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...

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...

The tyranny of content

I have had the opportunity to interact with some school textbooks and instructional designers in my lifetime (and I am rediscovering some now). I have also had occasion to browse through India's National Curricular Framework, 2005. The puzzle that has confronted me has been that although there seems to be no dearth of good thinking...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

Learner Responsibility

We have often, actually most of the time, decided to focus on teachers, teaching methods, institutional structures, assessments and certifications, but what is the responsibility of the learner herself in this experience? I am not talking about defining learners by the characteristics (autonomous, takes responsibility for her own learning...) under the category of responsibility, but...

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...

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...

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...

20th ICCE Day 1

I am at the 20th ICCE at Mauritius and am getting a chance to interact with Chemistry educators and researchers from all over the world on their thoughts and approaches to using ICT in Science education. A very interesting and interactive session by Prof. Peter Mahaffy around climate change and the role of chemistry was...

Gaming and Simulation – Drawing the line?

In one of my conversations with a reputed customer, we had an interesting discussion around a theme for our project. Essentially a gaming project as conceived initially, both teams got together to thrash out the underlying model - the processes, variables and algorithms that would constitute this project. As the teams got a better understanding...

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...

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!...

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...

Sliced PLEs and Soft Peer review

I read about soft peer reviews on George Siemens' blog and immediately went on to read more about the concept. I am very intrigued because of a discussion I had not long ago with an academician at a prominent university in India about the feasibility of starting an online journal based on intellectual property originating from within...

Notes on Instructional Design

A lot of good thinking has been provoked by Tony Karrer's provocative questions. Manish and Geetha have also been responding to these thoughts. Here are my 2 cents. For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to approach Instructional Design in a manner similar to my approach for Software and Database design....

e-learning 2.0 challenges for organizations

Organizations and institutions that follow the traditional system of knowledge sharing and instruction understand the limitations of this system in terms of building effective resource pools and leveraging organizational knowledge and skills. A system driven in majority by rote learning, page turners and curriculum-centricity rather than focusing on the learner and growth through harnessing collective...

The strategic inflection point

Only the paranoid survive. Andrew Grove's 2003 book by the same name reflects on the strategic inflection point when something in the environment changes in a fundamental way that is not so apparent in our daily chaos of survival. Andrew writes of how a 10X change in any one force (following Porter’s classical competitive strategy...

Social Learning

Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet developmental psychologist (1896-1934), also known as the founder of cultural historical psychology, believed that our learning depends heavily on the social and cultural context within which we exist and the role of interpersonal communication. Theories such as cognitive apprenticeship, activity theory, situated learning and distributed cognition have been reportedly influenced by Vygotsky's...

Pervasive Learning

I found some great stuff on Pervasive Learning at the KnowledgeLab site. I would think there are strong parallels with Personal Learning and collaborative learning in that we talk about the sources of knowledge and the processes by which learning takes place. However, there is one additional key differentiator which is that pervasive or ubiquitous...

Collaborative and Cooperative Learning

I came across some very interesting articles around collaboration and cooperation in learning. Formally defined, cooperative learning is defined by a set of processes which help people interact together in order to accomplish a specific goal or develop an end product which is usually content specific while (Panitz, 1996). Collaborative learning is defined as a...

Frameworks for Learning

So everything that we formalize needs a frame of reference. The design of these frameworks and models typically defines the boundaries of what can be achieved. Take for example, ADL's SCORM. Written by experts across industry and standards organizations, SCORM defines a methodology to design and serve learning content. Take a look at the work...