Limitless learning plenary #OEB16 on owning learning

A great set of speakers, all talking on the subject of owning learning (some limitless)

Alec Couros

Promise of open and connected learning is the subject. Promise of personalised learning is one of the elements that have changed in the last few years. The ownership.

Help with bowdril youtube is example of the strength of weak ties. Everyone has access to networks today. The longtail of learning helps to connect with people for niche learning.

Post napster idea of MIT giving 2002 all their materials away via the internet. Youtube is the ultimate MOOC as so many people have learned their own passion.

Audrey Clemens is another kid that he learned and shared through the web.

#learningproject (part for students): how can we learn from the web, and document the learning through web options. (eg Bob Ross tutorials to learn painting).

So if we can google it, why teach it. This is a bit of techno utopianism that we need to be critical off. Tech utopia , Langdon Winner on mythinformation. (from searching for the limits book).

Neil Postman on 5 things we need to know about technological change. It is not an attitude, but a ecological…

Emerging challenges for open learning:

information literacies; filter bubbles and fake news (Eli Pariser, youtube beware of filter bubbles).

Blue feed,, Red feed: looking at the tail of two different tail news. Very good article.

Most students don’t know when news is fake (wallstreet journal).

Trevelyan (1942) what is worth reading and easy prey to sensations.

Attention literacy: Mcluhan, heavy media multitaskers impacting learning and attention.

Problems of identity: resume is replaced by online portfolio (eg). One option is universities providing you with your own domain name for you to fill with relevant information.

We live in a world where one single tweet can change our lives for bad or for good.

Cybercrime: romance scams: fake network accounts (catfishing) to get money.

Greater societal problems: when we ask students to come to the web, this is not a perfect world and it is getting more hostile. Geography of hate website.

We need to really think about what we teach students on getting online tools.

Diana Laurillard

Who owns the responsibility of for learning. (using the conversational framework, see picture)

The outline of her argument is: what it means by learning, and what it takes to teach in the digital world, who owns the responsibility fr learning, how to plan the shift to effective blended learning, the education context for teachers and leaders. So her point is more formal, where alex couros’s focus was more on the informal, passionate learning.

What does it take us to learn formally? The point of the conversational framework was to distill the learning and put it into a fairly simple framework.

(see picture), and the idea should be to widen the learning conversations to embed all of these types of learning and interactions.

Question: teaching presence ? when a teacher is taken out of the framework. This is where education comes in, as it can cater specific learning that would take you much more time to get there. So the teacher provides something that you cannot reach quickly yourself.

The teaching workload is increased in terms of … (see picture).

Using learning technologies is our best bet to be able to do this. So, to Diana these are exciting times to be in education.

Challenges: MOOCs are free education for highly educated professionals most of the time. So we need to use the technology to scaffold/cascade those who do need education and cut off.

One option is to use MOOCs for teachers, as they are following MOOCs anyway, but aiming the course at training teachers for their profession.

Who owns the responsibility of learning? The new digital demands we make on teacher time will effect the time and tasks they need to do.

Learners were collaborating, working online in both class and at home, online.

Balance of responsibility looking at teacher and learners? With technology we can enhance the advocacy of both. Teachers should be able to think through how they can support learners with tech for independent learning.

Shift planning towards blended learning.  Modelling learning benefits versus teaching costs: see

http://web.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/cram/index.html

The drivers are strong but not aligned with digital. And we invest in the enablers, which are weak if you do not have the drivers for innovation. Unlock the power of the teachers to support more blended learning, more personalised learning. Teaching is a design science, lets trust the teachers to do this.

Martin Eyjolfsson

He wondered about why Icelandians seem to be more creative? Because Icelandians are happy… but why?

Only a few of us young people know what they want to do later on in life… this calls for creative solutions to bring passion to their life. A massive participation from an early age into society. So becoming a jack of many trades from an early age onward to feel society, to keep an open mind and be a free spirit. Bjork has a project biophilia (http://biophiliaeducational.org/ ), which learns kids about creativity.   

Mark Surman from Mozilla

Web literacy empowers people and keeps the internet healthy. The stakes are getting higher on what internet means for education and for humanity.

What does it mean to have a healthy internet? Mozilla has a motto: guard the open nature of the internet. And this was said when it was launched in 2003 but it still rings true.

The internet is made by multiple people and in a way by us all. The internet is an ecosystem built by us, but we need to keep it healthy. But many things have happened.

The internet of things is increasingly becoming  reality. Every aspect of us will become connected. This also means it becomes an increased risk, as AI is embedded in these systems and filtering bubbles as well. Some of the risks of this ecosystem is IoT botnets are growing and they are up for hire. Where devices are much less secured. We have an increasing cybersecurity risk that risks of taking whole companies down. The stakes are very high.

What is the social structure as we live in an increasingly connected society? There is a digital divide (eg demographic digital divide is real and pervasive). The digital power and opportunities influence divides. Those divides are global.

Structures of economy are part of the healthy internet, eg major app producers are in the North, where growing smartphone use in South, so new/old colonial.

(look up latest worldbank report as it was actually critical and of interest).

Imperial ambitions from US and China corporations using the internet. Mozilla makes products with values and ethics embedded in them, but increasingly Mozilla found that the need to be part of a larger trend to keep internet health. We as Mozilla are choosing to become more political.

Teaching this to help people realize what the digital world is, is one of the best activist actions to take and be part of. This is an important activist role.

Are we teaching the right things? Web literacy is an important citizen skill, yet we do not take it seriously enough in schools. This is reading and writing and participating in the digital world. Critical reading skills as well as participation skills, and creativity is critical as a skill. We need to be successful to be a productive force.

www.theglassroomnyc.org as a way to interactively make people more web literate.

Why Europe’s new copyright proposals are bad news for the internet (see fortune article), the outcome of this debate will have a massive effect on citizenship in Europe. It might be giving an free road to censor personal internet content on a massive scale. It will have an effect on free digital speech.

Look at www.changecopyright.org which is just getting going, and Mozilla wants teachers and young people to be involved in.

Mobile ways to teach business and medical skills, plus a look at the changing face of e-learning…

During the last Online Educa Berlin, podcasts were recorded all through the conference. In one of them you can hear a bit of what we (= the eLearning team) does at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. But what is really interesting to hear is the podcast part of Michael Wesch.

This is the link to the mp3-version (19 min in total). For the complete podcast with time, click here.

The podcast is the third and final part of Thursday’s coverage from ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2008 where we meet with more of the contributors to the conference and discuss their topics in more detail.

1 - Mathew Constantine, IE Business School (0m.30s) talks about using mobile phones to deliver market simulations and learning nuggets to students on business courses.

2 - Inge de Waard, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Belgium (6m.01) shows us how mobiles are being used to spread health information as part of a blended offering in the developing world.

3 - Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Kansas State University, US (10m.02s) shares his insights and thoughts on the future of education, particularly focussing on a global perspective.

The effect of the economic crisis on (e)Learning - a lunch discussion started by Jay Cross

At OEB there are several things happening, one of the initiatives I like a lot are the Special Interest Group lunches (SIG). This noon I joined Jay Cross at his lunch initiative: what can the learning world expect/tackle in these times of crisis?

All of us agreed that the economic crisis will be here for a couple of years, resulting in job losses. Seeing that in the past the learning department was one of the first departments to be cut in companies, estimates are that nearly 70 to 80 % of the learning budgets will be cut in the next couple of years. So we all better gear ourselves to overcome this crisis, both on a personal and on an institutional level.

It was a round table, so I jott down the main topics that were raised:

• more emphasis on open source/open resources;
• shift in company ethics, durable (energy) solutions;
• the world is in an economic shift going gom the industrial age towards a knowledge age => so investing in knowledge = learning will be crucial if you want your company/organisation to stay financially valid.
• the world is in an economic shift going gom the industrial age towards a knowledge age.
• CEO's need to be included in defining strategy for eLearning (training, coaching, awakening management will be crucial if the learning departments want to keep alive);
• equiping people to manage the recession => that would be a business worth investing in.
• it is time to invest in more bottom-up, informal learning;
• dare to invest time to seize the day the opportunity to be prepared for the long-term future.
• in times of crisis you go in search of the essence of what you have and what you need => a personal process;
• learning is personal.
• being confronted with dire straights inspires, the ones that dare in these times florish.
• some companies (Volkswagen, Google) dare to incorporate learning on personal interest in the workers time.
• personal knowledge/learning techniques will benefit the whole or the communities to which the learners belongs.
• personal learning is essential in addition to managemental learning change.
• learning touches all societal issues.
• outsourcing the learning department to some extent might be a possibility.
• increase the consciousness that learning has a definite positive impact on the complete organisation or/and person (if you cut a department, it will effect the whole; if you cut knowledge, everyone will be challenged).
• knowledge on new learning techniques should be increased.
• more really tailored content has to be provided. In many cases we now buy a complete package from which we only use a small percentage, because only this content is of interest to us. So focus on small content tailored for the user and standardized so it can be build on.
• learning touches all the society.

#OEB08 the elearning in Africa session

Some random notes, hoping that you can make sense of them.

Moderated by Shafika Isaacs from South Africa. Shafika is a very energetic and knowledgeable person with an amazing humor (yes, I love humoristic people its seems, because I keep filtering those out of the crowd). And very engaged in elevating global poverty.

In Africa the main revolution is a mobile revolution. Unfortunately we underestimated the use of mobile phone. 95% of mobile cell phone use is for social reasons, so it would be interesting to put out much more useful content with evidence of developmental impact. Reaching the bottom billion in Africa is crucial in lifting the world from poverty and degridation.

E-Learning Experiences in Africa

Jan Beniest, World Agroforestry Centre, Kenya

A man with a yellow ‘debardeur’ (Flemish word I keep in because he is Flemish speaking and such a word brings it home for me).
Web-Based Courses for Capacity Strengthening in the Agricultural Sector in Developing Countries

CGIAR and eLearnikng

In Africa there is a lot of pressure to put all of the content online.

Knowledge banks, but these are resources that people need to access individually.

(eradic notes, but they give an idea on what is said)

With this project they wanted to use standards to make these resources accessible. So they use open standards (yeah!).

Ariadne in Leuven, you can search for CGIAR and at the same time you can search on other resources (international). This way agricultural learning can be improved for all interested. They host it under a Moodle site.

Agricultural: 6 week preparitory period which was face-to-face (expensive course) 1 week problem solving workshop. To get everyone on the same wave length and afterwards the online content came in.

‘Contextualizing agroforestry’ from within

These courses become relevant because mathematics, language topics were mixed into agroforestry making everything much more contextualized, much more comprehensible to all the learners.

No accreditation, no certificate so the course was intrinsically motivational. From the 40 starters 30 finished all the courses (so purely on personal interest: IMPRESSIVE)

Learners got into the subject matter much quicker.

Because of the previous online contacts, it was much easier to work with them during the face-to-face part.

Access and and navigation was NOT an issue (in regard to the common understanding of low resource areas).

A network was build an was seen as a positive surplus.

Future: looking at mobile possibilities, other locations to distribute these courses.

CGIAR

Dr Herbert Thomas, University of the Free State, South Africa
The E-Learning Manager as Prophet: The Curious Case of a Developing Country

Emphasizes the need for internationally acceptable quality standards from government side.

96% of students own a cell phone ó 57% own pc at home. So you can easily see the potential of mobile learning.

Management needs to drive the change within eLearning.

http://www.ufs.ac.za/

Paul Landers, Ericsson, Sweden
Mobile Learning for Africa. The Millennium Village, Rwanda, Case Study

Mobile course on one of the millenium goals that Ericsson was involved in.

80 million in Africa 2007

+46 million in first half of 2008

What is the benefit of having a 3G network if you do not provide interesting content.

So they started looking at village clusters.

Child mortality issues were used to construct a mobile course. SCORM compliant and distributable.

The latest evolutions in mobile use:
Presence ·
Geo positioning ·
Mobile tv ·
Whiteboarding (sharing applications) ·
Blogging ·
Instant messaging

Daniel Richard Stern, Uconnect, Uganda
Rural Community and Family-Oriented Education by Mobile Computing with Portable Solar

Daniel is kind of a paternal figure. He has done amazing things in his life (lived and aided junkies in Geneva, lived in a cabin amidst a wooded reserve without many facilitations (together with his family), lived on one of the highest mountain tops in Switzerland together with his six sons and surviving from the earth…and now living in Uganda). He has a big grey beard and likes to talk.

One of the main problems in Africa is access to electricity. So new energy techniques can be beneficial.

Solar power is one of them.

http://www.uconnect.org/

He suggests that if you understand the meaning of life, you will be a secure learner and you will find what interests you.

Self-directed learning is the future and will keep on inspiring learners.

Self-reliance is important for learners and facilities.

Michael Wesch at #OEB08

Michael Wesch has been social mediated innumerous times because he pushes the learning agenda forward. He was keynoting at OEB08 and it was a blast. He managed to mix humor, storytelling, self-relativation and content. The topics he raised were not that new if you follow the learning sphere, but he put everything in an inspiring framework.

Michael Wesch works at Kansas University and he mixes anthropology, ethnology and culture into the new learning equation. He does not only talk about it, he immediately uses it. For a quick intro, visit his youtube channel. His most famous video is probably the 'Web2.0... the machine is using us'.

He talked about the future of education in which he stated that there is currently a 'crisis of significance' in which he states 'How can we create students who can create meaningful connections'. He linked his subject to Papua New Guinea where he lived for an extended time.

For this statement on the 'crisis of significance' he referred to YouTube which has enabled a real shift both in the media world and in the educational realm. Learners no longer are passive, but they create content, distribute, comment, organize, filter ... learners have become active learners and they are becoming more and more connected.
Web2.0 has created a revolution of which the complete impact is becoming clearer everyday. Learners are connecting to their taste in music, culture, content and they are no longer passively taking over the toplists that big media multinationals propose.

This revolution affects learners on many levels. Unfortunately our schools have not adapted to this revolution, they are still very traditional in approach. So many learners are in dubio, they love learning and creating, discussing content... but they do not like the rigid traditional educational ways that fill a lot of our school's curriculum.

Michael Wesch is all over the web, if you are interested this is the link to a paper he wrote about antiteaching.

mobile learning and QRcodes: my session and the audience's ideas

The OEB08 session in which I spoke was amazingly rich in content (talking about the other participants). They all had great applications making use of language technology, sms, multimedia and all combining it in mobile examples. Because I was the last one to speak, I was too nervous to take notes while they were giving it. I looked up links to them:

Gavin Cooney, Learnosity, Ireland on 'Voice: The Killer Application of Mobile Learning';

Mathew James Constantine, IE Business School, Spain on 'Mind the Gap – Narrowing the Distance to the Learner'

Sarah Cornelius, University of Aberdeen, UK on 'Real-Time Simulation on the Move: The Learner Context'


The audience that was present was amazing. They gave idea after idea on how the QRcodes could be used in a learning or broader setting, it was mindblowing. I tried to jott down all of the ideas mentioned:

• Adding it to a business card;
• Using QRcodes to promote an article or thing on the go (in the street, open space);
• using it inside buildings (flour plans);
• using it in tours by linking it to audio that give background information on the sights;
• using it in (newspaper) articles to link to extra/background information;
• putting it on geocaching games and articles;
• using it to guide people directly to a map to go to a hotel, university... (from bus stops, train stations...);
• linking it to audio samples to construct a bigger sound landscape;
• using it to guide learners to sights and learning spaces;
• making a mobile tour and in that tour linking certain spots to the Basque language (or any other language, but I liked the idea of linking it to a language that is not mainstream yet very rich).

So I was very thankful to everyone that attended with all their great ideas.
I also uploaded my presentation for anyone who is interested.

OEB08 Mobile Barcodes QRcodes Inge de Waard

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OEB08 informal learning and social media workshop by Jay Cross and guides

Jay is a wise man using humor to spice up any workshop and at this occasion he was wearing a yellow tie and suspenders. The audience was very diverse but all with an eLearning perspective and their social media background as well.

The workshop is taken a complete day, but unfortunately I had a deadline to meet in the afternoon, so what follows is only on the first part of the day (before lunch). Jay Cross had asked me to be one of the 'guides' during the workshop. A guide is someone who is into informal learning and/or using social media and willing to share information on it. I am always willing to share, so I rushed to the occasion! Thanks for asking Jay!

Where can you find all of what Jay Cross is talking about:
internet time page;
Jay Cross homepage;

Interesting links:
The cluetrain manifesto: for handling intellectual property in the open internet age.
Web2.0 framework by Ross Dawson;
unconferencing as a conference format;
barcamp as an example of an unconference.

fish bowl format in conferences
idea: for people to be able to have a conversation in a little group but which is aired to the complete group (concentric circles for interaction).
sometimes it works, other times it falls flat. It is important to have a common purpose and to have a format that supports that, otherwise participants might not be that pleased with the issues that will be raised.

Jay mentions he is a bit dubious towards books: a publisher takes a year before publishing it. A book freezes the content for always. The author does not need to get into conversation with the readers. So how do we go about in opening books and make them updateable? He tries it:
Un-book from Jay Cross: Learnscaping

The workshop flow:
We started to know each other (= the participants) by introducing the person on each of our right, building some connections in our heads. And after the intro the workshop was a mix of informal information giving by 'guides' and more didactical as well as informal parts given by Jay.

My two cents that I shared during the workshop:

• kids learn naturally and by doing.... there is no framework, no structure, they just do it: Web2.0 allows this kind of learning. It enables you to explore the knowledge that is out there and to connect with people with similar or related interests.
• Informal learning allows you to connect with people you might otherwise not know off, or in different fields, but by connecting you can see other ways of working to come to the same results and maybe ... these new ways are more (cost)-effective.
• Informal learning is about making choices: you know which knowledge you need, you select, you connect and you put it out there the way you want it for other people to find.
• Informal learning is about forgetting pride: you will never know it all, so be humble and open for learning each day. Titles no longer matter, it is what you effectively know and exchange and collaborate on (what you are really doing) that matters.
• Informal learning makes you critical: you just do not swallow everything that is send to you, you choose, decipher and take what you need because it seems a better fit.
• Social media allows you to let go of rules and explore new possibilities.
• Social media is global, it is everywhere, also in low resource areas: they are using it: mobile journalism, farmers learn through blogging, the whole world is exchanging and discussing knowledge.
• Social media is personal: you make it to fit your interests, yet building on all of our knowledge and insights.

What I jotted down in the course of the workshop:
The world is in an economical crisis, but this is happening at any major cultural/socio-economic shift the industrial age is ending, the knowledge age is here. Informal learning is all about knowledge.

How people learn:

• natural learning
• spontaneous
• informal
• unbounded
• adaptive
• fun
• self-service

what is natural learning?
You learn from mistakes (because it is discussed, because you get a first hand experience of what works and what is not = practical experience),
conversation results in learning (because it is all about communication, argumenting why yes or why not, critical thinking...)
collaboration is learning (one person never again will know it all, not even the largest chunk of anything, the world is a rhizome = everyone is connected and the connections are not always visible).

informal learning is typically

• no curriculum;
• no constraint time frame;
• push (formal which pushes the content to you) versus pull (informal and what you need you can and do find - or build);
• openness and curiosity.

the world is changing at warp speed
some management and supervision have not taken account these changes: firewall restrictions, company rules... But as we look at new learners (not necessarily young but the learner explorers) we find that control is out of date. So it is time to give workers trust and giving them credit for their own way of knowledge gathering.
Discussing on ROI are no longer completely valid as it comes to the growing amount of intangibles that companies have, because ROI focuses on tangibles only. In the business world virtuality is a fact, intangibles are a fact, think of google and its assets.

But social media is about sharing, and openness sometimes gives a strange feeling
openness is a starting point, semantic web which tells you all about private things, but who do you want to give access to what of your private life).
Openness is a starting off point, but which will demand more access rules.
So how can we share things? And to what extend are we willing to change? And to what extend does management allow us to change?

One of the reasons for not opening up is because you want to keep out the people that want to burn the house down. This is something we want to get pinned down.

Questions that were raised (will go into these in later blogposts):

• how do you measure informal learning outcomes?
• how do we cope with intellectual property in an open access environment?
• how do you convince people of using new technologies within an institute or company?

A slideshow on the future of books:

The unbook

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When an economic crisis hits eLearning, what do managers have to say about it?

I really need your help here, if you are a conscientious eLearn provider, please add to the discussion (on your blog, forum, here,… anywhere). I came across some old school thinking and solutions regarding eLearning (see below).

There is an old economic tendency that in times of crisis the training department budgets get cut. For more then one reason I tend to disagree with this tendency. When a crisis hits your organisation or company, that is the right moment to rethink training and boost it. The same with R&D (research and development), because it is by rethinking you can outrun your competitors. If something did not keep you from a crisis, something is amiss and new methods can help you overcome them. You need training to get people thinking out of the box (or broaden their box) and you need training to implement new methods that will counter the crisis within the company quickly.

Last week I read an article on the subject in the sciencedaily, which was also listed in and prlog and in innovationsreport (it is a press release issued by Online Educa Berlin - OEB): “The present world’s economic woes are opening up new opportunities for innovative forms of education and training such as informal learning, e-learning and blended learning. Faced with shrinking budgets, the use of learning technologies is becoming increasingly attractive for businesses: This was the appraisal articulated by the consultants and training professionals who responded to an impromptu survey undertaken by the international e-learning conference Online Educa Berlin.”

In the press release there are some nuanced quotes and then a very scary one. A nuanced one from Sue Martin from Global Certification Portfolio Manager at SAP: "In times of tight or zero travel budgets and increasing environmental awareness, the importance of learning technologies has to be given a second look.”
Yes, I agree. A second and in-depth look at training (face-to-face and eLearning) is the way to go. But will eLearning cost less than face-to-face? Well, not sure, certainly not in the beginning of the development. And the myths of eLearning could pop-up again too.

With this in mind I predict a growing need for more qualified eLearning evaluators. They will enable management to get a good idea of what works most efficiently (yes, I am also an eLearning evaluator) and it will result in solid eLearning.

But then the article lists a very scary quote!

Christophe Binot, E-Learning Manager at the French oil firm Total, adds: "The newest solutions make it possible to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a course for a thousand employees within two hours. The ROI outperfoms training in a classroom."

What the HUH!!! eLearning is NOT about turning some kind of stupid non-descriptive, non-assessing powerpoint into a course! Can you imagine the non-interactivity of these powerpoints?! I mean in TWO HOURS! Oh my lord and goddess! How can OEB keep this quote in a press release? They know better than that. Okay he will be a keynote speaker at their conference, but looking at what is quoted here, I can almost imagine what his speech will be about (but I give him the benefit of the doubt, miss quotations have been made before).

Maybe winter is getting to me... darn dark clouded days...