2012 Horizon report
An advance copy of the the NMC Horizon Report 2012 K-12 Edition, due to be launched on June 14, identifies mobile devices and apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Game-based learning and personal learning environments are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; and augmented reality and natural user interfaces emerged in the third horizon of four to five years.
OER Quality
A new project is attempting to define quality standards for open educational resources in higher education; this is part of the OER Quality Project, a joint research between the universities of Barcelona, Santiago de Chile and the University of London.
The researchers for this project are lecturers and academic librarians and aim to define a set of quality standards and develop a good practices guide both for content design and for indexing open educational resources in institutional repositories.
They are looking for university lecturers, readers or professors (distance learning lecturers welcome too) willing to answer 2 surveys (20 minutes each) and to evaluate a set of OERs, according to certain guidelines and criteria, which will take 30 minutes to answer. To participate, please register here.
Hangouts on Air
Personally I am not a great fan of Google+, although as Google increasingly integrates its different services it is hard to avoid. But, as Stephen Downes points out in the ever valuable Oldaily, citing an original blog post by David Andrade, “by far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconference with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. “With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post.”
With free skype video calls limited to two people and the increasing cost of proprietary synchronous elearning platforms like Blackboard Collaborate, Hangouts could become the system of choice for open online courses.
Gadgets and widgets
The Dutch SURFnet have announced the ‘Edu-Socializing Seminar’, to be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on June 12th and 13th. They say “Gadget and widget technology is gaining momentum in the Research and Educational community. Projects like the Role Project, Apache Rave, Sakai OAE and OpenConext implement and deploy these technologies, showcasing the possibilities and benefits of such loosely coupled and distributed environments. The projects address a wide variety of needs from within the community like, among others, personalized learning environments, mashing web and social content, distributed learning and online collaborations.
The event seeks to explore trends and foster these developments internationally, by bringing together experts from different fields into one event and joining them in a community. With interactive sessions the workshop wants to enable sharing of ideas and knowledge. At the same time the event wants to trigger new developments. With dedicated breakout sessions, common challenges can be addressed and solutions can be targeted.”
More details on the seminar wiki page.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
Thank for this post (accessed via Twitter), Graham. I think the combination of autonomy and experience is very important. 106 cases seems more than ‘modest’ though as a foundation for the discussion!
Best wishes
Keith
Agree with the Digital Natives nonsense, even if the premise had validity (that is the neurological makeup of people exposed to the digital world from a young age in some way are different) it isn’t at all useful in the same way that research into race and intelligence can only be divisive and dangerous.
However, I don’t necessarily agree with the assertion that “work organisation would seem to be the most important factor in introducing social software in enterprises”. My experience in running large scale (hundreds of students), work-based, online degree programmes is that need overcomes perceived barriers. This is based on working with students with an average age of 40, 80% o them being female – a very unlikely group of technology adopters from a Digital Natives perspective!
Cheers, Stephen.
“The term [digital natives] was dreamed up with no research to support it but became popular in the media. OK – these things happen. But it is totally useless for trying to discuss any real development and use of new technologies.”
I´m not sure I would agree that the term “digital natives” is nonsense. Whether biological or social, I think most would agree that technology has changed how Generation Y receives information (i.e., learns) as opposed to earlier generations. If most learners born after 1980 are learning from current technologies and teachers are not tapping into these technologies in delivering information in schools, well, isn’t that a basis for development in teaching and learning circles? This doesn’t necessarily mean that the younger generation is automatically more technologically savvy than the older generation, however. It only means that the younger generation grew up with technology and the older generation did not. It means, in my humble opinion, that teachers that ignore technology are doing a great disservice for not facilitating the development of learners using tools they will certainly need later on. And even if learners have certain technology skills, educators are still needed to design assessment and instruction that provides educative experiences that are aligned to a particular curriculum.
If the term “digital natives” serves as motivation for teachers to get training on technologies to be used in their classes, I´m all for keeping it in our lexicon. For teachers who already use technologies in their classroom, the delivery method of learning in the future will depend a lot on how the younger generation chooses to use new technologies.
I’m glad someone with a bit of clout has said this. I think it’s a term, with as you mention no evidence to back it up, which is generally used by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and who will also use a series of other meaningless phrases to make it look as if the do – journalists, policy makers, managers and other pseudo-intellectuals.
Good article, Graham. Really struck a chord. The places of work and education (locus of learning) are far more important than any other more accidental attribute of the individual. There was a real chime with a piece of work done by colleagues at Brookes, similarly calling the “Google generation” into question
http://rworld2.brookesblogs.net/2009/03/20/digital-natives-analogue-colonists/