A great Video Featuring the Future Classroom with future 3D Modelling and other future Graphic User Interface and display Technology. Technology in Education- A Future Classroom from Mr. Kirsch on Vimeo.  

Every now and then I think it is useful to reflect on the range of activities I do as part of my day job. Over the last couple of days I have been working on a number of things.   A chapter on the 7Cs of Learning Design, a draft of which I circulated via social media. I have already received a number of useful comments. Reading a thesis that I am examining next week. Reading a PhD upgrade report and writing the pre-via examiner’s report. A meeting with the medical school about their use of iPads. Evaluation of the MOOCs we ran as part of FutureLearn. An online meeting about a review we are doing of open accreditation process for non-formal and informal learning. A presentation to the VC on our research and teaching activities. An online meeting to discuss the EDEN research workshop and associated programme. Participating in social media. A blog post on an evaluation checklist for courses. So lots of writing and communicating; a mix of research-focused and teaching-related activities. It’s interesting also to reflect on one’s approaches to working on something. So I was dreading writing the 7Cs chapter and kept putting it off, but finally got my teeth into it and it was very satisfying to print out a copy this morning. 

Some years ago during my first stint at InfoPro Learning and while conducting an open lecture-cum-workshop at IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Kanpur, my co-presenter and I were pleasantly surprised at the level of awareness of the audience we were addressing. There were questions not just about the subject we covered but also on how it could be applied in different contexts. Participants also articulated some of the surmountable and insurmountable challenges for the subject we were dealing with. We came away not just with the satisfaction of having made our audience learn, but we were also injected with a few clear areas we had to think about, to develop our idea further. Looking back, I wondered about what was really happening during that session. Was it a case of a few students, having looked up the Web before they joined our session, generally playing smart? That was not possible because those students of Engineering and Technology of a reputed institution like IIT would not come and spend a couple of hours on something that they could satisfactorily learn over the Web. Were they trying to show us our place—that we were not the experts we thought we were? No, they had nothing against us since they didn’t know us at all and there was no reason for it. Was this session part of their program of study that they had to attend? Negative! So again, what was happening there? What it clearly demonstrates is that those who wish to learn are changing with the times. The educational theorists would reflect on what was at work there. But for an observer of how learning has evolved in the last 20 years, it wouldn’t be wide of the mark to say that learners, both adult and young, are more and more in control of their learning. They are motivated enough to figure out what they need to learn and expedite (or I should say search) where they can get the information for learning. What technology (Internet, Enterprise 2.0, and Social Computing etc.) has done is to make it easy for them to express themselves without inhibition and without any restriction (through a Wiki, Blog, Tweet etc.) They can organize their knowledge within their own social spaces, networks, and ecosystems. In addition, they can explore the reservoir of the world for information and knowledge as well as locate people who can guide them in real time or with their expressed ideas. It seems everyone who knows something is instantly putting their knowledge and insights into the public domain, to make it accessible for everyone else to explore. Does this pose a challenge for learning strategists and key people in the learning business? Well, it sure does. We must appreciate this change and analyze the advancements in technology in terms of modern tools of expression, organization, and discovery to be able to pitch our solutions correctly and successfully. We must ARISE to MODERNIZE! About the author: S M Nafay Kumail is Director—Learning Strategies at InfoPro Learning Inc. Nafay is co-author of ‘e-Learning an Expression of the Knowledge Economy’ (McGraw-Hill 2002) and a regular commentator on learning, knowledge management, and new media trends. The post Learning Strategists, ARISE to MODERNIZE! appeared first on .

I’ve just returned from a trip to Dublin, where I am visiting professor at Dublin City University (DCU), working with Mark Brown and his team. Mark is the director of the new National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL). Yesterday was the launch of a new digital technologies initiative, called Connected. It is DCU’s new offering in terms of flexible and distance learning. It includes a new digital learning environment, called LOOP. The event was well attended with around 120 registered. The president of DCU, Professor Brian MacCraith opened the event and described how the initiative linked into the institutional mission, in terms of transforming lives and society, as well as national strategy. Mark Brown unveiled Connected and peppered his talk with three very powerful videos from DCU learners, explaining how DCU had literally transformed their lives.  Professor MacCraith said: Today’s announcement is much more than a brand launch - rather it is a public commitment by DCU to embrace the best of digital technologies to enhance the learner experience of students, both nationally and globally. Whether you live in Sligo, Seville or Shanghai, DCU Connected provides access to world-class online education, with international expertise and locally-relevant courses designed to meet your needs. Mark Brown stated that: DCU Connected is the evolution of our commitment to flexible learning but with a more contemporary and clearly international focus. I began my short talk by stating that these were interesting and challenging time for Higher Education and that digital technologies offered a plethora of ways in which learners could interact with rich multimedia and ways of communicating and collaborating with peers. I stated that there was a need to move beyond knowledge recall, to enabling learners to become critical thinkers and problem solvers. We need to equip learners to face a complex and dynamic future, where they will be doing jobs that do not even exist today. The new NIDL that Mark Brown directs is a vibrant and strong research centre, which will inform the development of the Connected initiative in the coming months. NIDL will be supported by an International Advisory Board of experts in the field. Connected is an important initiative not just for DCU, but for the whole of Ireland. I concluded with a couple of statistics, that demonstrate the timeliness of Connected. Tony Bates states that to meet the demands of future leaners we would need to build a brick and mortar institution every week. Clearly e-learning is the only solution. Finally, UNESCO state that more than 10 Million learners cannot afford formal education, Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), offer a viable alternative for them.  I am looking forward very much to working with Mark and the NIDL team over the coming months in terms of developing this very exciting initiative.  The Irish Times reported on the launch yesterday, the link  can be found here. The new DCU Connected website will be available from Monday 11th August.

With so many changes underway in today’s fast-changing world, the Learning Management System (LMS) has become critical to organizations that are trying to keep employees current on everything from the latest technologies and regulatory requirements, to industry certifications, best practices, including job-specific and leadership skills. The evolution of LMS software is allowing more businesses to invest in and benefit from them. MarketsAndMarkets predicts the LMS market near $8 billion by 2018, with North America leading the marketplace in terms of revenue contribution. To gain market traction in today’s economy it’s essential to implement training programs that are strategically aligned with your organization’s business goals, resulting in a positive effect on your bottom line. By incorporating an LMS into your training program you can realize a measurable training ROI and immediate cost savings, but many companies are leaving money on the table by not fully utilizing the features of modern LMS platforms The top benefits to maximize ROI from integrating an LMS are highlighted below. Totally Mobile LMS Tagging Content Customize the LMS Robust Reporting An LMS will be truly "mobile" only if all functionality is available to both internal and external learners, instructors, managers, and training administrators. Highlighted below are checks and balances to make you aware of functionality that is not fully extended to mobile users on an LMS. You can gain access to LMS content through a browser on any device—but you must pan awkwardly, or the font size is too small for most people to read Mobile access is available for learners, but not administrators Smartphones are not supported but tablets are—with the version really designed for the desktop The LMS detects mobile users and serves content in a bare-bones interface with limited functionality Ideally, a mobile-enabled LMS allows learners to learn anytime, anywhere, on any device. That leaves no room for doubt that an LMS must be fully supported on all mobile devices to reap its total benefits. Appropriately tagging content in the LMS to make it easier to find, helps to dissolve content boundaries within an LMS. Additionally, the benefit of content tagging between LMSs and institutions empowers instructors to more easily share, discover, revise, remix, and reuse course content. Learning today has evolved as an ‘on-demand’ business. Appropriately tagging content so that it is easily found at the time when it is needed, will add value to the learner. Categorization of content with a flexible tagging system goes a long way to organize people, content, and courses. Customization gives you the ability to modify your LMS to perform specific functions and organize your information according to your unique requirements. Some administrative examples include granting or restricting user access, defining user roles and permissions, adding and maintaining custom user fields, designing user registrations tools, organizing users into groups and so on. In short, make use of customization options provided by your LMS to make the tasks which you perform regularly more accessible. Do not worry about "hiding" the more advanced features of your LMS because you probably only access them once a month, and spending an extra 30 seconds on these tasks are insignificant. A shameless plug—InfoPro built GnosisConnect LMS for companies which had difficulties finding an off-the-shelf platform and which can be customized enough to match their needs. You can learn more about GnosisConnect and through this blog, be informed that GnosisConnect can be customized 100% to match your unique learning paths. With the advent of big data and the growth in the importance of analytics, organizations are driven to provide in-depth reports. Data in the reports must reference the impact that training has had on their bottom line by compiling and correlating data from across the business to measure the true impact on business. Once the impact on business is proved, Learning and Development and the LMS will become a key resource for many in the business, significantly increasing the demands for training. Tapping the right reporting capabilities an LMS offers will provide the necessary data and analytics a company needs to prove the impact that the LMS has on the business—much more than just who has completed what training. Summarized thoughts: There are many more benefits. To put together a plan of action, consider the top benefits listed here and move on with your next steps to help you squeeze the revenue out of your existing LMS investment—a sure shot way to fire up your organization’s economic engine. About the author: Brenda Fernandes is a content quality analyst with InfoPro Learning, Inc. With over 15 years of experience, Brenda is an avid learning strategist with content development, instructional design and business analysis as her core areas of expertise. Brenda is a keen practitioner of harnessing the power of learning content to impact employee performance. The post Maximize ROI of Your LMS Investment Top Benefits of Learning Management Systems (LMS) appeared first on .

I am currently in Kuala Lumpur doing a keynote at the 5th International Personal Learning Environment (PLE) conference. The focus of my talk is on the notion of ‘PLE+’, i.e. I want to argue that we are entering a third phase of learning environments; the first are Virtual Learning Environments (where tools are provided by the institutional system, and where the teacher chooses which are used for their courses), the second are Personal Learning Environments (where learners create their own learning space, mixing and matching institutional tools with cloud-based tools). The third generation, PLE+, builds on this and relates to the impact of ‘The Internet of Things’, and  seamless learning across different contexts, surfaces and devices; in other words, learning across digital and physical spaces. I want to begin my talk by considering the notion of disruptive innovation, originally coined by Christensten: A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. For me there are four key facets of disruptive innovation: change, something new, unexpected, and changing mindsets. We have seen many examples of technologies that have been disruptive in the last thirty years or so; from the Internet, through mobile devices and more recently Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). But first I want to step back. I like using an ecological metaphor in terms of technology adoption, drawing in particular on the work of Gibson, on affordances. So technologies may have potential affordances or characteristics but these will only be realised in relation to a particular individual, we need time to appropriate the technology into our practice. And sometimes a technology is subverted and used in unexpected ways. Below is a picture of an iPad that I took at a hotel I was at last week in Uppsala, Sweden. The iPad is being used to control the juice machine, you click on the pick of the juice you want, and then again to stop when the glass is full. I am sure this is not a use that Apple had anticipated the iPad would be used for! Of course there are numerous reports, describing key emergent technologies and their potential impact on learning. The NMC Horizon reports, the OU UK’s Innovating Pedagogy reports, and the TED talks. I want to focus in on four examples: two videos on intelligent surfaces (‘A day made of glass’ and ‘Technology in education - a future classroom’), the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ and a recent article on ‘The most connected man’. I want to allow space for the audience to discuss these and to consider to what extent they are innovative and/or disruptive, as well as thinking about their potential use in a learning context. I am then going to show Gartner’s most recent Hype cycle and point out that the Internet of Things is currently at the hype of the curve, whilst virtual reality is well down, and speech recognition software has reached the plateau stage. Focusing in on disruption in a learning context I will look at three examples: the flipped classroom, mobile learning and open learning. I will then introduce the concept of PLE+, beginning by listing the four things that are needed to facilitate learning: Guidance and Support Content and Activities Communication and Collaboration Reflection and Demonstration These can be achieved in a variety of ways of course and through different pedagogical approaches. The HoTEL project provides a nice visualisation of pedagogical approaches and their key features; so associative pedagogies are about stimulus and responses such as drill and practice, whereas constructivist pedagogies are about building on prior knowledge and are more task orientated. The below lists the key characteristics of VLEs, PLES, and PLE+s  VLEs: Institutionally owned, teacher controlled, digitally based PLEs: Mix of institutional and cloud-based, learner controlled, nebulous set of components, digitally based PLE+: Mix of institutional and cloud based, learner controlled, nebulous set of components, digitally and physically based. Finally, drawing on the work of Gibson, Pea, Perkins, Solomon, Wertsch and others, I list the following as what I think are the characteristics of a PLE+: Relates to concepts of distributed cognition and PersonPlus We leave learning trails Our learning  environment is culturally constructed We co-evolve with our environment Technologies have affordances Blurring of physical and digital I will finish by suggesting that we need new approaches to design to create effective PLE+ and will put forward the 7Cs of Learning Design as a means of achieving this.  Of particular note here is the fact that I argue that learners can use the tools associated with the 7Cs of Learning Design to create their own PLE+.    

The EdCampNov8 team just completed our first edcamp on Saturday, May 3rd. So much to process, so I’ll do it "stream-of-consciousness" style: I am always amazed at the transition from energy to matter, ideas to actions, the imperceptible to the incarnate. What began as a reverberation of airwaves emitted from Naomi Bates mouth months ago ended around 1pm on a Saturday in austere silence as the echoes, heavy with meaning and inspiration, of our edcamp dissipated. In the form of participants making their way back home, these echoes take on a shape, again, of conversations, evolving lessons, and exchanges of spirit all in the direction of serving students. A comment was made by a friend that it’s hard to imagine a 4 hour "PD Session" coming together with few hiccups that involved no predetermined schedule and hundreds of strangers whose common ground was seemingly non existent. That doubt or confusion is understandable! For a flurry of reasons, though, teachers and administrators DID show, share, and shine. The edcamp experience was a reminder of how powerful choice and self determination can be for, not just an education setting, but for a free people. When considering that we are preparing students to take the reigns of our republic, giving students a taste of that freedom before they are thrusters into their charge is a crucial need. Teachers have to be reminded at times that those PLCs, PDs, lesson plans, late nights grading, etc. are ultimately geared to this end. That taste of freedom, for adults, may be vanilla, but we have to remember what vanilla tasted like that very first time. Freedom and choice within the context of purpose…mmmmm. :) No doubt we’re all reflecting on the sessions and experience and will likely continue to do so. Personally, I was thrilled to meet old Twitter pals and make new pals in the process. As an EdCamp organizer, I didn’t get to attend any sessions and it killed me. However working with my fellow I.T. "Navy Seals" as we moved into this new territory was thrilling. Naomi Bates and I "headed" up the project, but there was so much teamwork that this sentence has little meaning. Kim Barker graciously hosted us on her campus. Karla Burkholder and Rory Peacock, our fearless leaders, gave us direction. Janet Corder was the "swag" coordinator as she pulled all kinds of string to populate our prize tables. Brittany Horn, Cara Carter, Ashley Chapman, Rene Egle, and Kirsten Wilson put legs to the plans and ran the show on Saturday.Filed under: In The Classroom

Thrasymachus:Truth! Originally posted on Sam's Reflections: There are a plethora of teacher resignation letters on the Internet; I refuse to link to any of them, but they follow the same format: "I love teaching, I love my students, but I don’t like X, so I’m out." When I read them, I feel heartbroken that a dedicated educator allowed himself or herself to be pushed out of the classroom. One large problem is that teaching can be isolating; in my favorite dedication letter (or anti-resignation letter), Principal John Wick encourages teachers to support each other. Personally, last year I was ready to walk away from education. Thank God I had a supportive group of educators to give me perspective. But in three weeks, I will no longer be a classroom teacher. I get my Masters in administration tomorrow, and yet I will be school-less. So why am I critical of quitters? Because leaving the classroom isn’t… View original 619 more wordsFiled under: In The Classroom

What is the biggest dream you have for yourself? Is it to travel the world? Is it to be the first person in your family to attend college? Or it is to get a big promotion at work or even start your own business? Source: mashable.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)