for Online Learning was that there was too much emphasis on theory and not enough emphasis on practice.

 

 

 

110 predictions for the next 110 years — from popularmechanics.com with thanks to Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) for posting this on twitter

From DSC:
Normally, I don’t care for these sorts of massive listings — 100 ways to…, 10,000 tools to check out…, etc.  But I like peering into the future. So this caught my eye. Such predictions also illustrate the pace of change and that our kids will be growing up in a world very different from the one we grew up in.

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Current/Future State of Higher Education — from Educause Live by George Siemens, Andy Caulkins, Malcolm Brown

Change drivers

  • Globalization
  • Commercial/entrepreneurial activity
  • Funding cuts
  • Online learning
  • Unbundling of education systems
  • Technology advancement (mobiles)
  • Employment-oriented education
  • Big data and analytics

Net Pedagogies: New Models for Teaching & Learning

  • New pedagogies emerging from:
    • Concerns about how well institutions are meeting their mission, on behalf of students they serve
    • Pressures resulting from feeling constrained within the “Iron Triangle” of costs, access, and quality
    • New technologies
  • How to balance personalization with competency-based pathways
  • How to build community among students who are geographically distant and proceeding at different rates (a different cohort dynamic taking place here)
  • Personalized learning divisions/groups
  • Innovation labs <– From DSC: This lines up nicely with my posting here

Entrepreneurship

  • Deborah Quazzo, GSV Advisors
  • Velocity of change
  • e-books up
  • 200K education apps
  • 98% of students own some sort of device
  • Coursera — 33 partners, 1.7 million students
  • 13% of students now at for-profits
  • The Bear Story
    • Readiness — freshmen often needing remediation
    • Completion rates
    • Cost
    • Career
  • Venture capital and startups increasing
  • What’s driving investment
    • Funding issues
    • Accountability
    • Technology
    • Consumer choice
  • Waves of HE innovation
  • “Traditional institutions are not standing still”
  • Higher ed arms race — online program delivery (tuition-based) / MOOC (free)
  • Growth in MOOC students — .51 in Fall 2011, 2.79 in Fall 2012; 447% growth rate
  • Need to increase learning outcomes, access, capacity, and decrease costs

Big Data & Analytics

  • Erik Duval, Simon Buckingham Shum, Caroline Haythornthwaite
  • State of learning analytics
    • Open analytics
    • Standards
    • Methods and metrics
    • Impact on learner success
    • Early risk detection
    • Common language
    • Institutional use of analytics
    • Planning and deployment of LA
    • Move from concept to application
  • Participation wall seems to be occurring 30-40% of the time into the course
  • 762 tweets, 305 links, 172 RTs, 244 Unique Twitter accounts

Leadership in Education

  • James Hilton
    • Characterizing change
    • Not a linear system often times; instead, an emergent change; not always orderly and linear
    • Unknown end point
    • Adjust as you go
    • Adjust fundamental conditions
      • 2 fundamental forces in HE
      • Commoditization
      • Unbundling
    • “Find your North Star”
  • George Mehaffy
    • Challenge and change article
    • Massive change and great uncertainty
    • Technology changes everything
    • Traditional institutions loss of control
    • Students abilities to interact and learn without mediating
    • “Outsiders” becoming players
    • Venture capital
    • Models of college changing
    • Course models
    • Data analytics
    • Cost discrepancies
    • Measuring success
    • Loss of credentialing monopoly
    • Leadership vacuum
    • Change is rapid, profound, emergent
    • We need to rethink HE leadership model
    • We need to rethink HE in many fundamental dimensions
    • Now is the time for bold, imaginative, entrepreneurial leadership

Distributed Research

  • Traditional methods of sharing research, established centuries ago
  • Need to re-imagine those methods and generate higher, faster, better outcomes from research
  • Challenges: pace, dissemination, incentive to collaborate
  • Opportunities: immediacy, openness, new/richer tools and indicators, unprecedented progress

Still some challenges in offering a MOOC-based course:

  • Skillset development
  • Getting participants orientated to the course
  • Technological glitches

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Other resources/links:


 

 

 

 

 

 

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Digital Revolution’s Winners And Losers — from Information Week by John Foley
Workers with in-demand digital skills benefit most as computers increasingly take over
everyday tasks. In this InformationWeek 500 video, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson discusses
how this trend could affect your enterprise.

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From DSC:
I agree with Erik that a large swath of people are being left behind, mainly because of technological changes and the pace of those changes. Again I ask, can you hear the engines roar?  How can we re-train folks to take advantage of the 3+million open jobs out there? How can we reinvent ourselves as quickly as possible?
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The pace has changed -- don't come onto the track in a Model T
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Addendums:
  • Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?
    Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating — jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain’t seen nothing yet. But then he steps back to look at big history, and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next.
  • America’s jobs gap: 9 million — from cnn.com by Tami Luhby

Smartphone adoption rate fastest in tech history — from  pcmag.com by Stephanie Mlot

Excerpt:

When smartphone technology was created more than a decade ago, it was simply a small step for connected man–no one knew what a giant leap for mankind it would become. According to a recent Flurry report, global smartphone adoption has exploded, growing faster than any consumer technology in history.

Connected TV grows at “breakneck pace” — rapidtvnews.com

Excerpt:

The growth rate of connected TV development is so steep that it is difficult to keep up with all the developments, let alone understand their impact, according to new research from adRise. The Connected TV Market Report reveals that the marketplace has been proliferating as OEMs, content distributors, and advertisers have made it into “one of the hottest spaces” for consumer video technology, content distribution and advertising. Basically, adRise has found that usage among all connected TV devices is increasing and, in aggregate, that this has led to a 25x growth surge among the apps.

From DSC:
This reminds me of a graphic from Mary Meeker’s 5/30/12 presentation:

 

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/95259089?access_key=key-mv1qbwlvykk5cacr6a7

 

…it also reminds me of a graphic I created a while back:

 

The pace has changed significantly and quickly

 

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The financially sustainable university — from bain.com, a Bain Brief by Jeff Denneen and Tom Dretle

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Still, at the majority of institutions, the pace of change is slower than it needs to be. Plenty of hurdles exist, including the belief that things will return to the way they always were. (Note: They won’t.) But the biggest obstacle is more fundamental: While leaders might have a sense of what needs to be done, they may not know how to achieve the required degree of change that will allow their institution not just to survive, but also thrive with a focused strategy and a sustainable financial base.

Too often, stakeholders believe that the current cash crunch and need for change is a temporary phenomenon that will subside as the economy continues to improve. But those who see things this way probably haven’t been exposed to the data presented here and in other reports that show convincingly that this time is different. Faculty and other key stakeholders must be shown clear and compelling facts to disprove the “return to the status quo” notion and to clarify the corresponding negative implications and consequences of inaction.

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The Financially Sustainable University - July 2012 - a Bain Brief by Denneen & Dretle

From DSC:
I recently wrote a piece for EvoLLLution.com — a site focused on LifeLong Learning:

 

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Some linked up resources along these lines:


  • RSS feeds
    (understand RSS feeds; obtain a feed aggregator such as Google Reader; subscribe to the relevant blogs and websites in one’s discipline; create your own blog, using WordPress for example; post your own relevant items on it, while not forgetting to point people towards your own RSS feed!)
  • Twitter
    (get an account; identify knowledgeable people; follow them on twitter; post your own items on twitter)
  • See if there are some Yammer-based communities of practice in your enterprise or in your desired discipline (there are other social networking/learning applications as well)
  • LinkedIn
    Join groups that line up with your industry, your profession and your professional aspirations, engage in discussions on best practice and use your groups and connections as a network of colleagues.
  • Facebook
    “Like” institutions or organizations that are relevant to your area of interest and reach out to individuals within your field.
  • Community bookmarking tools such as Delicious or diigo
  • Ways to discover content on the web such as StumbleUpon or Digg

From DSC:
Whether you’re talking the corporate world or the world of higher education…in this fast-paced and increasingly technology-driven world, the role that technology plays in our organizations’ strategic plans needs to escalate.  That is, if our organizations want to survive, we cannot view IT as a cost center. 

Instead, we need to wake up and realize the world in which we are living in.  As such, our IT groups should be playing key roles in determining new business models and helping our organizations identify new sources of income.  IT is not just about infrastructure and plumbing anymore (although that’s important as well).  IT should be about becoming thee key leading group on campus or in your company.  No joke.

If you doubt that or don’t think your IT group has it in them, than you need to identify which other group/dept is developing the strategic plans on how to ride the enormous waves of change being caused by the Internet, shifting consumer expectations, changing methods of tech-enabled communications, and the massive convergence of the TV, telephone, computer (as well as other forces). 

A poster in our shop asserts that you can either ride the waves of change or be crushed by them.  Along those lines, my father-in-law wisely reminds me that it’s much easier to ride on the front side of a wave than trying to play catch up on the backside of the wave.

Excerpt from Succeeding in the New Normal (from CampusTechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser)

As IT administrators struggle to come to terms with the new normal, one truth is becoming clear: CIOs need to change the conversation about IT on campus. First, instead of driving their beleaguered IT staffs ever harder while service levels drop, they need to reset campus expectations about what IT can realistically achieve. Second, CIOs must rebrand their own organization. They need to start taking credit for how IT saves their institutions money. In the eyes of the university, IT has to go from cost center to efficiency expert.

“Technology people are inherently working to make things more efficient,” Carter points out. “But they do a lousy job of publicizing their results. They do a lousy job of measuring them. As we get more and more into things like performance funding, accreditation, and accountability, what you’re going to find is that IT leaders are going to have figure out a way to justify their existence, or they’re going to end up out of a job.”

From DSC:
I would argue that if IT leaders (at least those leaders who are effective in developing their organization’s strategy and who see the role of IT as different from its past roles) are going to end up out of a job, then the entire organization will end up out of jobs.  No kidding.  The world is changing rapidly, and people can no longer afford to view IT as simply a cost center.  As Thomas Friedman recommends, “Know the world you’re living in.”  As such, IT needs to be one of thee key drivers of business model change and overall strategy within your organization.

 

Addendum/also see:

  • 61-year tenure for average firm in 1958 narrowed to 25 years in 1980—to 18 years now.
  • A warning to execs: At current churn rate, 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027.
  • To survive and thrive, leaders must “create, operate and trade” their business units without losing control of their company.
  • Study led by Innosight director Richard N. Foster, co-author of Creative Destruction.

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?

Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in US — from wired.co.uk by Mark Brown

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