The Learning Revolution is Here

I didn't know it at that time, having been born just a few months later, that the revolutionary Open University, UK was born in January, 1971 with 25000 students. Of course, my parents didn't know that either when they named me Viplav (my Sanskrit origin name literally means "revolution"). It's just one of those weird...

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....

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 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....

PLE/N Tools

Really nice collection of links for this week's #PLENK2010 discussions. I especially liked Patterns of personal learning environments, Wilson. Wilson looks at patterns of use of and activity in personal learning tools and learning networks, revising a previous approach which was very functional and tool-specific. One of the ongoing challenges I have is with the...

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 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...

Unthinking the network

Ulises Mejias writes a very thought-provoking post Disassembled Spaces. He makes the point that if we are not able to ensure that a substantial part of our social and cultural production over the Internet is controlled openly rather than by a handful of private corporations, should we begin “unthinking the network”? He explores many dimensions of the concept in...

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...

Medium – the Massage

Reading Marshall mcLuhan's the medium is the MASSAGE. Deep. The impact of media - the wheel as an extension of the leg, clothes as an extension of the body, electronic circuitry as an extension of the brain - has powerful impacts on the way we are. He makes the point about "electric technology" presenting a unifying force,...

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...

CCK08 Week 2

End of week two of the "course" and I think I have come some way. While Week 1 was about Connectivism and the changing face of the web at an introductory level exposing me to some interesting ideas and getting me acclimatised to a massively online course, Week 2 has been the process of getting my...

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,...

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...

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...

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....

Taare Zameen Par – Stars on our earth

I just finished watching this amazing story and I have to insist anyone who has anything to do with education must watch it too! Kudos to Aamir Khan and his entire team for doing a fantastic job. Aamir must accept the mantle of being the Indian Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love, a story about a...

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...