YouTube has become an important teaching tool. In fact University of California at Berkeley follows MIT in posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site. It all started in 2001, when a number of high profile web-based educational projects were "exploring new models of learning." These higher education experiments included NYU Online, Fathom, Virtual Temple and MIT Open Courseware. Today, only MIT Open Courseware has survived. In fact, one could say it has flourished and in the process it has changed higher education forever, encouraging other universities, like UC Berkeley to experiment with new ways of sharing knowledge in an open forum. MIT Open CourseWare offers course materials from MIT classes on the Web. The original plan, as approved by MIT in 2001, was to share syllabi and other textual information, such as articles and exam questions. But today the site includes some combination of videos, podcasts and animations for all 1,800 MIT courses, as well as translations of course materials in Chinese, Portguese, Spanish, and Thai by another 160 universities that have joined forces to form the MIT Open Courseware Consortium. The video below features an event celebrating MIT’s decision to put materials from all of its 1,800 courses online for free. The event, held recently at MIT, was hosted by MIT President Susan Hockfield and included a talk by author and New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman (who of course wrote the hugely influential book The World is Flat). One of the more interesting aspects of this project has been the discovery of who exactly is accessing MIT Open CourseWare. While originally designed for faculty and students around the world to advance their knowledge in science and technology, it is now accessed mostly by "self-learners," meaning primarily those working in corporate and government organizations around the world. (This group accounts for more 50% of the 1.6 million downloads per month.) These self-learners are using the MIT Open Courseware site for refreshing their knowledge in a range of subjects, including chemistry, physics, computer science and search engine technology. This level of interest has motivated other universities to also offer their course materials free. UC Berkeley, for example, has made over 300 hours of course lectures available free on YouTube. The topics of study posted by UC Berkeley include chemistry, physics, biology and even a video lecture (below) on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin. So how will this free online content impact corporate learning departments? I think more and more we will see this free intellectual capital readily accessible on corporate university portals, and where appropriate free content may also be integrated into formal learning offerings for post-course references or into corporate mentoring/coaching situations. Perhaps the more challenging question is: Will corporate learning departments simply be customers of this open learning movement or will they join the movement by sharing some of their own non-proprietary intellectual content? Technorati Tags: Free content, Higher Education, Open Learning, YouTube

I have been giving seminars this past month on how companies are experimenting with social media to maximize knowledge sharing and collaboration and one theme is consistent across companies of various sizes and locations: they are turning to their training departments to be the test beds for using new social media tools like blogs and wiki’s. This is the case with Jet Blue University (JBU), the corporate university of Jet Blue Airlines. Jet Blue University has 200 faculty spread across three locations, in Orlando, Florida (where they train flight crews), in Queens, NY (where they train operations and technical crews) and in Salt Lake City ( the training arm for reservations and customer services representatives). Early in 2008, Jet Blue University powered its training faculty with a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs and wiki’s as a way for them to share best practices and be the pioneers for social media tools. Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies at Jet Blue University, says that the main driver to experimenting with these new technologies is to capture process improvements and "next" practices that are working among faculty across the country. It really makes a lot of sense for companies to use their "learning organization" to test out new ways to collaborate and share best practices. First, for employees in the learning department of an organization, part of their job is to share best practices around the enterprise. However, often they have been frustrated with their company’s attempts at knowledge management systems. So now they can become blogger champions and learn first-hand the power of social media while using the tools to do their job—share lessons learned across their community of peers.. Secondly, while the training faculty may have good intentions about sharing best practices, they often lack an easy tool that allows them to collaborate with their peers. So, I can see how empowering the training faculty to be a community of blogger and wiki champions can create excitement and even be a vehicle to re-invent and re-brand an entire learning organization. Some topic areas to think about having your faculty share best practices using blogs and wikis’ include, new-hire employee on-boarding, leadership development of high potentials and even company-wide blogging guidelines, assuming the company then decides to expand this initiative enterprise-wide. Finally, professionals in a company’s learning organization want to "role model" what is expected across the organization. What better way to be a role model business unit than to be the first to use these new social media tools. The Jet Blue University’s social platform, which went live early this year, was provided by Awareness, a company that focuses on delivering enterprise-wide blogs and wiki’s to both internal and external communities. In fact, the folks at Jet Blue University are so enamored with their "experiment" that they went ahead and made a series of videos describing why they did this. Tune in to hear what they say below: So, is your learning department taking the lead to "test out" new social media tools for the enterprise? What has been your experience to date?

One of my recent posts entitled From e-Learning To m-Learning talked about the enormous potential for m-Learning. This topic was debated recently by a panel of experts including Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at the World Economic Forum last month. The current estimates for mobile phone penetration are impressive: today 3.2 billion people have mobile phones and about 10% of these are smart phones, which are web enabled. In fact, Zuckerberg estimates that among the 200 million unique visitors to Facebook each month, 25 million are using mobile applications to post updates and share photos and videos. And as devices continue to enter the market, new features and new capabilities are, and will continue to be, appearing at an accelerated rate. For example, there are now custom applications that allow students to turn their mobile phones into sophisticated calculators. Programs such as Space Time and QuickGraph are just two examples. But the bar is being raised once again. As reported in the New York Times in an article entitled Industry Makes Pitch that Cellphones Belong In Classroom, Qualcomm, a producer of chips for mobile phones, is funding a million dollar research project targeting Millennials in an attempt to understand how cellphones could be used in high school to augment or even replace computers. This is a significant opportunity since K-12 schools now spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computers to provide an average of one computer for every three students. Think about the potential if schools spent even a percentage of their budget on mobile phones instead of computers. But also think about the impact on corporate learning and human resources as Post Millennials (those now aged 12-18 years old) enter and college and then the corporate world with the expectation of using their mobile phones instead of their computers to work, communicate, and even learn. Already there has been a buzz in the market as some companies are asking sales professionals to use their mobile devices for every day computing needs instead of their laptop. And many road warriors say they are willing to entirely ditch their laptops in favor of their mobile as the technology improves, which it has been doing by leaps and bounds. Finally, food for thought: In a report published in January by research firm In-Stat based on a survey of 1,402 technology users, 52% of respondents to the In-Stat survey said they could envision using a smart phone in the future as their sole computing device, provided handset companies make improvements like better keyboards, expandable screens and applications that work as well as they do on PCs. What are you waiting for to develop your m-Learning strategy? Share your thoughts with me in your comments, or over email. Technorati Tags: Millennials, Chief Learning Officers, Mobile learning

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Twitter Frenzy Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin Political HumorEconomic Crisis You know Twitter has hit mainstream when it becomes a topic for Jon Stewart and Social Media Analyst Jeremiah is talking about dreaming in 140 characters in his recent blog post.. Ask Jeremiah: Comprehensive FAQ Guide To Twitter. All kidding aside, Jeremiah Owyang is one of the most "qualified" people I know to share how to really leverage Twitter to advance your personal brand as well as to increase your productivity at work. Here’s a short story on how I used twitter to build my network. I was a speaker this week at a Human Capital Institute event in Scottsdale, AZ. My speech entitled Creating Next Generation Learning" was to take place on Tuesday, March 10th, but I arrived on Monday the 9th. I wanted to connect with as many folks as possible so I sent out a tweet about my being at the HCI event. All of the sudden I connected with nearly a dozen folks from around the world who were also going to be at the event. We planned several lunches and even created a poster for our lunch table entitled Twitter Friends at HCI. I have written about using Twitter as a learning tool here and here, and so I wanted to and got to hear first hand about how it is being used by Human Resource and Learning practitioners. How long did it take me to do this? All of 5 minutes and 140 characters. There are countless other examples of how I could have been built my network, but I was deliberate about doing this on Twitter and in doing I connected with a group of fellow Twitter users and we all discussed how we are using microblogging to improve our productivity and build our networks. Here are some of the ways Twitter is being used on-the-job and in one’s personal life as discussed at HCI: 1) Think Before You Tweet Yes it’s informal and only 140 characters but it is searchable and, yes, it can be googled. 2) Answer the Question: "What Is Interesting/Innovative" rather than just "What Are You Doing Now?" Embed links to interesting content so all your followers learn what you are reading and what influences your thoughts on a topic. 3) Approach Twitter as a Social Learning Tool It is participatory, collaborative and, at its heart, contextual. It may in fact be one of the best ways to instantly share knowledge among your network. 4) Explore how best places to work use Twitter to build their brand. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, was one of the keynote speakers at HCI event this week. He is a big user of Twitter with 218,906 followers. Zappos made the list in Fortune Magazine’s annual "100 Best Companies To Work For" list, and Fortune began and ended the article by talking about how Zappos uses Twitter to build more personal connections with people. Zappos came in at #23 on the Fortune list making the company the highest ranking newcomer for 2009. In fact in Zappos Corporate Employee directory they have all employees ranked by the number of followers they have on Twitter. Now that’s an incentive to start sending tweets. Tony even created a beginners guide on how to get onto Twitter. You can find this at: http://twitter.zappos.com/start 5) Explore how your company’s public relations, marketing communications and customer relations departments are using Twitter. What can you learn from these departments in order to experiment with your own learning department? In the case of Zappos, they have transformed their public relations and marketing departments to use Twitter as the first way to connect to customers. 6) Join the dialogue Follow me at www.twitter.com/jcmeister Join "Social Learning Question Of The Day" on Twitter at http://twitter.com/slqotd. We have 447 followers. A pdf of all the questions asked prior to February 2009 can be downloaded as a pdf. Thanks to Kevin Jones and Dave Wilkins for moderating this group. 7) Learn from "THE" social media analyst on this topic As mentioned previously, one of the most qualified individuals on this subject is Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research covering social computing. Below are top 7 questions from FAQ Guide Jeremiah created and is something I consider to be a "MUST READ" for all those already on Twitter or thinking about joining Twitter. Ask Jeremiah: The Comprehensive FAQ Guide to Twitter Complete FAQ’s are found here. Question: What are common terms and phrases I need to know? Do I Tweet or Twitter? Twitter, which evolved from simple status messages to now a global conversation, is referred to in a number of times. Asking folks: "Are you on Twitter" is appropriate. When you want to use Twitter, and want to refer to it as a verb, it’s appropriate to say "I’m Twittering that". However, it’s more appropriate to say to say, "Did you Tweet that?". (verb conjugation) It is never appropriate to suggest "I’m twatting now". Question: I just joined, now what? I don’t get it.Twitter on it’s own makes little sense, why? It’s a social tool and this means you have to follow others. First, use the address import tool to add folks that are in your Yahoo mail and Google mail. Secondly, do searches for people you may know to find them. If Twitter search doesn’t’ work or the "Find people" search, use Google and seasrch "First Last Twitter" to find folks. Once you find people you do know (or want to know) see who they are following, and add them. You can always add me, but you should first see how I use Twitter. Question: Who gives a donk what I ate for lunch, can I talk about something else? Yes, talk about anything you want. The twitter question "what are you doing now" isn’t the most effective way of using the tool. Instead, answer this question "What’s important to me" or better yet "What’s important to my followers". Also, engage in dialog, ask questions and answer others questions using the reply feature. Question: Why 140 Characters? 140 characters is the size limit of text messages using SMS, since Twitter integrates well with mobile devices, you can text to "40404" and enter in 140 characters to tweet from your phone. Also, 140 characters is a true bite sized chunk of information making it easy to consume and create -ideal for rapid sharing of ideas. Question: How do I use the reply feature? Easy. When you see someone’s tweet, there’s a small ‘arrow’ next to their tweet. If you feel like responding to them, click that arrow and it will automatically load their name into the text box. Type your answer in 140 characters and submit. This will make conversations easier to track and find. Question: How come people don’t write in normal English in Twitter? Good question, due to it’s limited 140 characters style of publishing, Twitter has formed it’s own unique nomenclature, similar to how users of pagers in the 90s developed shortened codes and how text message have developed their own digital shorthand. Often you’ll hear people use Twinglish, a combination of "Tw" plus other English words like "Twello Texas". It’s cute once in a while, but can grate on ones nerves after a while. Twanks Tweeple. Question: What is a DM? DM stands for "Direct Messages" which suggests that an individual can message another individually using the private messaging system (like email) to other members. You can only DM users that are following you. You may hear individuals say "DM me for details about conference discounts" suggesting the user wants to take the discussion private. Do note that Twitter’s DM system still resolves in 140 characters and is fairly primitive, many conversations may naturally shift to email, or even the archaic phone! Happy Tweeting See you online, Jeanne Meister Technorati Tags: Social Learning, Twitter, Forrester Research, Jeremiah Owyang, Zappos, Human Capital Institute

We have been spending a lot of time in recent posts talking about the enormous potential for m-Learning. In a span of only 20 years, wireless services have reached almost 50 percent of the world’s population. There are now more than 3 billion mobile subscribers globally, that number is expected to grow to 4.5 billion by 2012. In the workforce development industry, these numbers translate into new ways to reach and engage learners. On Wednesday, June 10th, 2009, at 2PM EST, come join me, along with Don Duquette, GP’s corporate learning and development expert, for an interactive webinar, sponsored by General Physics Corporation, on practical solutions to help you navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of mobile learning. The webcast will focus on: Explosive growth of mobile subscriptions Huge interest in mobile as device for K-12, University and Corporate Learning Results from survey on the current uses for learning & development Potential bandwidth, instructional design, LMS capability challenges We want to hear from you before the webinar-what are your questions, and what issues are you dealing with as you explore how to implement m leanring in your orgnaizaiton. Send me an email here Thanks and See You Online. [tags]M Learning, Performance Support, Talent Management, General Physics Corporation

For the past month, I have been a lurker in the Khan Academy Google Group.  I've been reflecting on the constant flow of comments submitted by "users" of the Khan videos who include a wide mix of people but often are teachers and students.  I am inspired but also saddened by the comments from students who share empowering stories of how the videos have enabled them to experience their capabilities to learn.  And this experience is the catalyst that sparked my most recent GETInsight blog* post.  I hope you enjoy it and feel inspired to leave a comment on the post or in the VoiceThread."I’m Not Stupid": How Open Educational Video Resources Will Change the Future of Education*The GetInsight blog is an integrated resource of GETideas.org, a community for education leaders.  I am a paid consultant for GETideas and write a monthly post about a related topic.  Everyone is welcome to participate in the conversation and I hope you'll join us!

by TZA on FlickrEach month, I author a blog post on the GETinsight blog, part of Cisco Systems' GETideas.org network, about a topic relevant to educational innovation.  This month, I am exploring the relationship between cognitive brain research and mobile learning -- not a topic a claim to be an expert on, but certainly one I've been pondering quite a bit lately.  From my own mobile learning experiences, I find a much a higher rate of retention and deep learning when I am a mobile learner (usually on a walk or in a quiet place at a time that is convenient for me) versus in a scheduled, face-to-face setting.  Mobile learning seems to meet the human brain's craving for multisensory experiences and offers the opportunity to, well, be mobile and engage in physical activity while learning -- which is kind of like sprinkling your brain with vitamin powder. I hope you'll venture on over to the blog post here, take a gander, and join in on the VoiceThread conversation I've set up.  Hope to "see" you soon! Take me to "Is Mobile Learning Smarter Learning?"

I speak with a lot of faculty, staff, and administrators about teaching with technology.  And nearly every single time, one of the first questions I am asked is, "What do we do about all the faculty who don't want to change?  Who are resistant to trying new things?  Who don't believe, for example, a cell phone could ever have a place in a classroom?"  The fact that this question is asked so much is, I think, indicative of a bigger problem. I think it's time, folks, that we reframe our focus. Yes, many faculty are resistant to change.  Yes, many faculty refuse to accept new forms of technology in their classrooms.  We need to accept that this is the way it is.  We need to accept that we can't change everybody's perspective on what teaching and learning should look like.  After all, academic freedom is at the core of our teaching values, right?  Why would I suggest such a thing?  Because as so many of us sit around tables building plans and strategies to figure out how to change the unchangeables or worse yet, throw in the towel and give up hope because all we see are the unchangeables we are ignoring and, in turn, risking the greatest assets to the future of our educational system -- the changers. Have you sat down and engaged in a Twitter chat using the hashtag #edchat?  Or #flipclass?  Don't know how?  Just go to Twitter.com and in the search box enter either of those two terms (#edchat or #flipclass). These are called hashtags on Twitter and when you send a tweet with a hashtag, they can easily be filtered into a search stream creating a 'chat' like scenario.  By doing this, you'll see tweets sent from educators around the world sharing resources with each other about how and why they're using emerging technologies to reinvent their classrooms.  These are teachers committed to change.  These are teachers driven by an internal passion.  This passion doesn't stop at the concrete curbs surrounding their schools or campuses.  It doesn't sync up with an academic calendar.  They don't wait for professional development or teacher inservice days to learn.  They're always learning, always sharing, always innovating -- and social media tools like Twitter and mobile devices like iPads and smartphones enable their learning and facilitate connections with their growing global networks.  They understand how to use technology to change the way students learn because they use technology to learn.All of you have creative, risk-taking educators on your campus.  There may be just one or there may be many -- but they are there.  They may share a lot with their colleagues and they may share absolutely nothing, but that does not mean they aren't sharing with someone, somewhere.  Last year I enrolled in a full-day Google workshop to learn how to use the latest Google tools in my classes.  It was an awesome day.  The facilitator was fabulous -- someone I had known previously and is part of my own personal learning network (PLN) on Twitter.  I won't name that person here, as I do not have his permission.  Throughout the workshop he referenced how he uses various tools in his own classes.  We had a few casual conversations throughout the day and at one point I asked, "Wow, what do your colleagues think about all this great stuff you do in your classes?  Do they love it or what?"  He shrugged his shoulders and said, "They don't know what I do. There's just no interest."I do not intend to put words in anyone's mouth here.  These are my own observations ... and I certainly welcome yours. I think many of our innovative teachers -- regardless of the level they teach -- feel smothered by bureaucracy, frustrated, unsupported, exhausted, overworked, unappreciated, and may even at times question if they've made the right decision to become an educator.  Last summer after I finished presenting a keynote at a conference, a woman approached me with tears in her eyes and said, "I was going to resign this year.  After hearing that presentation, I'm going to give it one more year." As we approach that one year mark, I find myself thinking about her and wondering where she is in her journey.Folks, this is our crisis.  Let's try to stop focusing on the unchangeables and shift all that energy to those who are already out there changing the world.  

Each month, I write a sponsored blog post for Cisco's GETinsight blog, which is part of the GETideas.org network, a global community of educators with a shared interest in discovering ways to change and innovate education through technology.In this month's post, I share a detailed overview of a non-traditional learning activity I use in my online History of Photography class.  I have found that many educators see the potential in using web 2.0 and social media tools to activate student learning but what's critical at this moment is for specific practices to be shared so we call can come together, consider them, discuss them, and evolve them into what's right for our own classes.The activity I share is titled Visual Thinking and it's a 2-week activity that uses VoiceThread as the platform for a student-curated learning unit about mid-20th century photographers.  In the activity, students take ownership of researching one photographer, contributing media (examples of the photographer's work) and voice or video comments to the VoiceThread to fulfill the content criteria for the activity, as well as an open-ended discussion prompt. The following week, the class re-engages with the newly curated unit, delving into each other's discussion questions. I invite you to peruse the details of the activity by reading the post and reflect on the deeper question that guided this teaching experiment for me, "How does learning change when students become the teachers?" This question will be further explored in a free VoiceThread-sponsored webinar I am hosting on Thursday, July 19th at 12pm PST/3pm EST.  Click here to read the post.  Enjoy!

Nearly three years ago I shared a presentation at Loyola Marymont University about my journey through teaching with technology that led me to begin to use VoiceThread, transform my teaching approaches, and, eventually, flip my classroom.  That day, a man named Michael Kieley, whom I had never met, sat in the audience.  Michael did not introduce himself to me that day but did reach out to me afterwards via email to share how my presentation encouraged him to rethink the ways he was teaching his fully on-ground Visual Thinking course. We have remained in touch ever since.  And he's made many spectacular transformations in his class.  We have met a few times in person at conferences and he regularly attends my "Teaching with VoiceThread Hangouts."While Michael often credits my presentation as a formative moment in the beginning of his own teaching transformation, I have learned and continue to learn a great deal from him.  That's one of the things I love most about using social technologies for my own professional development. They allow me to engage in dialogue with educators outside my physical sphere of access. And the more educators are motivated to have dialogues with different people from varied contexts, the more we will shift our frames of reference, ask new questions, and continue to approach teaching as a process of life learning.Michael wrote to me today. He has been asked to share a 10-minute presentation about VoiceThread with his institution at a faculty development event tomorrow.  To convey the potential of VoiceThread in 10-minutes isn't a simple task.  His solution was to create a VoiceThread about his journey.  It is shared below. Enjoy.You may share this VoiceThread using this link: http://voicethread.com/share/4001638/