NMC 2016: Transformative Ideas, Exploding Minds, and Hyper-normals

The first full day of the NMC (New Media Consortium) 2016 Summer Conference here in Rochester, New York is far from over, but we’re already seeing signs that it’s a wonderfully transformative gathering of educator/trainer/ed-tech innovators from all over the world.

Our minds are exploding with ideas coming from formal sessions, informal hallway and over-meal conversations, and online interactions with colleagues who are here even though they’re actually participating via Twitter and other online platforms rather than traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to join the party. Our vocabulary and our approach to teaching-training-learning-doing is growing as a result of the exchanges—one person in the “Rethinking Digital Literacy” session I facilitated earlier this afternoon, for example, expanded our richly-descriptive vocabulary by observing that “I’m in a room with a bunch of ‘hyper-normals.’” And many of us are already committing to concrete actions we will take, when we return to our day-to-day learning landscapes, as a result of what we are learning/experiencing/discussing here.

As always, the learning begins at the moment we arrive in the conference city. Many of us start running into each other in hotel lobbies, coffee shops, restaurants, or local cultural centers even before the first formal onsite session begins. We also begin interacting via conference backchannels on Twitter; through our own pre-conference preparation including reading and blogging; pre-conference meals; and, sometimes, through phone calls with colleagues who cannot be here or are not yet here. It continues through the formal keynote/plenary sessions, like the engaging and inspiring “Games, Learning, and Society” presentation by Constance Steinkuehler that opened the NMC 2016 Summer Conference this morning.

Steinkuehler set a wonderful tone for the learning through numerous pithy, insightful observations, including the ideas that all game are models and simulations of something; that games are architecture for engagement—designed to be sticky; that games are vehicles for interest-based learning; and that games can make students care about what they’re learning by sparking curiosity.

A 2015 webinar title captures the essence of the current conference

Breakout sessions on a variety of topics have offered—and will continue to offer—engaging opportunities to hear our best colleagues bringing us up to date on ed-tech trends, challenges, and developments. A lunch-time town-hall meeting gave us an opportunity to discuss and influence the future of NMC onsite as well as online through an NMCNext website. A playful “Five Minutes of Fame” session later today will expose us to a variety of cutting-edge case studies. And informal “Idea Lab” offerings tomorrow capture “the best in big thinking from the NMC community” so we can “learn about the latest edtech projects through interactives, posters, and all kinds of formats that showcase how the future of learning is happening right now,” conference organizers tell us in the official conference program booklet.

All of this is what NMC as a highly-focused, extremely collaborative, and forward-thinking community of learning does best. It provides us with a blended onsite-online platform to engage and explore opportunities for thinking and for action in the ed-tech arena. It brings us together in ways we would not otherwise convene and encounter and interact with each other. It supports a process of contributing to positive transformation at a local, regional, national, and international level. And it knows enough to make sure that all of this is fun, inspiration, and capable of producing concrete results.

NMC Horizon Report 2014 (Pt. 5 of 6): Educational Technology on the Mid-Range Horizon

With all the justifiable attention given over the past few years to 3D printing and gaming/gamification in learning, it’s not surprising to see these topics highlighted in the latest Higher Education Edition of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project reports on key trends, significant challenges, and developments in educational technology.

If we take the additional step of looking at two additional technologies (wearable technology and the Internet of Things) that grabbed the attention of Horizon Report Advisory Board members but were not formally included in the section of the report listing important developments in educational technology expected to “have a significant impact on the practice of higher education around the globe” over the next two to three years (the report’s mid-range horizon), we find wonderfully interconnected resources that are clearly on our training-teaching-learning landscape but haven’t quite reached complete mainstream adoption yet.

The report is a road map for any trainer-teacher-learner who wants to keep up with what learners are currently exploring and experiencing. Report co-principal investigators Larry Johnson and Malcolm Brown, along with lead writer/researcher Samantha Adams Becker, help us by offering background on the two featured mid-horizon technologies and providing links to resources to support our own learning. There are, for example, connections to an article showing how the University of Delaware is incorporating 3D printing into learning and an article showing how learners use 3D printing to collaborate with members of a local artists collective. If we are curious and inspired enough to engage in our own self-directed learning, we easily find other wonderful online resources, including the “3D Printing in the Classroom” video from Marlo Steed at the University of Lethbridge; another video, featuring East Carolina University of Technology Professor of Instructional Technology Abbie Brown, on the topic of 3D printing in learning; the EDUCAUSE article “7 Things You Should Know About 3D Printing”; and “3D Printing in the Classroom: 5 Tips for Bringing New Dimensions to Your Students’ Experiences” from The Journal.  (“Admit you don’t know it all” and “Don’t grade the results” are two wonderful tips that could be applied in many learning situations.)

“3D printing is an especially appealing technology as applied to active and project-based learning in higher education,” the new Horizon Report reminds us—and that suggests that 3D printing in many other training-teaching-learning settings can’t be far behind.

The same can easily be said of the second mid-range horizon technology (gaming and gamification): “Gameplay…has found considerable traction in the military, business and industry, and increasingly, education as a useful training and motivation tool….the gamification of education is gaining support among educators who recognize that effectively designed games can stimulate large gains in productivity and creativity among learners” (p. 42).

Following a link from the Horizon Report to the EdTech article “The Awesome Power of Gaming in Higher Education” provides further context for our exploration of gamification. EdTech writer Tara Buck tells us about “a future in education where MOOCs [massive open online courses], live events and extraordinary gamification initiatives all blend into a new way of learning,” summarizes a presentation by “games designer, author and researcher Jane McGonigal,” and provides three examples of educational gamification discussed by McGonical.”

And that’s where we come full circle, finding the same sort of interweaving of key trends, challenges, and developments in educational technology that I’ve noted throughout this series of articles on the latest Horizon Report. We can’t really look at 3D printing or gaming and gamification in isolation if we want to fully grasp what is happening in our learning environment. Exploring 3D printing in learning connects us to the report key trend of “the shift from students as consumers to students as creators” as well as some of the other technologies tracked through the Horizon Project (e.g., makerspaces and collaborative environments). Exploring gaming and gamification in learning connects us at some level to the key trend of integration of online, hybrid, and collaborative learning, the challenge of keeping education relevant, and other technologies including flipped classrooms, social networks, and augmented reality.

Our greatest challenge, of course, is simply finding and making the time to explore and incorporate into our work all that the Horizon Report and our own insatiable curiosity provide.

NB: This is part of a series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report. Next: On the Four- to Five-Year Horizon—the Quantified Self and (Digital) Virtual Assistants.

NMC Horizon Report 2013 (Pt. 1 of 4): Tech and Learning Trends in Higher Education

The release this week of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project 2013 Higher Education report on “new and emerging technologies, and their potential impact on teaching, learning, and research,” reminds us once again what a great resource the reports are for trainer-teacher-learners around the world.

With its summaries of key trends and significant challenges along with the usual explorations of six technologies reviewed in each report, it serves as a thought- (and action-) provoking resource, an up-to-date reference source, and a potential course of study for anyone willing to follow the numerous links to online resources compiled by everyone involved in its preparation and production.

It also, as if becoming an example of one of the technologies it explores, could easily serve as an unfacilitated massive open online course (MOOC) on the topic of technology in learning for any of us with the drive and self-discipline to treat each section as a module of an online course; it is, furthermore, easy to imagine someone setting up a discussion group within LinkedIn, Facebook, or some other social media tool for learners interested in exploring the themes and technologies; it is, in fact, not much of a stretch to also imagine the possibility of live Horizon Report learning sessions via a tweet chat or virtual office hours within Facebook or a Google+ Hangout. Even the process of preparing the reports could be a topic for study and discussion among learners interested in understanding how a well-facilitated wiki can inspire learning and produce learning objects.

But let’s not go too far afield here, since the content of the report is already spurring plenty of online discussion. The technologies themselves are fascinating. Within the one year time-to-adoption horizon we find tablet computing and MOOCs. Within the two-to-three-year adoption horizon, we see gaming and gamification and learning analytics. And in the furthest horizon (four to five years away), we find 3D printing and wearable technology (think about Google’s Project Glass foray into augmented reality here). And for those who want a broader picture of what is on the horizon, there is the short list (four technologies per horizon) that NMC staff and report advisory board members developed as a step toward determining the final set of horizon technologies, along with the overall list of topics that served as the starting point for the entire process of  identifying key trends, challenges, and technologies.

There are obvious themes that run through the report, and they’re not just of interest to those working in academia. The trend toward openness—open content, open data, open resources—is at the top of the list of key trends documented in the report; it serves as a foundational element for at least a few of the others. It’s a natural step from that broad brushstroke of openness to the next important trend—the explosion of massive open online courses—and its close cousins, informal, self-directed, and collaborative learning that, in turn, lead us toward the learner-centric concept of personal learning environments. If all of this inspires you to suspect or acknowledge that huge disruptive changes are underway in the world of learning, then you’re well on the way to appreciating the level of thought the report inspires: “Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models,” the report writers note.

Equally important are the significant challenges documented in the report. Faculty, the report suggests, aren’t acknowledging “the fact that digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession”—a challenge that I believe could also be documented in workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs. We’re also facing—and not dealing particularly well with—new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching; our own resistance to change; learners’ demand for personalized (and learner-centric) learning; new models of education and learning that challenge long-standing models; and the need to adopt new technologies for learning and teaching.

The beauty of this and other Horizon reports released throughout the year—others focus on K-12 education, museums, and specific regions—is that they are free, accessible, well-researched and well-written, and transparent. Anyone wanting to review and use the advisory board members’ discussions for their own learning purposes has access to them on the project wiki. And those interested in playing a more active role in the Horizon Report process are encouraged to complete the online application form.

Next: On the One-Year Horizon (Tablets and MOOCs)