Next Generation Technology

An incomplete theme summary

Terry Anderson

Athabasca University Canada

• “Canada is a great country, much too cold for common sense, inhabited by compassionate and intelligent people with bad haircuts”. – Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 2002.

The Community Filtering for each other

• QALT Overcoming information overload• The gadgets and gizmo example• Need to extend this filtering beyond 3 days a

year• RSS and your blog• “The text becomes the community”

– Chris Sessuns

• Edublogs• Stephen Downes’ OLDaily

Change Agent - Age 56

Adoption Issues

• How to select and support best mix of technologies amongst majority users?

Geoffry Moore – Crossing the Chasm

Change Agent Tactics

• Use the Tech

• Preach about and demonstrate the Scholarship of Teaching

• Involve yourself with Strategic Users and Pilots

• Constant assessment and reflection – individually and in community

Lone Ranger debate

Expectations?

Multiple skill sets

Handholding and support

Next generation teacher

Death and retirement solution?

Next Generation Production Values?

• Is ‘teacher created’ good enough?

• The 1.5” talking head – a horseless carriage?

• How much does an educational game or simulation cost to produce?

• Oblinger “Do it yourself” era

• Do it yourself With objects

WebTeach Innovation (Chris Hughes)

• Adding small group technique to asynch messaging

• The seductive song of quantitative transcript analysis

• The necessity of getting such tools in the Open Source and moving in to VLE’s/PLEs

Inclusiveness

• Disability Pyramid

• Use of the tech to empower and teach all of us

• Need to make available in machine readable and searchable format producing alternative representations of content

Learning Objects and Repositories

• UK is a world leader

• Moving beyond object to the culture, economics, the processes, the rewards and actual re-use

• Syndication

Is ELearning 2.0 a Cargo Cult?

• “a characteristic feature of Cargo Cults is the belief that spiritual agents will at some future time give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products to the cult members.” Wikipedia

Blogs

• A square page in an institutional round hole?• Individual or group?• Control, trust, identity and ownership• Forced, induced or voluntary ?• How to support ?• Internal or external ?• What is their relative advantage over threaded

discussion lists ?• Best use for identification/learning beyond the

course

Podcasts

• Average Canadian spends 56 minutes a day commuting to work or school.

• Do they really want to listen to a boring lecture twice?

• What are the affordances of auditory learning?

Next Generation AccessMobile Computing

• When “e-mail is too slow”!

• What is the killer educational app for mobile learning?

• Challenges of bringing the ubiquitous tech to the controlled school (exams?)

• Just in time learning

• Lifelong learning potential

Evaluation

• Views by Traxler and Kukulska-Hulme regarding evaluation of mobile learning could be applied to all interventions

• In some fields 15-20% or more is applied to the evaluation

• Need much more rigour, sharing of instruments and theoretical underpinnings

• Kirkpatrick’s levels– Perceptions– Learning– Effect on performance– Effect on life– Cost effectiveness

Evaluation

• The problem of ethics release

• Next year Alt-C requires 2 of 3– Practice– Theory– Evaluation

• Are we knowledgeable enough, equipped, trained and empowered to properly evaluate?

Next Generation Identity

• Learner models – necessary for holy grail of mass customization

• Who creates learner models that identity us, the context/culture, teachers, machines or users?

• How many identities should we have

Access Issues

• TechDis Accessibility Pyramid- conceptualizing cost/benefit of adaptation

• Using mobile technology to teach adaptive techniques

• Speech recognition – Will it always be just around the corner?– Lecturers– Longitudinal studies– Social acceptability– Effect on writing style, volume, quality

Time and Community

• Until we invent virtual time, we need to better use our communities

• Good examples throughout like the gizmo and gadgets – there has to be more efficient ways to learn value of new tech without surmounting learning curves

Next Generation ALT

• How are next generation technologies harnessed to ALT needs?

• Why is Alt-J not available to everyone?

A Tale of 3 books

Open Access

78,000 downloads plus

indiv. chapters

400 hardcopies sold @ $50.00

Free at cde.athabascau.ca/online_book

Commercial publisher

934 copies sold at $52.00

Buy at Amazon!!

E-Learning for the 21st CenturyCommercial Pub.1200 sold @ $135.002,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8.

One Measure of Article Impact

From Google Scholar stats May 2006 Anderson (2006)

Funding

• Picking up the pieces from military and health research

• Very disproportionate funding for education research

• Must we follow natural science or medicine research models?

Beyond the LMS to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

My hobbies

My calendar

My social Life

My school(s)

My files, my podcastsMy publications

E-portfolios

My profile

My conversations

My work My media

Personal Learning Space (PLE)

Multi-Media Creation tools

Storage

Collaboration tools

Communication Tools

Scheduling and Planning

Reflection tools

Specialized tools

Conceptualizing the PLE – an ALT-C Product

Personal Learning Space (PLE)

Multi-Media Creation tools

Storage

Collaboration tools

Communication Tools

Scheduling and Planning

Reflection tools

Specialized tools

Content Colleagues

Assessment and Credentialing Expertise

Tutoring & Mentoring

Personal Learning Space (PLE)Personal Learning Space (PLE)

Multi-Media Creation tools

Storage

Collaboration tools

Communication Tools

Scheduling and Planning tools

Reflection tools

Specialized tools (Stats, GPS etc)

Content Colleagues

Assessment and Credentialing Expertise

Tutoring & Mentoring

Identity

Missing

• Discussion of Next Generation ALT

• Scholarship of teaching

• Standards implementation:– Open ID, SSE, – IMS, IEEE LOMasertertertert

• Social profiling, privacy

• Ubiquitous wireless

Conclude My Summary

• Following Tim Shea’s lead:

• Who invented Higher Education?

Your Turn

• What was the one best idea you are taking home?

• What is the one next generation technology issue that must be discussed next year?

• What is really missing in this summary?