The internet is happening to education “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” I’ve been involved in higher education for fifteen years. The past decade alone has seen the rise of Google. During this period of rapid transition, nothing prepared me for the now over-hyped Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Then Stanford, 2011, happened. Why? Change does not follow a continuous or smooth trajectory. Education impacts all aspects of society. I’ve sat in far too many lectures where the presenter pulls up that cliche slide: “this is the industrialized education system” “it looks just like it did 200 years ago”. The pent up, frustrated, demand for change in a system as personal as HE produces a zealousness to embrace almost any concept that holds potential for change. Bill Gates supposedly stated some variation of “change is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term”. With this xEducation book we want to explore what is the change that underpins the new technologies and tools.
Thoughts on Innovations in Education Rhizomatic Learning – Why we teach? It’s my week at #change11. My topic? Rhizomatic Learning. Rhizomatic learning is a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a thousand plateaus. I’ve been talking about rhizomes and learning for about five years now. Why do we teach? Why do we teach? What does successful learning look like? the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is that map that I think successful learning looks like. Sounds a bit like networked learning…? What does a successful learner look like? Nomads have the ability to learn rhizomatically, to ‘self-reproduce’, to grow and change ideas as they explore new contexts. How do we structure successful learning? Activity.
Online Courses Look for a Business Model Response to critiques of Open Course Educause article and the free economy generally Earlier this year, while George Siemens and I were working our way through teaching the Edfutures course, we were contacted by the fine folks at the Educause review and asked to contribute an article on ‘the open course.’ I’ve been fortunate enough to run a few open courses now, some inside and some outside of the academy, and while we’ve yet to do formal research on the topic, I felt pretty comfortable taking a run at what is, in the sense that we mean ‘open course’ a very recent development. The article has recently been published, and while there has been some positive response ( willrich45and courosa for instance) one particular blogger has raised some valid concerns about some issues that may have been taken as read for that particular issue of educause… I thought i might address them here. How can we assess ‘value’ to an open course? “A short ways into it [the open course article], what I starting reading/hearing was blablabla. The ‘Value’ of an open course Some final thoughts.
Dave Cormier talks Openness Is blogging on the decline in 2013 Corporate blogging is on the decline as reported here: Study blogging in decline as social media takes over. Here is a post relating to the decline of blogs. Here is an update in 2012. Blogging declines for the first time among the Inc. 500. Fifty percent of the 2010 Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008. In this new 2011 study, the use of blogging dropped to 37%. I think 2013 would see further decline in blogging, as I have shared my findings in 2011. Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. My observation was that many bloggers in the past few years have slowed down in blogging, and have shifted to Twitter, Facebook and Google + in the posting of links. Would this also account for the difficulties in using PLE (blogging) in the cMOOCs? Would HE institutions still be expecting the students to compose reflective blog posts if that is the case? Photo credit: Google
Guerrilla Connectivism: 10 Tips for Taking Control of your Education I recently had the misfortune of taking a week-long training course on project management. The instructor was a friendly, experienced, and knowledgable project manager, but her teaching style consisted of reading through a company-prepared deck of over 500 powerpoint slides. For five days. Seven hours a day. There were about 50 of us sitting in rows, quietly listening as she diligently worked through the slides, interjecting a personal experience here or expanding on a bullet point there. Someone would occasionally raise a hand to ask a question, but most sat silently. But this is where, I now realize, I failed. I’ve been so busy working on my education degree, studying connectivism and other learning theories, and writing up education plans for my job as a learning consultant, that I lost sight of the actions I could have taken right there and then, in my role as a student. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Peer-to-Peer Learning Handbook | Peeragogy.org Albert Bandura Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925) is a psychologist who is the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. For almost six decades, he has been responsible for contributions to many fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology, and was also influential in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B. F. In 1974 Bandura was elected to be the Eighty-Second President of the American Psychological Association (APA). Personal life[edit] Bandura was born in Mundare, in Alberta, a small town of roughly four hundred inhabitants, as the youngest child, and only son, in a family of six. Post-doctoral work[edit]
Joichi Ito - Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants Almost 20 years ago, I installed on my computer a tiny piece of software called MacPPP, which connected the programs running on it to the Internet. The program immediately transformed my computer from a fancy telex machine to a device running a very early version of the graphical Web. I was working in entertainment at the time, and I remember thinking that this connection was going to change everything. I left to join the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, PSINet Japan, as its first chief executive. Our first serious challenge, oddly enough, was a battle over an obscure information-sharing computer protocol called X.25. Most of us laboring to build the new Internet preferred the less regulated and simpler Internet Protocol. The Internet, on the other hand, was designed and deployed by small groups of researchers following the credo of one of its chief architects, David Clark: “rough consensus and running code.”
What is #etmooc? And why you should join us… | Learning About Learning #ETMOOC is an opportunity. The very worst thing that could happen to you if you join #ETMOOC is that you could learn a few new things, and connect with a few new learners, like yourself. It’s free. It is not evaluative. It is open and supportive. (And some of the coolest educators in the world are hanging out there for the next few months). So what is #ETMOOC? Let’s start with the MOOC part. MOOC = Massive Open Online Course. When you hear “course”, no doubt you think “work”, “boring”, “drudgery”, “marks”, “assignments”. [Replace "course" in that last bit with "school" and think like a student for a minute. What if the first thing that came to mind when you heard the word “course” was “learning”? If you are an Ontario teacher, the concept of self-directed learning is not new to you (!). Many people working in the education sector are exactly in that place when it comes to technology. So here is what a MOOC can do for you. I have done two MOOCs over the last two years. So back to #ETMOOC.