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25 Years of EdTech: 2015 – Digital Badges
[Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] Providing digital badges for achievements that can be verified and linked to evidence started with Mozilla’s open badge infrastructure in 2011. They were an idea that had been floating around for a while – that you could earn informal accreditation for online activity. What the Mozilla work provided was a technical infrastructure, so badges could be linked through to evidence and verified. Badges could be awarded for assessment (passing a quiz), but more interestingly for community action, such as contributing to an online forum. Like many other edtech developments, digital badges had an initial flurry of interest from devotees but then settled…
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25 Years of EdTech: 2014 – Learning analytics
[Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] Data, data, data. It’s the new oil and the new driver of capitalism, war, politics. So inevitably its role in education would come to the fore. Interest in analytics is driven by the increased amount of time that students spend in online learning environments, particularly LMSs and MOOCs. Although not a direct consequence, there is a definite synergy and similarity between MOOCs and analytics. Both brought new people into education technology, particularly from the computer science field. I think we can be a bit snooty about this, what are all these hard core empiricists suddenly doing in our touchy-feely domain? But if…
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25 years of EdTech: 2013 – Open Textbooks
[Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] If MOOCs were the glamorous side of open education, all breathless headlines and predictions, open textbooks were the practical, even dowdy, application. An extension of the OER movement, and particularly pertinent in the United States and Canada, open textbooks provided openly licensed versions of bespoke written textbooks, free for the digital version. The cost of textbooks provided an initial motivation for adoption, but it is the potential of adaption that makes them interesting. Open textbooks are sometimes criticised for being an unimaginative application of the possibilities of open. But they also offer a clear example of several aspects which need to align…
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Recognising our own expertise
During the recent OU Crisis, one of the things I moaned about was the lack of faith senior management seemed to have in the expertise of their own staff. We brought in consultants, and hired people outside of higher ed, to tell us how to be a better open university. I know my institution is not alone in this, and it portrays perhaps an insecurity about our own knowledge. So, having moaned about it, my bluff has been called. I’ve been asked to lead a set of internal OU seminars, highlighting expertise we have and focussing on how it can be applied practically. I have a vagueish set of principles…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2012: MOOCs
(we used David Kernohan’s image a lot back in the day and this is Michael Branson Smith’s animated version) [Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] Inevitably, in this series 2012 had to be allocated to MOOCs, when it was so breathlessly anointed “The Year of the MOOC“. In many ways the MOOC phenomenon can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies: some of the open approach of OER, the application of video, the experimentation of connectivism, and the revolutionary hype of web 2.0. Clay Shirky mistakenly proclaimed that MOOCs were the internet happening to education. If he’d been paying attention, he would have seen that this…
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25 Years of EdTech: 2011 – PLE
Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) were an outcome of the proliferation of services that suddenly became available following the web 2.0 boom. Learners and educators began to gather a set of tools to realize a number of functions. In edtech, the conversation turned to whether these tools could be somehow “glued” together in terms of data. We got quite excited about the idea of eduglu, which might be a bit embarrassing now. Instead of talking about one LMS provided to all students, we were discussing how each learner had their own particular blend of tools. Yet beyond a plethora of spoke diagrams, with each showing a different collection of icons, the…
