EdTechNext – Be the change

My presentation at the Technology in Higher Education at the edTechNext conference today.

India MOOCs and eLibrary

Massive Open Online Courses  (MOOCs) and OERs have captured the imagination of our polity. The new Government's election manifesto clearly specifies MOOCs, although not under school or higher education, but under Vocational Training as a means for "working class people and housewives to further their knowledge and qualifications". Further, there is a firm push, although...

Blended Learning in India

There are many positives happening in EdTech in India. A government led mission called the National Mission on Education using ICT (NMEICT) has created massive amounts of content for engineering, arts and humanities, social sciences and natural science. It has also delivered the under 50 USD tablet, Aakash and a slew of innovations including Virtual...

Udacity throws out the MOOC?

As Thrun was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students--1.6 million to date--he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually...

MOOCs are ecologies not episodes

There are two ways one could think of the life-cycle of a MOOC. MOOCs could be thought of as one-time and episodic. They could also be thought of as ecologies, sites or environments for continual learning (for example, a series of MOOCs on the same topics, such as CCK), not use-once-and-throw episodes of learning. I...

MOOCs and the Future of Indian Higher Education – FICCI HES 2013

The 2013 FICCI Higher Education Summit was held on Nov 13 and 14, 2013. I, along with Prof. B N Jain (Vice Chancellor, BITS) and Mohan Kannegal (Manipal Global Education), conducted a master class on MOOCs and the Future of Indian Higher Education. Prof. Jain, in his address made the following points (please read MOOCs...

Confused MOOCThink

I came across an article by the progenitors of #EDCMOOC on their initial thinking around MOOC pedagogy (MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera). Riding on the Coursera engagement with the University of Edinburgh, the team designing the eLearning and Digital Cultures MOOC on the Coursera platform (that I missed enrolling for, though) was...

Business and MOOCs

Jay Cross anchored a fascinating conversation on Google Hangouts recently. Thinkers and practitioners on both sides of the MOOC divide (x-MOOC and c-MOOC) such as George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Lal Jones-Bey, Jerry Michalski and Terri Griffiths came together. The purpose was to discuss how MOOCs could possibly be used by businesses. Dave (at around...

Serious Games Singapore Conference Videos

A little delayed, but here are the two videos from the 2012 conference in Singapore. The first one is a panel discussion on how to monetize serious games where I flipped the discussion to "why monetize - what is the value that we are bringing to customers" instead. The next one, is my pitch for...

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around

Although I first heard this only recently in a rendition by Joan Baez (and it seems to have a rich history), the lyrics are revolutionary to say the least. The fragment below is a refrain (with "nobody" being replaced with what or who you want it to be). Ain't gonna let nobody, turn me around...

Serious Gaming and Social Connect 2012

I had a good time at the Serious Gaming and Social Connect 2012 Conference organized by Christopher Ng and Ivan Boo in Singapore between Oct 4-6. Kudos to the organizers and their terrific effort at getting so many different stakeholders in one place. It was also great to have NASSG members Amruth (Vitabeans), Rajiv (Knolskape), Inder (Wisecells)...

xMOOCs: Inside the box thinking

I had an occassion to present a session on MOOCs to some really bright people a few days ago. My thesis was that MOOCs (cMOOCs) represent an invention (they add vocabulary), while other models (xMOOCs, Flipped Classroom etc.) represent innovation that is more inside the box than outside it.

MOOCology

The discussion on what is a MOOC or how do we classify MOOCs is gaining momentum. First we had George explaining the difference by saying that there are xMOOCs and cMOOCs. Now Lisa Lane has come with a different taxonomy (network/task/content based) with some interesting distinctions. Dominic came up his own understanding of the "features" of a MOOC....

MOOConomics

Carlos Salerno over at Inside HigherEd wrote a piece on the Bitter Reality of MOOConomics. The major point he makes is that because students need to acquire credentials from top universities/colleges for better employment prospects whereas colleges are loath to provide these credentials through MOOCs because they have no barriers to entry (in terms of...

MOOC Dropouts

Audrey is grumpy and unhappy about the massive dropout rate vs. the hype of the open courses. She writes: I’m starting to get more than a little grumpy about MOOCs, what with all the hype about the revolutionary disruptions and game-changing tsunamis. I’m tired of the mainstream media punditry and their predictions that Stanford University’s experiments...

Scaling the MOOC

I read with interest Audrey Watters' commentary on Scaling College Composition. Some of the work I did in this area (I call it Connectivist Metrics) and the recent discussions I had with Stephen Downes in New Delhi during the EDGEX conference around intelligent environments for assessment, as well as all the great work that is happening...

The tensions at EDGEX2012

Speakers at the EDGEX Conference debated many tensions and challenges apparent in education today. George Siemens evocatively questioned the use of the word “disruptive” and asserted that we should call for transformation instead. Given the broad societal transitions to a networked and complex ecology, he talked about how initiatives like Coursera, Udacity and the Khan Academy provided...

The EDGEX2012 Primer

Over the next few weeks, as the countdown to the EDGEX Disruptive Educational Research conference to be held in New Delhi from March 12-14 begins, I hope to bring to you all news and updates about the conference and its themes. The EDGEX 2012 Conference has been carefully and collaboratively constructed to bring cutting edge educational research...

EDGEX 2012 Conference New Delhi

It gives me great pleasure to announce a unique conference on educational research and innovation called EDGEX, to be held at the Habitat Centre, New Delhi from March 12-14, 2012. The two main themes of the conference are: Learning X.O - marking the significant and ongoing developments in learning and teaching, particularly in informal learning, connectivism...

Learning Histories

What happens to learning histories? Traditionally, in the school or college system, we treat textbooks and references built by experts as the starting point of our education. Students are encouraged to discover through the texts and teacher led activities. However, from one group of students to the other, from one year to the other, it...

Managed Simulations

I have been researching management of simulations and other complex entity based learning implements such as serious games. The challenge here is that the traditional SCORM/AICC paradigm allows limited reporting capabilities. Another challenge is storing state for later resumption (bookmarks) and the third challenge is to be able to set simulation parameters. Another related challenge is...

Skillshare: Democratizing Education

The concept of Skillshare is to connect teachers and learners within a local community context. It is Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Skillshare CEO/Co-Founder, who makes a clarion call for democratizing education. Read more at FutureLearn!

The quality of educational administrators

I think this is a key challenge, not only in India, but across the world. It is every bit as important as the quality of educational technology and content in our classrooms. I am, so far, largely untouched by what I see in India (and maybe I have limited experience).  The first problem, and the most important...

Pushing the Frontiers of New Assessments – EDGE2011

My talk at EDGE2011 in Delhi was part of a panel that was presenting different thoughts on cutting edge developments in Assessments. I specifically focused on the tracking data, metrics and corresponding analytics that could be found by using games and simulations (or blends of the two). When I talk of Games and Simulations, I...

Revisiting SCORM

SCORM works on 2 main principles - as a way to package and sequence learning material, and as a way for learning management systems to track learning activity through a run time interface. It is based on traditional teaching-learning processes and provides additional promises of inter-operability and reuse through standardization of the way courses are organized and presented to...

Learning to Dandi

Right off the bat, if you have not seen it yet, check out Building a New Culture of Teaching and Learning by Dr. Tae. The movement started with the Dandi March in March 1930. The British had a monopoly or complete control over the manufacture of salt. Indians were not allowed to collect salt from the sea....

The Kahani of Learning

For those who are not aware, Kahani is the Hindi word for Story. And this gentleman tells a story like no one else I know. His use of metaphors is wondrous. The Torrent of Words, by the way, thunders down from the Sea of Stories into the Lake of Wisdom, who waters are illuminated by...

The capacity of universities

George Siemens bemoans the emerging trend that "higher education is not in control of its fate as it has failed to develop the capacity to be self-reliant in times of change". Referring to a dilution of the stance against corporatization, and the way external innovation is driving change at the academy, George may just be right....

PLEs and Connective Environments

With a little help from Jatinder, a kindred soul in the making of simulators that happen to attract Brandon Hall Awards, I tried to visualize a model of PLEs operating in a connective environment. It started with a reply I made to Janet and Carmen on what I think should be: ...let us contrast the...

The eXtended Web PLENK discussion

Missed Janet Clarey's great interactive talk this Wednesday but caught up with the recording. I think it was a great session on many accounts. Janet brings her great experience in Corporate Learning Development research at Brandon Hall into the session she leads. Thanks, Janet! The main questions that she addressed were: What are Web 1.0/2.0 learning...

Connectivist and Constructivist PLEs

Is the PLE a connectivist construct or a constructivist construct? Or both? Or neither, just influenced by many theories? A statement by Wendy Drexler in her paper prompted this question. I quote: Principles of connectivism equate to fundamentals of learning in a networked world. The design of the teacher-facilitated, student-created personal learning environment in this study...

The Curation Debate – Plenk2010

Yesterday's session seemed to be interesting. I missed it but was catching up on the recording. One part of it, around Curation (at least where it initially started), was especially interesting, not only from the point of view of what was being discussed, but also as an interesting example of the anatomy of the "narrative...

PLEs are an Operating System for Learning

This is my first post for PLENK2010 and I am glad to be involved in this discussion. Thanks to the MOOC organizers for setting this up. I think of PLEs as Operating Systems just like regular operating systems are for computer users. In fact, I call the PLE a LearnOS. Thinking of a PLE as a LearnOS helps me...

The curious cat and other stories

After listening and reading a lot about the Hole in the Wall over the past 10 years or so and other such experiments and viewing Dr. Sugata Mitra's latest TED Talk, I am inspired to ask the question - what makes the cat curious? What if I did not put a high-speed PC with Internet...

Critical Literacies and Native Collaboration

The epiphany is that what I have been thinking around native collaboration and what Stephen and participants of the Critical Literacies open course (which I regret not being actively part of) have been discussing have a great deal of resonance. Like in CCK08, I was approaching the topic more from the tools and implementation perspective while the...

Learners as Educators

Sliced PLEs - that is the term I had thought of to describe the subject of this post. I wrote: Let us say I managed to slice through everything in my PLE and gathered relevant information (posts, entries, discussions etc) around a specific learning area. Then, suppose I had the tools to order and sequence...

Attaching more than the network to open courses

Alan Levine summed it up nicely: And frankly, the open courses, marched to the beat of a fixed time length syllabus, might be seen as an incremental step from (I guess they would be called) closed courses? Non open courses? Are there other models than attaching the open network to a fixed course? We have...

Innovative Learning Formats

I am looking at the history of web based training. Found an interesting timeline here and here. Google's timeline search throws up some more interesting links. In particular, I liked reading this 1998 thesis by Mattias Moser. I am sure I could be pointed to more (and it would be great if you could point me to more)....

Can eLearning really scale

I know this must be on the face of it a rather impertinent question. But I am not talking just the about the "e" in eLearning (of course bits and bytes can float to almost anywhere now), but I am talking of eLearning as a whole concept. So what am I saying? Let me focus on...

Learning and Architecture

I was prompted by Howard to think more about the intersection of Learning and Architecture. Howard states: I’ve been thinking about how to create educationally relevant physical and social spaces for networked everyday learning. The similarity is in the importance of physical space and tacit learning. And poses the question: So . . . how...

Connective Simulations

Trust Stephen to come out with another super presentation. The presentation titled The Representative Student seeks to explore two challenges related to the modeling - the role of simulations or models in both delivering and learning about learning; and the relationships between adaptive courseware and social learning environments. This comes close on the heels of the...

PLE Architecture

Rita Kop mentions Stephen Downes' charter/vision for a PLE extending on from a discussion of critical literacies and the eXtended Web, building on Steve Wheeler's Web 3.0, George Siemens' xWeb and Stephen's Web X, to which I would add some of my own thoughts from a couple of years ago on Learning X.0: The components that were...

Learning Innovation

To communicate an elusive and esoteric concept such as corporate values or leadership skills in a way that learners at all levels imbibe the spirit and passion with which the company has been created and is driven on a daily basis, is a task that requires continuous engagement and time. It also requires continuous reiteration...

We don’t need no education

I was reading with interest Will Richardson's Motivating DIY Learners and his links to Alan Levine's The Gaping M Shaped Void for DY Education and then following up on Anya Kamenetz who has written a new book called DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education which I have to read, and I...

New models for Indian Education

In this post, I would like to propose some new models/directions for Indian Education by addressing some core problem areas that I have been able to identify. I would like to focus on, in particular how some strategic new models could change the way we are addressing the huge scale and diversity in India. The...

Modeling the Education Sector

There are doubtless many models put into use to try to analyze the working of the education sector and there is significant interest in this space. Here are my initial thoughts on how we could create a useful analytical model. I consider three dimensions to be vital for this model. Infrastructure This first dimension concerns the...

Indian Education Services

I was discussing the formation of a specialized cadre, perhaps on the lines of the Indian Administrative Services, for providing a set of well trained educators and educational administrators that have a pan Indian impact. I was told that former Education Secretary, Anil Bordia, has been empowered to investigate this. Subsequently, I found a recent...

Future Ready Indian Higher Education

FICCI (the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) and Ernst and Young took out a report for the FICCI Higher Education Summit 2009. They called it "Making the Indian higher education system future ready". The report uses trends and understanding of the underlying structures in higher ed in India and proposes alternate educational...

EdFutures – Futures Map – India

Here is a brief CMap on what I think are some of the major components of a possible Indian educational future. There are trends (and data) to back a whole lot of these elements. Needless to say, this is a first attempt! Please click on the image to get a better view.

Trends as a pattern of change over time

I have been branding myself as a contrarion over at edFutures in what I see as a fundamental issue, not mere semantics, with how we started the course. All started from the OECD starter framework and the edFutures week 1 discussion that I attempted to initiate on not using trends as our starting point if...

Schooling for Tomorrow

I came across this fascinating OECD-CERI project through Dave Cormier and George Siemens' Open Course in Education Futures. Please download the Schooling for Tomorrow StarterPack document here. It gives practitioners, administrators and other stakeholders a way to think about key questions such as: What is shaping the future of schooling? What might schooling look like...

Panel 5: VLEs in HE (HE 2010)

Major General S B Akali, Director, Global Institute of Healthcare Management, talked about facilities should be reused and how mobile technologies will really make the largest impact. He talked about how technology can change culture and lifestyles. We must figure what direction to take ICT in because one tree can create a thousand matchsticks, but...

Panel 4: Online Examinations (HE 2010)

Madan Padaki, Co-Founder and CeO, Meritrac Services, said he distinctly gets the sense that online examinations will become commonplace a few years from now. With that comes a responsibility to make sure that we not only provide the rights systems and processes, but also the right methodologies. In a survey they conducted with heads of...

Panel 3: Technology enabled Campus (HE 2010)

Brig (Dr) R S Grewal, Chitkara University, talked about the state of the art required in campus today. With students driving the transition to new devices, applications and content in an ubiquitous, the central problem, he felt, was that around control and information security. The entertainment industry has its own impact with students connected with...

Panel: Democratizing Distance Education (HE 2010)

Moderated by A M Thimmayya, SVP, Distributed Learning, Manipal Education who referred also to the debate between India and "Bharat". The theme was - Democratizing the dissemination of Quality Education. The first panelist, Dr. C K Ghosh, Director, Student Service Centre, IGNOU, spoke about the value of the sensitizing people that technology can be used...

Panel: Use of technology in Learning (HE 2010)

Mr. B K Murthy, Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Technology, Government of India, started by talking about a National Knowledge Network approved by the government in late March 2010 (costed around 5900 crores, taking over from National Mission). The plan is to connect all academic institutions on a high speed redundant...

HE Summit Keynote: Sushma Berlia

We have an envious growth rate. Access is the most important dimension and bottleneck. We want to get 30% of our HE age group access to good quality, equitable education. ICT is a powerful tool in that quest. ICT implementations will help create the basic supporting infrastructure - content, delivery mechanism and evaluation. Nothing can...

HE Summit Keynote: Prof. Pental

Our education system is a bit like Karol Bagh Market (a popular and crowded market place in Delhi). There must be some wisdon to separate engineering, agricultural etc institutes separate from universities, he said. There is some wonder to this; why we have not looked at university as a comprehensive systems as in countries like...

HE Summit Keynote: Prof. Pillai

HE cannot be separated from other types of education. The challenge is to provide firstly, access (GER - Gross Enrolment Ratio - is 12% of 18-24 age group, world average is 23%); secondly, the quality of teaching learning is a bottleneck - if it improves, the GER will go up - this will improve by...

Digital Learning Higher Ed Summit 2010

A small group of educators, technologists, bureaucrats and private companies are sitting together to dliberate the use of Digital Learning in Higher Education in India. We have Prof. VN Rajasekharan Pillai, VC, IGNOU, Prof. Deepak Pental, VC, Delhi University, Prof. A K Bakshi, Director, ILLL, DU, Dr. B K Murthy, Director, DoIT and many more...

Should education be free?

...and should education be not-for-profit? The recent Right to Education Act being implemented from April 1,2010, is catching flak on a wide range of aspects. Advocates of the common school system, like Prof. Anil Sadgopal, want a school system that is defined as follows: Common School System means the National System of Education that is...

The Right To Education

Education is the key to progress. It empowers the individual. It enables a nation. It is the belief of our government that if we nurture our children and young people with the right education, India's future as a strong and prosperous country is secure. These words, part of the Indian Prime Minister's address to the...

Digital memory against forgetting

In 1978 Milan Kundera wrote a novel , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and said: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Now in 2010, in our context, perhaps, this statement might be revisited. Our struggle, in the digital medium, is not of forgetting our digital memories (look...

Learning and Chaos

Found an interesting article after talking with an expert in Chaos theory. JoAnn discusses possible impacts of Chaos theory on classroom learning using systems, initial effects, bifurcations and fractals. She also explores existing theory in relation to chaotic systems for learning. Essentially, the point that needs to be explored is whether learning is linear, deterministic and predictable...

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs)

I had not heard of  games of this genre before, but they are pretty exciting and I must thank Ulises Mejias for my first introduction to  this medium. There are many definitions including the one here where ARGs are contrasted with serious games. Apparently, the first such "game" dates back to 1996! Wikipedia defines it as "is...

Picolearning

Check out Microvision's SHOWWX. The SHOWWX Laser Pico Projector is a pocket-sized projection device that can connect to iPods, PCs and other TV-Out devices expected to be made commercially available in March 2010 in the US. Microvision also offers an evaluation kit for other companies who want to embed this technology in their digital products e.g. mobile phones. While there are...

Alternate Education

I have started research on alternative education systems. Right off the bat I found a website that summarizes some of these initiatives in the Indian context - Alternative Education in India. Two really interesting categories were Alternative Schools and Learning Cooperatives. I like the fact that the latter prefer not to be called "schools" at all. Among...

Centenary Post

For my hundredth post, I would like to focus on a few key questions that attack various aspects of what I have experienced and learnt in the past two years. These questions are extremely important for me to attempt to answer and I hopefully will, atleast in part, as I go on. The questions may...

The god in Education

Am reading Neil Postman's The End of Education. Was particularly struck by his separation of the engineering of learning from the metaphysics of learning. While the engineering of learning involves the how (the methods, techniques), the metaphysics of learning involves becoming a "different person because of something you have learned" (p. 3). The metaphysics of...

The 21st century LMS

I recently read a report compiled by eLearning Network from their Next Generation Learning Management Event held in September, 2009. It is an interesting report. Personalization of content is a base expectation with an element of learner's control or choice over what she wants to learn coupled with added intelligence from the system to provide relevant...

Networked Learning Environments

So are LMSs now part of a technology trend that is headed south? Will incorporation of Web 2.0 features make them more enticing? Will learning really become more effective if Web 2.0 happens to these LMSs? Will they start working on a networked learning SCORM advanced API soon, maybe by defining standard runtime Web 2.0 interactions...

NBT – Networked Based Training Solutions

NBTs, the natural evolution (in my opinion) from WBTs, are a solution worth evaluating. Let us look at NBTs from two aspects - one within a learning context and the other from outside that context. Typical online training involves the use of self paced digital media or virtual classrooms. The major aspects are: The very...

Google Wave

Check out Google Wave. The concept is striking and ambitious. Also very relevant to what we have been talking about in terms of PLEs. At the core, there are a few important architectural dimensions. Firstly, content structure. A few years back I had designed an architecture for a content management system that structured out content...

3D Data Visualization

Data visualization in 2D is what we have done most of our lives. Till recently, I viewed 3D as a medium for understanding and manipulating complex structures (say molecules, genes, architectural maps etc) both for academic and commercial use. With mashups, came the concept that you could intermix n-dimensional data (like OLAP) in a Web...

Connectivist Metrics

I thought I would take a stab at defining what connectivist metrics could include. Having read in Stephen's post, Connectivist Dynamics in Communities, that connectivist networks produce connective knowledge and that four elements  (autonomy, diversity, open-ness and interactivity & connectedness) distinguish a knowledge-generating network from a mere set of connected elements, I thought it would make sense to...

The Slumdog Post

This post just had to be written. After hearing about Slumdog Millionaire and (both sides) of the debate surrounding this film, I finally decided to watch it hours before the Oscars ceremony. It is a gut wrenching, sad yet triumphant story for a young boy whose only source of learning was informal, connective, but which...

Stigmergic Collaboration

Mark Elliot talks about Stigmergic collaboration. Stigmergy, a term coined by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s with his research on termite behavior, describes self organization of complex tasks by collective inputs of a large number who are responding to changes in their local environment through small simple actions. The concept of stigmergy therefore provides an intuitive and easy-to-grasp theory...

Instructional Design – Under Siege?

When I think of the term under siege, it reminds me of Steven Seagal, a master chef, on board a US Navy battleship taken over by terrorists in the 1992 movie by the same name. Of course, he fights back and defeats the terrorists. Doubtless somewhat of a stretch of imagination here and completely unrelated,...

X.Os in Learning and Technology

There have been some huge developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially those around the internet and the way we learn. The “X” in “X.O” represents “fault lines” or tensions between local and global, groups and networks, structure and chaos, homogeneity and diversity, teacher-led vs facilitated and simple vs complex. With each tension comes...

Learning X.0 Whitepaper

I wrote this summary a few months ago. The paper focuses on the generations of learning and the web that we are hearing about and their importance to organizations. Download it!

Communities of Practice, Learning as a social system (Wenger, 1998)

We frequently say that people are an organization's most important resource. Yet we seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through which individuals develop and share the capacity to create and use knowledge. CoP: Best Practices, Etienne Wenger, "Systems Thinker", June 1998 I came across Wenger's 1998 paper titled Communities of Practice, Learning...

Connectives and Collectives

George Siemens interesting and provocative presentation at D2L Fusion 2008 titled Connectives and Collectives: Learning Alone, together talks about the autonomy of self (Connectives) and the subsumption of self (Collectives). He quotes: “Intense connectivity can homogenize the pool…high cohesiveness can lead to the sharing of common rather than novel information” Uzzi, Spiro (2005) George suggests...

A stitch in time saves Twine

I talked not long ago of Networks of Practice and Learning Formations. I talked about learning effectiveness as a function of individual and network strength and possible optimizations of access to information and connections to people. And Twine is the perfect example of this. A networking site that incorporates evolutionary personalization of content and networking...

Learning Effectiveness = Func[Individual and Network strength]

In a 2.0 world, what will constitute or determine learning effectiveness and learner engagement? We have seen a lot of literature on the individual's own impact on her learning, but a recent post by Tony Karrer on his Work Literacy blog struck me as profound. So, while information is much more readily accessible and that...

Network of Practice

I came across an interesting set of concepts that quite predate the Learning 2.0 proclamation. Building upon Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, Brown and Duguid developed the concept of Network of Practice. Ranging from communities of practice to electronic or virtual communities, and differentiated from formal work teams, it focuses on how individuals come together...

The new age of innovation

The book by the same name written by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan has much to offer us in the learning industry. There is a fundamental transformation in the way we do business and it is critical for companies to negotiate two fundamental pillars of this change - co-created experiences and access (rather than ownership)...

More on Learning Formations

In the last post, I talked about the characteristics of these learning formations. To summarize, these ad hoc formations are characterized by: life cycle - duration and phases interaction frequency interaction depth or complexity extent of formal structures formation size There may be more characteristics, but these seem to be key. By life cycle I...

2.0 Learning Formations

In my last post, I talked about networks and groups and discussed how groups make for more meaning for Learning 2.0 than simply the concept of networks. As we look at the way Learning 2.0 styles possibly function in a network, it would be helpful to think of ad hoc formations that are forming and...

Groups and Networks: 2.0 Formal methodologies

In the last post, I looked at some of the basic components that any formal methodology for Learning 2.0 shall need to address. These are Network organization, Group organization, Content, Measurement and Tracking and Collaboration. In this post I will attempt to dive deeper into Networks and Groups and try to identify the characteristics of...

Part 5: Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies

Discussion Thread: This post << Part 4 << Part 3 << Part 2 << Part 1 (Also a contribution to the May Working/Learning blog carnival hosted by Rupa Rajagopalan) In the last few posts, I have tried to identify what I think are the pillars of the learning process/experience and tried to establish that they...

Part 4: Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies

Discussion Thread: This post << Part 3 << Part 2 << Part 1 Before we go on to start detailing formal methodologies, we must make concrete the business case, context and critical success factors for these methodologies. As organizations struggle to understand how they can leverage Learning 2.0 and vendors bring in their own interpretations...

Part 3: Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies

Discussion Thread: This post << Part 2 << Part 1 I think the discussion regarding the dimensions of analysis of learning is useful, because (unlike the author) I think these are precisely where old-style (1.0) learning and new-style (2.0) are different. Take, for example, the whole idea of goals and measurements. To measure the 'effectiveness'...

Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies – More thoughts

I thought that this was an interesting attempt, even if I would not subscribe to it wholeheartedly. The author takes the formal dimensions of traditional learning - objectives, time, measurement, improvement and content or knowledge - and maps them to Learning 2.0, defined loosely as a combination of social networks, collaboration, and the rest. I...

Sugar – an operating system for learners

Now this is really very exciting. Let me start with explaining how I got here. The first thing is there are groups such as the One Laptop per child (OLPC) and those within Intel, HP and many companies that are trying to create laptops for the classroom in the K12 segment. These are small form...

Learnlets » Learning Management Colloquium: Day 1

Learnlets » Learning Management Colloquium: Day 1 I think this is a really important chart from Clark. The first striking thing about it is the start point - elearning. We are, today, at the low point of design depth and technical elegance and need to move to "intelligent systems" towards the top right. Running backwards,...

Learning 2.0 formal methodologies?

Jane Hart, in response to my comment on Manish's blog post, was wondering what I meant by structured construction and tracking models for teaching-learning in a Learning 2.0 world. I guess this is as good a time as any to start throwing some ideas around for discussion. Thanks Jane, for forcing me to think harder!...

Learn@Work and Work@Learn

Part of the Work at Learning/Learning at Work blog carnival hosted by Manish Mohan. A few months back, I started two collaborative multi-author blogs for my company (one for my software development team and one for my e-learning development team) and helped a couple of other individuals at work to start their own. I also...

Ning

Ning. It is out there. A tool to help you create your own learning network. This tool allows you to create a community, link blogs, track activity, make announcements and create discussion forums. This is a really cool way of getting started quickly on sharing and collaboration.

Social Learning Networks

I stumbled across LearnHub, a social learning network that combines social networking, community ratings, learning and structured teaching. This is a really innovative solution that provides teachers the capability to teach online and host discussions among other things.  Teachers can create lessons, tests, courses and tutoring sessions. Any one can start or join multiple communities...

Learner Profiling

When we look at the three pillars of learning design - learner, pedagogy (I will include learning theory, content and instructional design in this) and technology - we have been talking a lot about pedagogy and technology. I would like to start a discussion around the learner and how we can synthesize what we know about...