Horizon Project reports, for more than a decade, have been guiding us through what is changing and what remains consistent in our learning landscape; the flagship Higher Education Edition, which currently is accompanied by K-12, Library and Museum editions, consistently helps us identify and become familiar with key trends that are “accelerating technology adoption in higher education”—and, I continue to maintain, in many other parts of our overall lifelong-learning landscape.
Reading through the latest Key Trends section confirms, among other ideas, that collaboration is a common thread weaving the trends into a cohesive tapestry of ed-tech developments. We see, through the report, that key trends (in addition to an increasing use of blended learning and significant amounts of attention given to redesigning learning spaces) include advancing cultures of change and innovation; increasing cross-institution collaboration; a growing focus on measuring learning; and the proliferation of open educational resources—OERs. And the 2015 Higher Education Edition includes plenty of examples to help us see how we can adapt, in our own learning environments, what our more adventurous colleagues are already doing.
As we move into the mid-term trends—those “driving ed tech adoption in higher education for three to five years”—we turn our attention to the growing focus on measuring learning (think learning analytics) and the proliferation of open educational resources. With the growing focus on measuring learning, we are reminded, “The goal is to build better pedagogies, empower students to take an active part in their learning, target at-risk student populations, and assess factors affecting completion and student success” (p. 12); among the numerous first-rate resources cited in the 2015 Higher Education Edition are the “Code of Practice for Learning Analytics” prepared by Niall Sclater for Jisc, and records from the Asilomar Conference (here in California) that was designed to “inform the ethical use of data and technology in learning research” through development of six principals (“respect for the rights of learners, beneficence, justice, openness, the humanity of learning, and continuous consideration”). Turning to the trend toward increasing use of open educational resources, we see how they represent “a broad variety of digital content, including full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software, and any other means of conveying knowledge” (p. 14). Among the open textbook projects receiving attention here are Rice University’s OpenStax College and College Open Textbooks; massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the North-West OER Network also receive much-justified attention for their ongoing collaborative and open approaches to learning.
The Key Trends section of the report concludes with the two intriguing and fruitful short-term trends—those “driving ed tech adoption in higher education [and elsewhere] for the next one to two years”: increasing use of blended learning and redesigning learning spaces. “[B]lended learning—the combination of online and face-to-face instruction—is a model currently being explored by many higher educational institutions” (p. 17) and some of us who work in other learning environments, as we’re reminded through a link to a blended-learning case study (written by Carrie Schulz, Jessica Vargas, and Anna Lohaus) from Rollins University. And changes in pedagogical approaches themselves are driving the need to re-examine and redesign our learning spaces: “A student-centered approach to education has taken root, prompting many higher education professionals to rethink how learning spaces should be configured,” the report co-authors confirm (p. 18). If, for example, we are interested in having the learner at the center of the learning process, we’re going to have to rework the numerous lecture halls that continue to place the focus on learning facilitators. The FLEXspace interactive OER database and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory are among the wonderful resources cited for those of us interested in diving much more deeply into the world of learning-space redesign, and Tom Haymes’Idea Spaces presentation provides additional food for thought while also serving as an example of how we can create online content in a way that creates its own type of learning space—the website itself.
There was a time when reading these free online training-teaching-learning resources involved little more than downloading the documents, taking a couple of hours to absorb the content, and then following a few selected links to learn more about the topics covered. Then the ever-increasing amount of content included within the reports created a need for a video synopsis posted on the New Media Consortium YouTube channel; the lavishly-produced and well-paced 2015 Higher Education Edition video clocks in at nearly seven minutes (compared to just under four minutes for the 2014 Higher Education Edition video). A very helpful infographic that further synthesizes the report through a single well-designed image for those who want to quickly grasp the high points of the report. A chart on page 35 of the report mirrors the online resource that lists the more than 50 technologies followed through the Horizon Project—a great gateway for anyone interested in exploring individual technologies they haven’t yet encountered. Increasingly numerous resources available through endnotes—nearly 300 spread over two pages near the final pages of the latest report—offer information-hungry readers a chance to explore the topics in greater depth. And the usual access to report expert-panel discussions within a well-facilitated wiki make the process of producing the report as transparent as possible while also providing an educational-technology resource unlike any others currently available online.
Simply compiling the endnotes for the report is a magnificent effort in collaboration, report lead writer Samantha Adams Becker explained via a recent email exchange: “Citations are split across three writers/researchers on the NMC team [Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada as co-authors]. Each of us is responsible for writing researching six of the 18 topics in the report. We have a rule to never write anything editorial or in our own opinion—we must back everything up with sources—hence the giant list of citations. We then review each other’s sections and provide feedback for improvement and check each other’s citations. We also have a research manager [Michele Cummins] who finds the further readings for each section, and I check that work as well. So while there are three writers of the report [supported by editor/Horizon Project founder Larry Johnson and Johnson’s co-principal investigator, Malcolm Brown], we meet weekly to critique each other’s work and then turn in revised drafts. I then compile all of our revised drafts into a master document and go over the entire report with a fine-toothed comb, editing for voice, cohesion, etc.”
The results are stimulating discussions of six key trends, six key challenges, and six technological developments expected to “inform policy, leadership, and practice at all levels impacting universities and colleges” in ways that have repercussions for any of us involved in training-teaching-learning within the ever-expanding lifelong learning landscape we inhabit.
What all of this means to those of us engaged in lifelong learning efforts will be explored more deeply in the remaining articles in this series of posts. In the meantime, those interested in playing a more active role in the Horizon Report process that many of us currently treasure are encouraged to complete the online application form.
Moving into the other element explored in that Horizon Report four- to five-year horizon, we find people looking for the quantified self based on data that their tech toys provide them: “…the phenomenon of consumers being able to closely track data that is relevant to their daily activities through the use of technology…these large data sets could reveal how environmental changes improve learning outcomes” (pp. 44-45 of the report). Most importantly, we see visions of where learning, creativity, and technology may be intersecting in significant ways in the not-too-distant future.
If we’re inclined to think the quantified self and these redefined virtual assistants are the latest pre-fad incarnations of technology that offers little to trainer-teacher-learners and those we serve, we need to look back only a few years to remember a period when tablets had not become a standard item in much of our learning environment. A time when massive open online courses (MOOCs) were barely a topic for discussion, and wearable technology was not on the cusp of mainstream adoption in learning via Google Glass. Then think about how quickly we have moved along adoption horizons.
Many of us have come to value our tablets as magnificent access points to information and learning resources—a form of mobile library in the palm of our hands—and can already imagine Google Glass and other forms of wearable technology becoming part of that learning environment. (Imagine John Butterill incorporating Google Glass into his virtual photo walks and you can already see the potential.) We are beginning, as Associate Instructional Design Librarian John Schank suggested during a panel discussion at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Philadelphia last month, to see MOOCs—particularly connectivist MOOCs—as a new form of textbook (a comment that, much to my surprise, seemed to receive little attention from anyone at the session but which strikes me as an incredibly perceptive and right-on-target observation as to one of the many roles MOOCs are assuming in training-teaching-learning). And we’re also seeing MOOCs as ways to inspire as well as evolve into long-term sustainable communities of learning providing ongoing experiential learning opportunities.
We really have never seen anything quite like this because we’ve never had the combination of technology tools and platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ Hangouts) we now have to create extended in-the-moment flexible learning environments that can facilitate just-in-time learning and create another way to sustain communities of learning long after a course formally ends.
And now we’re looking at the possibility of quanitifed self technology that could provide important information, filtered through learning analytics tools, to make real-time course adjustments to enhance learning experiences. We’re looking at virtual assistants that might be programmed to anticipate and respond to learners’ information and learning needs to the benefit of everyone involved.
If we connect learners through their tools and through collaborations between learning organizations (K-12, higher education, museums, libraries, and workplace learning and performance), we see the potential to further create, foster, and sustain the sort of onsite/hybrid/online lifelong learning that the New Media Consortium inspires and supports through the Horizon Project and its other innovative offerings. It’s a great example of how a learning organization not only provokes thought, but also provokes us to take the actions necessary to create the world of our dreams.
Having been lucky enough to have served on Horizon Report advisory boards for four years now, I’ve been as fascinated by what does not overtly show up in each of the published reports as what does. NMC staff annually creates and maintains master lists of tracked technologies that remain accessible on the Horizon Report wiki, but those who rely solely on the reports rather than exploring the wiki have missed a lot—up to now.
Recognizing the gold mine of data available on the wiki, report co-principal investigators Larry Johnson and Malcolm Brown, along with lead writer/researcher Samantha Adams Becker, have given the current list (which includes consumer technologies, digital strategies, Internet technologies, learning technologies, social media technologies, visualization technologies, and enabling technologies) far more prominence by including it on p. 35 of the 2014 Higher Education Edition of the continuing series. And while the near-term (one-year) horizon, as usual, focuses on the two most prominent technologies driving our work, it also feels more comprehensive through the display of the entire table of topics. When we take one further interim leap and look at the results of the 2014 Advisory Boardpreliminary voting, we add Bring Your Own Device and massive open online courses (MOOCs) to the near-term (one-year) field of study and spot an overall theme: we’re continuing to look for creative ways to engage learners (e.g., through the flipped classroom model), to support them at their moment of need (through the effective use of learning analytics), to make it easier for them to learn (through the use of their own tech tools), and even finding ways to allow them to participate in setting their own learning goals (through connectivist MOOCs) within the broad framework we design and employ in some of our most interesting learning endeavors.
Johnson, Brown, and Becker, in fact, explicitly call our attention to this broad theme at the beginning of the “Flipped Classroom” section of the report (p. 36): “The flipped classroom model is part of a larger pedagogical movement that overlaps with blended learning, inquiry-based learning, and other instructional approaches and tools that are meant to be flexible, active, and more engaging for students.”
We are reminded that everyone in training-teaching-learning is affected by this this model in that it suggests a continuing transition in roles “from lecturer to coaches.” Furthermore, it provides a model many of us are using even without fully embracing the flipped classroom model—incorporating readily-available online videos and other online resources into our face-to-face and online learning endeavors. Among that ever-increasing array of readily available resources are Khan Academy and TED-Ed videos, the UK-based Jorumopen educational resources—OER—site from the University of Manchester, and the Indian School of Business in Mumbai, and numerous others are just a Google search away, as I’ve repeatedly confirmed when creating links to learning resources for the adult learners I serve in online as well as onsite settings.
The 2014 Horizon Report > Higher Education Edition provides plenty of resources for any of us interested in learning more about the flipped classroom model. The “6 Expert Tips for Flipping the Classroom” article from Campus Technology is a great starting point; it includes the following recommendations: “use existing technology to ease faculty and students into a flipped mindset”; “be up front with your expectations”; “step aside and allow students to learn from each other”; “assess students’ understanding for pre-class assignments to make the best use of class time”; “set a specific target for the flip”; and “build assessments that complement the flipped model”—wonderful tips that can be adapted and should, at some level, be in every trainer-teacher-learners’ toolkit.
And when we return to the beginning of the Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition, we’re reminded why the topic of learning analytics is important to all of us: it’s another quickly-evolving educational application that leverages “student data to deliver personalized learning, enable[s[ adaptive pedagogies and practices, and [helps us] identify learning issues in time for them to be solved.”
Now, thanks to researchers Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars, we have a thoughtful and thought-provoking research-based study showing what can hinder success among certain groups of online learners.
Focusing on failure rates of online learners drawn from a very large sample (40,000 community and technical college learners throughout Washington state, tracked over a five-year period), Xu and Jaggars have produced a paper that includes insights useful to any of us involved in training-teaching learning. “Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas” (published through the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, at Columbia University), opens with a well-balanced introduction that cites previous research papers comparing face-to-face and online learning; provides observations about why some students may do better than others in online learning environments, e.g., “those with more extensive exposure to technology or those who have been taught skills in terms of time-management and self-directed learning…may adapt more readily to online learning than others” (p. 1); and includes the suggestion that “insufficient time management and self-directed learning skills” could contribute to the online learning failures examined in their paper (p. 4). Reading that section alone gives us a wonderfully concise overview of the challenges we and our learners face, and it serves as a great example of the sort of resources coming out of the open movement—the subject of our latest #etmooc module.
As we move more deeply into Xu and Jaggars’ 32-page paper, we learn more about the writers’ meticulous methodology; the subjects of their study and the types of courses they were attempting to complete; and the possibility that “older students’ superior adaptability to online learning lends them a slight advantage in online courses in comparison with their younger counterparts” (pp. 17-18). They go far beyond the usual basic levels of evaluation and ponder the possibility that peers’ behavior can have positive or negative effects on the learning process: “These descriptive comparisons suggest that a given student is exposed to higher performing peers in some subject areas and lower performing peers in others and that this could affect his or her own adaptability to online courses in each subject area” (p. 21).
In reaching the conclusion that those who struggle with face-to-face learning are even more likely to struggle with and fail at online learning, Xu and Jaggars lead us to an interesting set of conclusions and recommendations that include “screening, scaffolding, early warning, and wholesale [course] improvement” (p. 25). Acknowledging the difficulties inherent within each of their four suggestions, they leave us with proposals to define online learning “as a privilege rather than a right” and delay learners’ entry into online learning “until they demonstrate that they are likely to adapt well to the online context”; to incorporate “the teaching of online learning skills into online courses…”; to build “early warning systems into online courses in order to identify and intervene with students who are having difficulty adapting”; and “focus on improving the quality of all online courses…to ensure that their learning outcomes are equal to those of face-to face courses” (pp. 25-26).
None of this is revolutionary, nor is it beyond our reach. Preparing learners for new learning experiences before we toss them into the deep end of the learning pool simply makes good sense. Offering them help in developing their online learning skills is something that many of us already routinely do for online learners, and there are plenty of online examples at the community-college level alone for anyone who has not yet traveled this particular learning path. Building early warning systems into the process goes hand-in-hand with the increasing levels of attention we are giving to learning analytics and learning analytics tools; even at a rudimentary level, I’ve been able to increase retention rates in online courses by noting who is falling behind on assignments and sending individual notes to check in occasionally with those learners—the result is that the learners invariably note, in their course evaluations, that they had no idea online learning could be so personal and engaging. And the suggestion that we look for ways to further improve the quality of courses to make them more responsive to learners’ needs is a conclusion that hardly needs response; the wicked problem we face in meeting that challenge is to obtain the resources needed so we—and our learners—will be successful rather than being part of another report on why learners fail.
N.B.: This is the eighteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.
One learner, in his final course posting, noted that he “had the opportunity to use Google hangouts as part of a reference interaction at work recently. An online student was having trouble finding resources for an assignment…and we used hangouts to work through some of the difficulties.”
Another learner, wanting to explore Google+Hangouts further, arranged a session with five other course participants and quickly found the tool taking a back seat to a very engaging discussion in which they shared ideas and learned from each other in a way that made them feel as if they were sitting together rather than separated by tremendous geographic distances.
Several documented the fact that they had set up various social media accounts for the libraries they serve. At least a few have initiated live tweet sessions and begun discussing work-related issues in the private Facebook group we established so that our community of learning—which now includes participants from both offerings of the course—can continue to grow and flourish. And a few others were inspired to go beyond the course content and explore other tools, including Pinterest.
Engaging in a rudimentary version of learning analytics produces an interesting snapshot of how the course functions—and provides some positive responses to those who contend that online learning can’t possibly rival the face-to-face experience. Starting with a core group of 32 registered learners, we had five who never engaged at any significant level, and only four more who weren’t actively participating by the time the course ended. There was the usual spike of activity during the first of the four weeks of the course, with nearly 1,800 views of posts within the formal class forums that week; that had leveled off and remained steady at approximately seven hundred views during the final few weeks. Actual postings, however, were fairly consistent throughout the run of the course, with between 100 and 150 individual comments posted on course forums each week—which doesn’t even begin to take into account the dozens of postings made via Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ as we explored each of those platforms.
Most interesting to me, since I was expecting a steady decrease in discussion-forum postings, is that the largest number of individual discussions actually occurred during the final week, when learners were not only posting brief descriptions of their final projects, but also engaging in brief summaries of how their perceptions (and misperceptions) about social media tools had changed.
But it’s really not the numbers that tell the story here; it’s the observations the learners offered regarding how their perceptions had changed in positive ways and how they walked away from this brief, very concentrated experience with social media much more likely to use the tools than they had been before they took the course.
As I’ve said in response to many of their comments, this is the real icing on our learning cake. Because learning is about positive transformation, the fact that they are documenting increased use of social media tools and finding ways to use those tools to the benefit of those they serve in libraries throughout the United States and a few other countries means that our time together is offering rewards to the organizations they serve. They are also now engaged in a community of learning that was created during the initial offering of the course in 2012, has grown as a result of the latest four-week offering, and stands a good chance of growing even more as these participants use their online discussion groups to stay in touch, exchange resources, and explore issues of interest and importance to them in the months and years to come.
While each subject receives separate attention in the report’s two- to three-year “Time-to-Adoption” section, it’s not at all difficult to see how these two technologies, like the two technologies in the report one-year adoption section (tablets and MOOCs), can and should be thematically linked. Both appear to be strongly grounded in a learner-centric vision of training-teaching-learning; respond to learners’ needs with a sense of immediacy that provides support rather than hindrances during the learning process; and are already receiving plenty of attention worldwide.
“Whatever the scenario, online gaming enables strangers to build camaraderie and social networks in mere minutes, and to compete in a public forum where recognition is highly desirable,” we read in the report (p. 20). “Research has long indicated that video games help stimulate the production of dopamine, a chemical that provokes learning by reinforcing neuronal connections and communications. Furthermore, educational game-play has proven to increase soft skills in learners, such as critical thinking, creative problem-solving, and teamwork” (p. 21).
And just as game-based learning provides these obvious sources of support for learners, learning analytics—the real-time use of up-to-the-minute data to help learning facilitators identify and respond to obstacles hindering learners—provides a powerful tool to “build better pedagogies, target at-risk student populations, and to assess whether programs designed to improve retention have been effective and should be sustained—important outcomes for administrators, policy makers, and legislators” (p. 24), we learn from the latest Horizon Report.
As is always the case, the real meat of the report is in the links to examples and resources showing us how these technologies are already developing. We visit the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno, for example to see how a game introduces learners to library resources and helps them develop the skills to those resources—and the library is smart enough to show us (and its learners) several winning entries from a gamification contest which encouraged students to produce videos and other materials to help others use the library. We learn about McGill University’s Open Orchestra simulation game through a well-developed website. And a link to an EdTech magazine article and infographic takes us further into the subject as engagingly as the gamification process it explores.
In the same way, the examples in the learning analytics section of the report introduce us to the dynamic examples of Santa Monica College’s Glass Classroom project; the American Public University System (APUS) multi-campus data-collection effort designed to “identify trends contributing to student success, program momentum, and online course completion” (quote taken from APUS press release); and Stanford University’s five-year multimodal learning analytics project that is “investigating new ways to assess project-based activities, examining students’ speeches, gestures, sketches, and artifacts in order to better characterize their learning over extended periods of time” (quote taken from the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab website). And in what can only be described as a big-bang finish, the learning analytics section includes a link to a PDF of the entire 337-page October 2012 issue of the Journal of Educational Technology & Societywith 10 articles—nearly half of its content—focused on “the maturation of learning analytics and its impact on teaching and learning” (p. 27 of the Horizon Report).
Next: On the Four- to Five-Year Horizon (3D Printing & Wearable Technology)
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.
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.
Lev Gonick, Vice President, Information Technology Services and CIO at Case Western Reserve University, laid the foundations for the discussion of wicked problems by reminding summit participants that those challenges are complex and ambiguous; require disruptive thinking; and require innovative solutions that actually change the nature of the problems and the contexts in which they operate. They are not generally subject to perfect solutions, but they can be fun to tackle. And that’s where Gonick, summit graphic facilitatorDavid Sibbet (President and Founder of The Grove Consultants International), and NMC Founder/CEO Larry Johnson led us in an exercise designed to identify wicked problems we thought would be fun to address in the world of teaching-training-learning.
By early afternoon, we had identified a core set of 10 of those wicked problems in learning:
Reducing risk aversion in education
Finding ways to set aside time for learning innovations
Rethinking roles and identities for students, faculty members, and administrators
Reinventing education
Creating successful all-device interfaces in learning
Addressing the need for social and emotional development in curricula
Reinventing online learning
Addressing the challenges and benefits of learning from around the world
Fostering an ecosystem for experiential learning
Defining ethical boundaries and responsibilities in learning
Joining the discussion on reinventing online learning, I was impressed by the range of options compiled during that brief segment of the daylong proceedings:
Start with a goal of creating engaging online course that address subjects to be taught; don’t just transfer onsite courses to online settings
Include lots of choices, e.g., collaborative and individual study, and synchronous and asynchronous, that provide learner-centric experiences
Use social media to engage learners, and foster plenty of interaction
Design courses that move learners out of a learning management system and into online communities that continue to exist after courses formally conclude
Engage in blended learning by using asynchronous courses to serve learners world-wide, and build in live online and onsite interactions whenever possible
Partner with other teaching/learning organizations
Strive for more authentic learning opportunities
Provide more project-based learning opportunities that produce learning objects
Involve learners from all over the world so that the learning experience is enhanced by increased exposure to diverse perspectives
Entice faculty into online learning by creating faculty communities of learning to draw upon the knowledge base of that faculty
Develop flexible formats for crediting learners’ accomplishments
Capture and document teaching and learning for repurposing
Provide more just-in-time learning experiences
Comments from all of the breakout discussion groups were to be compiled this evening so discussions on the final day of the three-day summit could be used to propose plans of action in addressing these various wicked problems.
Interspersed throughout the activities conducted during the second day of the summit were wonderful presentations on a variety of “ideas that matter,” and the culmination of that process was the Shark Tank competition in which eight predetermined competitors were each given 10 minutes to describe an education-tech initiative under development and make a pitch for support (including a $2,500 cash award) from the New Media Consortium.
It was a winning exercise for everyone. The eight competitors involved in the first round (round two, with three survivors, was scheduled to be conducted at the beginning of the final day of the summit) had an opportunity to finely tune their project pitches, and audience members had an opportunity to learn about eight wonderful cutting-edge proposals that combine creativity, learning, and collaboration in ways designed to further our approaches to educational successes.
A sampling of the proposals provides an enticing glimpse into the state of tech and learning innovations:
The Taking IT Global project designed to cultivate future-friendly schools and foster global collaboration in addressing the world’s greatest challenges
The development of digital technology supporting educational software simulators and other products through Axis3D
The FLEXspace community of practice, centered on an interactive database that serves as a flexible learning environment exchange
Capturing learners’ information and analytics through Citelighter, a free social media tool that allows learners to store, organize and share research data and other educational information
The entire round of presentations left many of us not at all envying the tough choices the judges had to make, and we’re looking forward to seeing how finalists Citelighter, Taking IT Global, and X-Ray Analytics fare when the summit resumes in the morning.
Summit graphic facilitatorDavid Sibbet (President and Founder of The Grove Consultants International) and NMC Founder/CEO Larry Johnson didn’t waste a minute before establishing that the 100 of us from kindergarten through 12th-grade schools, colleges and universities, libraries and museums, and a handful of other organizations from all over the world, have a clear mandate over the next few days:
Identify some worthy challenges that deserve to be solved, and pilot a process that we can use to move an action agenda forward
Our playing field remains the intersection between technology, learning, creativity, and the people at the center of those fields. The common element that continues to draw us together is a passion for exploring the technology that continues to evolve all around us and the trends and challenges we and those we serve are facing. And the approach was a mixture of attentiveness, reflection, humor, and focus on what the metatrends—“a global and overarching force that will affect many multidimensional changes; for example, environmental impacts on business, individuals and countries,” according to an online sustainability dictionary—within education are.
It’s worth summarizing some of the metatrends previously identified to set a context for what comes next: the work of the world is increasingly global and collaborative; people expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to—and they can draw from a global mobile network (the Internet) to foster learning; concepts of open content, data, and resources, combined with changing view of ownership and privacy, have an impact of much of what we do; and the Internet is challenging us to rethink learning and education while refining our notion of literacy.
Metatrends that may be included on a revised list by the time the conference ends two days from now were varied and intriguing:
The end of credentials as we know them; one summit participant even mused about what would happen if we put expiration dates on academic degrees
The growing importance of the maker subculture and how it might reflect a new arts and crafts movement that does not at all eschew the use of technology in creation
The continuing expectation that people have that they will be able to learn, work, and play whenever and wherever they want to engage in those activities
New business models for learning
Redefining literacy
The impact of a commitment to openness in disseminating information
The end of physical boundaries of work in a world where our work and non-work lives are increasingly intertwined
There was also frank discussion about how “complexity” is a theme that seems to flow through almost every other theme we were exploring—a theme that itself almost seems to serve as a meta-metatrend that helps to make sense of the other disparate themes under discussion.
Our list-in-progress, Johnson reminded us toward the end of the afternoon, is not definitive—nor is it meant to be. It’s a starting point for discussion and action, and the real work will be continued within the overlapping communities we serve, and with the active participation of members of those communities.
“We have 100 people in the room, and I hope we have 100 perspectives,” he said.
And then the immediate future under the nurturing of the New Media Consortium was outlined for all of us:
A new NMC K-12 Ambassadors Program is about to unfold through a very quick search to identify 25 top innovative educators from around the world; their mandate will be to provide insight into the world of kindergarten through 12th-grade education and how the NMC can support them. This might eventually lead to similar ambassador programs for museums and libraries worldwide.
And in a movement I personally have long supported, the NMC community that has developed through the these new annual meetings is going to be supported year-round through establishment of an NMC Commons, “an Enterprise Hive social business community platform to improve member services, support collaboration among colleagues, and enhance the production of the NMC Horizon Report series.”
“This room is going to be the first sub-community on that group,” Johnson assured us.
The formal discussions ended as late afternoon melted into early evening, but the exchanges of ideas continued well into the night as we gathered for a reception that allowed us to engage in small-group discussions.
There still is much to do before we reach the goals that Johnson had outlined earlier in the day. But at least one thing is clear: the future of education may be an incredibly complex topic to explore over a three-day period, but the community that NMC staff is nurturing is one that is more than willing to be active participants in helping shape that future in the most positive of ways.
Celebrating Life. Making positive connections and collaborating with people from around the world. Living everyday with positive energy, possibility, passion and peace of mind. Learning from a School Counsellor lens. I'm not a Counsellor because I want to make a living. I am a Counsellor because I want to make a difference. Gratitude for ETMOOC roots.
Horizon Project reports, for more than a decade, have been guiding us through what is changing and what remains consistent in our learning landscape; the flagship Higher Education Edition, which currently is accompanied by K-12, Library and Museum editions, consistently helps us identify and become familiar with key trends that are “accelerating technology adoption in higher education”—and, I continue to maintain, in many other parts of our overall lifelong-learning landscape.
The Key Trends section of the report concludes with the two intriguing and fruitful short-term trends—those “driving ed tech adoption in higher education [and elsewhere] for the next one to two years”: increasing use of blended learning and redesigning learning spaces. “[B]lended learning—the combination of online and face-to-face instruction—is a model currently being explored by many higher educational institutions” (p. 17) and some of us who work in other learning environments, as we’re reminded through a link to a blended-learning case study (written by Carrie Schulz, Jessica Vargas, and Anna Lohaus) from Rollins University. And changes in pedagogical approaches themselves are driving the need to re-examine and redesign our learning spaces: “A student-centered approach to education has taken root, prompting many higher education professionals to rethink how learning spaces should be configured,” the report co-authors confirm (p. 18). If, for example, we are interested in having the learner at the center of the learning process, we’re going to have to rework the numerous lecture halls that continue to place the focus on learning facilitators. The FLEXspace interactive OER database and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory are among the wonderful resources cited for those of us interested in diving much more deeply into the world of learning-space redesign, and Tom Haymes’ Idea Spaces presentation provides additional food for thought while also serving as an example of how we can create online content in a way that creates its own type of learning space—the website itself.
Posted by paulsignorelli 
Building Creative Bridges 