The internet of things will likely have a greater impact on humanity than social media. The creation of a “central nervous system” for the earth or a “global data field” is well underway. As more devices connect to the internet – cars, home security systems, utility monitoring – and as more objects include RFID tags, the physical world begins to merge with the digital world. I can search for my car keys the same way I search for a research paper. Social media is an overlay of socialization on top of our physical worlds. The internet of things is an integration of physical and virtual worlds, permitting the most desirable elements of each to exist in the other. Here’s a short introduction to the concept of the internet of things. See also 8 better ways to understand the internet of things.
Grading is an attempt to offer a statement of competence/knowledge about an individual in relation to a particular subject area. Many other statements of competence exist: personal opinion from colleagues, portfolio of work completed, success/impact in a particular field, etc. In games, competence is expressed (represented) by activities completed or levels achieved. So why not use a game model as a replacement for grading?
Last year, Sheldon replaced the traditional grading system in two of his game design classes with a system that is based on experience points (XP), which were typically used to track progress in role-playing games.
Students commenced the program as avatars at level one, which corresponded to zero XP and a grade of ‘F’. They gained XP by completing ‘quests’, ‘fighting monsters’ and ‘crafting’– in other words, giving presentations, sitting quizzes and exams, and handing in projects.
Ages of social network users reviews how the various social networks (Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc) break down in terms of age categories. Of the 19 services covered, the 35-44 age group is tops in 11. While this fits into the “interesting” category. I’d like to see better data on the online activities of different age groups (Pew did a study of internet activities in general, not confined to social networks), which age groups show the fastest growth in participation, how online habits differ between novice and experienced users of the service, and perspectives of privacy/security by different age groups.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
It’s impossible to see the future of education from a single perspective. Many voices, many ideas, and many perspectives are required. While the future can’t be predicted, it can be somewhat anticipated by extrapolating current trends and innovations.
Dave Cormier and I are offering an open course on the Future(s) of Education, starting in April. Dave has an introduction based on a workshop he is running in Singapore next week. I’ve co-taught courses with Dave in the past and while we irritate each other, he has a keen, critical, and creative mind. Which means it’s always a great experience for me.
We need your help, according to the Levine/Norman playbook of getting others to do your work for you. Could you post a video/drawing/audio recording/dance routine/cave drawing/clay pot that represents your vision of the future of education?
Please tag your contribution with #edfuture and let Dave and I know via Twitter (Dave=@cormier, George=@gsiemens) or drop a link in the comments here.
I’m excited about this initiative we are hosting via TEKRI June 21-25 – Social Networks and Learning: “Social media and networked technologies have altered the ways in which society communicates, educates and produces. Research into social networks and learning, while still nascent, is progressing rapidly.” And this week-long seminar is a response to this trend and aims to develop a research agenda around the topic.
Having gone PowerPoint free for the last several presentations, I decided to return to a more traditional format – largely for the ability to post to slideshare. Presentations seem to have a longer life when some type of artifact is available. I’m in Madrid, delivering a presentation on moving from ICT integration to systemic transformation. Spain currently has the EU Presidency and they’ve made education a core focus. Slides are available on slideshare.
I’ve been making this point for several years: You are who you know. As the study details, what we reveal about ourselves in Facebook (or similar SNS) profiles is not as critical as mining the profiles of people we list as “friends”. I may be quite discrete in our privacy settings, but if 95% of my friends are of a certain faith or political party, an astute observer could infer things about me that I didn’t intend to reveal to them. I know what my network knows. And it appears that I am what my network is.
Creation and innovation are key elements in education. Research is concerned with discovering new schemes of connectedness between entities and evaluating the validity of those connections. No where does informal research, innovation, creating, and personal agency find a greater nexus point than in the work of entrepreneurs. I’ve owned several business in the past. An entrepreneur is a consistent, constant, learner. Y Combinator is a great example of supporting structures for entrepreneurs (though the main attempt here is for VC funding). Other organizations, such as Startup Edmonton, provide a combination of mentoring and guidance to assist individuals in moving from idea to product. The Hub is another great example of an informal system of entrepreneurial support. At TEKRI, I’ve been trying to make the argument that universities should be linked to innovative entrepreneurial activity. Not for the sake of generating revenue, but for the sake of being part of a learning ecology.
To provide a bit of background on what many creative people are doing today, Trendsspotting looks at the New Entrepreneur.
Roughly everything we do online is content of some sort. Each click can be captured. Each thought expressed in digital format serves as a future connection point. The trails we leave may not have much value today, but when someone decides to analyze trails left through a data mining tool, suddenly our data becomes alive (again). Educators have done a very poor job of visualizing and analyzing the data trails left by students. Several years ago, Alec Couros, Clarence Fisher, and I discussed setting up an educational analytics model to help teachers/learners/administrators understand ways to make use of data for learner purposes. Not much came of that. But the concept of effective use of the data produced by learners continues to grow in importance. I’d like, for example, to have a Google Data Explorer tool for education. Instead of confined to educator control (as LMS reports currently are), this tool should be available to both learners and educators. Awareness of trends and hidden patterns can be for great meta-learning.
The National Education Technology Plan (.pdf) reads like a somewhat random mix of concepts that have been discussed in various blogs and forums over the last decade: connected learning, 21st century skills, data-driven improvement, learning networks, life-wide learning, etc. Nothing new here. What is new, however, is the organization publishing the document: U.S. Department of Education. Many a school reformer, conference presenter, and consultant – not to mention tech companies – will be salivating over this report.
The drawback is the approach taken – if you proclaim connected, collaborative learning is the future, then why not demonstrate it in how you create the report? Why not collaborate rather than deliver it whole? The difficulty with connected learning is that it’s almost impossible to understand unless you directly experience it. And, it’s always easier to talk about it than it is to practice it.