YOFL
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The future of ed – my contribution
George Siemens and Dave Cormier are running an open course on the Future of Education. They have asked for contributions on this topic, so my musical slideshare is below. As well as the various angles you might expect, I think the answer is the presentation itself – when you think about why have I created a presentation for two people I have never met, on a course I won’t teach on? The answers are because it’s easy, because I have a social connection, and because I think it’s fun (and there’s probably a bit of ego in there too). And as I say at the end, that we can do…
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Of Course
George Siemens and I ran the Course to Discourse mini-conference the other week, to discuss the future of the course. The elluminate recordings are now up if you missed it. Here is the slideshare of my presentation: Digital Implications for Universities View more OpenOffice presentations from mweller. I opened the conference and so I was trying to set the tone for what was to come by considering the impact of digitisation on education. I employed a rather reductionist strategy by considering higher education as being comprised of a number of components. I used the analogy of newspapers to consider how each of their components had been weakened by digitisation. I…
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Course to Dis-course
As part of my Year of Future Learning thang (yes, you hoped it'd gone away), I've organised with George Siemens an online mini-conference called 'From Course to Dis-course', runs May 14th – 15th. The aim is to look at the future of the course in a digital world. I think that the course, as we know it, provides a nice tight focus, but at the same time it is the base unit of education – it's something we all understand. So using it as the means to explore the impact of digital technologies will provide a useful indication of changes in higher education overall. And what a line-up we have…
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Reflection on flash debate in twitter
Last Friday I attempted a 'Flash debate' in twitter. The idea was that, like Flash mobs, we'd come together via twitter to discuss a particular topic, in this case virality in education. In my previous post I drew some conclusions about the topic, but here are some thoughts on the process. Overall, I'd say it had only middling success, you can see some of the conversations here. Although the inputs I had were good (and thankyou to those who contributed), it didn't really take off. In short, my debate around virality didn't go viral. My aim in attempting this, and indeed the whole YOFL thing, is to explore what ways…
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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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Some YOFL goodies
I have ‘created’ (ah, what does created mean nowadays anyway), a couple of aggregating goodies for YOFL. First up, a Twitterfountain: Adblock And next, a Yahoo pipe. Actually, Tony just let me hack one of his. I’ve put both on the wiki too. Now, you see there is some point in engaging with my half-arsed idea – you’ll get to appear on one of these!
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Twitter Flash debate – inducing virality
Scott dropped me a line the other day saying that, in relation to YOFL, one of the skills he was interested in was 'creating virality'. I think this is exactly the sort of modern digital skill that we should be considering as educators. I'm not sure if this is what Scott meant by it, but I can see at least three reasons why it's interesting as an educator: You want to create the same engagement with learning material for your students, as you see in popular memes or viral ideas. A viral spread of an idea, concept, approach or technology is an excellent way of engaging other academics. Indeed it…
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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…
