merel van der woude
design academy now working as education designer and co-creator
Debating Pearson's OpenClass. Did you check out the Pearson's OpenClass booth at EDUCAUSE?
If not, it is worth spending some time on the new OpenClass site www.openclass.com. How would you answer the following questions: 1. Where does OpenClass fit into the LMS ecosystem? 2. At EDUCAUSE, Adrian Sannier (SVP of Product Pearson Education) gave a terrific presentation as part of a panel called Disruptive Innovation: Current Trends and Future Directions. It is worth paying attention to what Adrian thinks about the future of the LMS (and higher ed in general) because a) he is a smart guy with a strong iconoclastic streak, and b) Pearson is a big (and becoming bigger) player in the edtech platform, services and content space. I've been trying to make sense of Pearson's strategy with OpenClass (to answer question #1 above), and listening to what Adrian has to say is one of our best roadmaps to calibrating where Pearson may go.
A summary of Pearson's OpenClass strategy would go like this: A. B. C. Is that about right? Donald Clark Plan B. Habits fuel learningIn a Pizzeria, after a visit to one of my favourite London spots (the Soane Museum) Jay Cross asked me what I thought fuelled good learning.
My answer was ‘habits’. Soane was a habitual learner and collector. Strong, autonomous learners tend to have developed habitual learning, whether in reading, blogging, conversing, taking notes and so on. They all have different sets of habits, but habits they have in abundance. Blogging as a habitThis is a good example. 7 habits of highly effective learnersHere’s a stab at what I’d say makes habits work in learning: Stick with a new habit until it takes root. Bad habitsOf course we know a lot about the power of habits, especially bad ones such as smoking, eating fatty foods and gambling.
Imedia associates » individual solutions innovative approaches. OpenClass. Africa Straight Up - Official Film. EmTech Preview: Another Way to Think about Learning. Photos courtesy of Matt Keller Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, once said: “You cannot think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something.”
Does this apply to learning? Maybe not. Here is what I mean. As we industrialized learning and created schools, we needed to measure the system’s efficacy and each child’s progress. I believe that we get into trouble when knowing becomes a surrogate for learning. The closest I have ever come to thinking about thinking is writing computer programs. The gods must be crazy Have you watched a two-year-old use an iPad? The meteoric rise of modern instructionism, including the misguided belief that there is a perfect way to teach something, is alarming because of the unlimited support it is getting from Bill Gates, Google, and my own institution, MIT.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit association that I founded, launched the so-called XO Laptop in 2005 with built-in programming languages.
DIY-crafts. Media. Creative industry. Blackbirds. Visualisation. Green. Learning reflections. Art & inspiration.