e-learning
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Succession and the art of stretching a metaphor
As Scott has blogged, he came to visit us in Cardiff recently, while staying at the OU for a month on a fellowship. We had a lot of great chats, and while I failed to convince him of the ways of atheist, reductionist rationalism, I did manage to convert him to my succession metaphor for technology adoption. I used this in my VLE book a while back, and it goes something like this (from the book): When there is a new environment, for example barren rock, a few pioneer species, such as lichens begin to grow. The acid from these decomposes some rock particles, and their own death creates a…
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To the ghosts who write history blogs
Okay, maybe it's not an Obama moment in history, but, as you may have heard, the OU has adopted Google Apps for education for its students, and I think this may be a significant move in educational technology. Niall announced it and Tony has given his reaction. We're by no means the first to do it, but I think the OU's adoption is significant for a number of reasons: It ain't Microsoft – there will have been strong lobbying to adopt an MS solution, so the move to Google marks a shift in the power base or at least the default assumption that it's MS who do enterprise solutions. It's…
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A Pedagogy of Abundance take 2
I gave a presentation for George Siemens CCK09 course last night, which explored an idea I had proposed in this blog a while back, on the pedagogy of abundance. I wanted to explore the idea, so talked for half an hour and then we had a good discussion. You can see the recording of the session in Elluminate here. Below is a slidecast of the presentation. My main argument was that in economics previous models were based on an assumption of scarcity. In a digital world we have abundance and many of these models do not apply. There are two types of response to this, the abundance response which assumes…
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An interview with the future
I am one of the ‘presenters’ at the JISC 09 online conference. I don’t actually present, but instead have been asked to create a short video for the session looking at Do educational institutions have a future? Graham Attwell and Rob Howe are the other presenters. We had a chat about the session and I mentioned that I had considered doing an interview with a future version of myself, as a means of exploring the issues. They liked the idea so we have decided all to adopt it, with myself taking the academic perspective, Rob the learner one and Graham the institutional view. Below is my video, although it’s meant…
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Is the revolution justified?
Please see my previous post on the process behind this post. I have created a PDF version and below the blog post version, so you have the format of your choice. [This is a draft version, the full version will be published in JIME. September 2009] Is the revolution justified? Introduction It is common for observers and bloggers (including myself) in educational technology to proclaim that current educational practice is, in some way, ‘broken’. It is seen as not delivering deep learning, or failing to meet the needs of students, and of potentially becoming irrelevant to a new generation of digital learners. For example, here I am arguing that the…
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Reading club as course model?
As John has already mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I worked with him and Doug on a kind of online reading club experiment. This came out of some research money our Centre for Professional Development obtained for examining different ways in which higher education could support professional development. At the OU we have an occasional book club group, where influential books are taken by an academic and in an extended session we explore these. John has done Benkler's Wealth of Networks, Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and I've done Everything is Miscellaneous. So the idea was to attempt this online, a sort of 'extended reading club' where we…
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Creating virality in education – some thoughts
So, we had the flash debate on twitter about creating virality in education (I'll reflect on the success of that in a separate post). As promised here is some synthesis and thoughts. What does virality mean?Inevitably some of the discussion was around what we mean by something being viral. Is it the same as a meme? Does it just mean something that is passed on by 'word of mouth'? Can we define the key characteristics of a viral idea? AJ suggested that one factor was novelty and JoeNicholls suggested that it needed to provide a quick meaningful return on effort. This return on investment is interesting in virality I think.…
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Year of Future Learning – an experiment
I want to try something out, so would like people's views on it. My idea is to try and get some focused activity going around the concept of the learner of the future. Think of it as either a distributed research process or adding a layer of intentionality over some of what we do in the blogosphere. I have this feeling that between us there are often very good conversations, excellent resources, great ideas, etc but we don't always take the next step in synthesising or collecting these. Here is what I have in mind: A loosely coupled, distributed research 'project'. We declare 09 the 'year of future learning' (#YOFL…
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MixedInk – affordances for collaboration?
From the always useful Jane's elearning picks I came across MixedInk. It's a tool to promote collaboration to produce joint documents. Before you raise eyebrows and say 'not another one,' bear with me. It has some neat features – you are working towards a definite goal document, it has time limits to focus effort, but most intriguingly it positively wants you to take and adapt the text of other writers. As you type it finds similar phrases from other contributers, and you can add these in. Each submission can be voted on, so you can see which are the most popular/useful. And then when the document is finalised it shows…
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Shiny show 2
Following on from the hugely irrelevant Shiny Show 1, I bring the next instalment, where I look at any new technologies that have crossed my path and evaluate them from an educational perspective. The usual proviso that some of these may not be that new, it's just when I get to them. Odadeo – a social network site for dads. It is built around the concept of 'pledges', eg 'I pledge to be more patient', or 'I pledge to take my daughter to see High School bloody Musical 3'. You can then 'pip' your pledges when you do something towards them. You can share pledges and there is a 'Dadsdaq'…
