Course Goal
Learners will identify technology innovations and embrace them as opportunities rather than challenges and proactively use those changes as catalysts to enhance their institution or district’s learning environments.
Learning Outcomes:
Aligning learning outcomes with activities and assessment:
Learning Outcomes
Assessment
Learning Activities
Foundational
Learners will identify and apply the principles of Disruptive Innovation.Learners will analyze technological innovation and change as a proactive catalyst.
Innovation Plan
Discussion
Blended Learning, Disrupting University or Innovator’s Dilemma and apply the principle of Disruptive Innovation to your particular educational setting.
Application
Learners will be able to identify, analyze and evaluate the impact of recent examples of Disruptive Innovation.
Literature review
Discussion
Review and examine the major and relevant data sources to identify disruptive trends that are currently or will be potentially impact your innovation plan.
Integration
Learners will be able to highlight the opportunities technological innovation spawns and develop strategies to proactively use these opportunities to move their institution/districts toward developing active learning environments.
Case studies –
Implementation strategy outline
Discussion
Examine exceptional examples of organizations using disruptive innovation to move their organizations forward. Identify and apply lessons to the development of your own implementation strategy to move your organization forward.
Human Dimension/Caring
Learners articulate their role in leading change and their responsibility in leading their learning communities through this process.
Video/Digital Story
Portfolio BlogDiscussion
Locate and identify an assortment of Ted, Youtube and Vimeo resources that convey the message of significant and active learning and bring these resources together in your blog that can be used to promote this perspective. Develop a your own video that conveys this message.
Learning How to Learn
Learners will locate, evaluate and compile web-based resources, experts and communities that will help them to promote current and future disruptive innovation opportunities.
Project plan
Portfolio Blog
Finalize innovation plan.
Add and organize the resources in your eportfolio/blog that can help you identify future disruptive innovations. Reflect on your role in leading the adoption of disruptive innovation in your learning environment. Organize your blog resources to support your change agent role.
The other day in our online class meeting in EDLD 5313 – Creating Significant Learning Environments course, one of the core courses in the M. Ed. in Digital Learning and Leading at Lamar University, one of my students asked me why this particular course that deals with learning theory and creating significant learning environments was not one of the first courses in the program. I explained that we run the learning theory course after EDLD 5305 – Disruptive Innovation in Education, the course in which the students research and develop a learning innovation proposal and plan, because 5305 creates a context for which you need to explore your beliefs about learning. Without having a context to look at how people learn, the work on learning theories is just theoretical. The genuine context provides the real world need or application where one needs to explore how best to design and create learning environments.
I am more than likely articulating this better in this post then I did in the meeting and as I thought about what I wish I would have said, Clayton Christensen’s perspective on learning came to mind. In a conversation with Jason Fried published in Inc in 2012, Christensen and Fried talked about innovation, the trap of marginal thinking, and learning. The perspective on learning that really caught my attention was the notion that someone can’t be taught until they are ready to learn. Christensen frames his perspective in the following unique way:
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
When viewed in this light the reason we run EDLD 5305 – Disruptive Innovation in Education first and get students to start the process of creating a learning innovation proposal and plan, is that 5305 disrupts students enough or disrupts their typical thinking about teaching and leanring enough, where they start asking the types of questions that will be addressed in EDLD 5313 and many other courses. Many students lament in the class discussions, class meetings, and in their reflections that this course and program has forced them to re-think many of their ideas about teaching and learning. Students often feel unsettled or uncomfortable because they may feel they have more questions then they have answers.
We have designed the DLL program and the courses to push students to start questioning conventional thinking about teaching and learning, the educational system, their schools and classes, and their process and methods so that their minds are opened up enough to the point that they want to know how to do things different. The program and courses are design to open up spaces in our learners minds for new ideas to fit and when we explore those new ideas in the next module or course many of those disconcerting questions or spaces are filled with the new ideas—only to have new questions that start to open up new spaces in their thinking.
In an age of standardized testing, of covering the content, of checklists masquerading as rubrics, and the need to regurgitate the right answer, getting learners to struggle with challenging questions is unfortunately a foreign concept. But learning has never fundamentally been about spouting off the right answer; it has always been about making meaningful connections and to make those meaningful connections you have to start with the questions. The type of questions that open up the spaces in our thinking and motivate us to want to know and to make those meaningful connections—only to have the whole process start over. This is learning—this is life.
The list of readings for this module was set up to be purposely overwhelming because you need to be aware of just how much information is available and, more importantly, you need to learn to glean what is valuable and what is not. If you have been following educational technology literature for many years, then you will not be overwhelmed with all this reading, because you will have read each of the reports when they were published. If you are new to the discipline, then you have a bit of catching up to do.
Ideally, you do want to read all the material, but given the time constraints of this course and the fact that you all have lives, I suggest that you look to your class colleagues to share the load of reading and devise a plan to distribute the reading load and to at least look at the following in detail.
At minimum, read the most recent years of the Horizon Report, and then read the Executive summaries, Technologies to Watch, Critical Challenges and Significant Trends sections of the earlier reports. Look for patterns and also critically assess how accurate the earlier reports have been. Compare the predictions and claims of the Horizon Reports with that data in the Internet Trends Report (at minimum, use the report summary). Read the most recent ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, and review the Key Findings of the previous two studies to identify patterns that will point to disruptive innovations and compare to the Horizon and Meeker reports.
Week 3
Multiple case studies are related resources are provided and linked through the Course BB site.
Week 4
Digital StoryTelling Cookbook (Accessible from Course BB site)
UK academics and professional and support staff inhabit “two parallel universes that have little point of contact”.
The Times Higher Education’s (THE) poll shows there is a deep gulf between academics and professional and support staff. Teaching and research are the primary source of job satisfaction for academics but most are not proud to represent their current university and more than half feel that their job has a negative impact on their health.
In contrast, most professional (administrators) and support staff are not only proud of their current university they belief it benefits them and would recommend their institution as a great place to work.
Having worked as a faculty member and administrator in a variety of Universities across North America I am not surprised to learn that the survey reveals:
Most university staff find their jobs rewarding, but most academics feel overworked, exploited and ignored by management
A majority of staff feel satisfied with pay, conditions and professional development opportunities
Half of academics are worried about redundancies related to metrics-based performance measures
Half of academics think that their institutions have compromised undergraduate entry standards as competition for students has increased, and half feel under pressure to award higher marks.
I am also not surprised by the UK data and believe that it could be generalized and applied to institutions across the North America as well. I also see the two parallel universes in higher education here in North America because I have lived it.
Why is there such a split?
While the following attempt to explain and reconcile this split is not formally supported by any hard research I will however use the data from the survey, rely on almost three decades of experience in academia and will build on Simon Sinek’s argument in his TED Talk “First why and then trust” to apply his ideas to this challenge.
Sinek argues that one of the most difficult challenges any organization will face is when the organization grows and becomes succesful the organizational “Why” or purpose separates from the organizational “What”. This “split” Sinek explains happens when an organization moves away from its original purpose and starts focusing on What they do without being grounded in Why they do it.
The data from the survey confirms that most faculty go into academic work because they truly enjoy the teaching, learning and research, so anything that interferes with this focus detracts from their experiences. Most educators firmly believe it is our responsibility to teach our learners to learn how to learn in order to prepare them for a world that is constantly changing. A very clear learner and learning centered Why or purpose.
Unfortunately, not all administrators have this same goal or purpose and this lack of a consistent Why or purpose is one of the primary causes for faulty distrust and the split. Too many administrators are not educators who are passionate about why we do what we do in education and are not learner and learning focused. Instead of the primary goal of serving our learners, too many administrators are focused first on the “What” on things like competition, measurement, costs, logistics and all too often change itself.
Sinek points out that when stress goes up and passion goes down, when the organization focuses more on what the competition is doing and less on what they are doing, when they start asking outsiders: “Who should we be?” and “How should we talk to you?” then you know that you have a split in your organizational Why and What and have strayed from your core values. The survey confirms that all these symptoms are present in the UK system and I from my experience would argue in our North American systems as well.
What can we do about it?
There is no denying, like so many other parts of our world, the educational landscape is being radically disrupted so there are significant changes happening with the way we learn, teach, and do research. These changes are inevitable but we do have the choice to be proactive or reactive. I have argued in the posts Sense of Urgency, Create it Now or React to it Later,Paradox of Being Proactive, and Pick Two–Innovation, Change or Stability that we need to be proactive and use disruptive innovation as a catalyst to enhance our learning environments. We have to start with the learner and the learning.
The key is to ensure that academics and administrators hold to the same Why or purpose. Not the vague or obtuse vision statement that most academic institutions have adopted as part of their business plans but the simple fact that it is our responsibility to teach our learners to learn how to learn in order to prepare them for a world that is constantly changing.
I believe we don’t have a choice but to bring together the two parallel universes we, unfortunately, see in our educational organizations. Fortunately, the steps for this unification are straight forward:
New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative have held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations. This process is formally called the Horizon Project, and the project’s Advisory Board considers the results of these dialogs and also looks at a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, and websites to generate a list of technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about and compiles the resulting information into an annual Horizon Report.
The project uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in each annual report, beginning with a survey of the work of other organizations and a review of the literature with an eye to spotting interesting emerging technologies. The Horizon Project expressly focuses on technologies not currently in widespread use in the Academy. In a typical year, 75 or more of these technologies may be identified for further investigation.
I have been reviewing the Horizon Reports since there were first published in 2002 and since 2006 have been following how mobile learning could be viewed as a disruptive innovation and a catalyst for change in higher education. By 2013 and 2014 mobile learning was only given a small mention and the reports focused more on what is possible with mobile learning than just the technology itself. By 2015 mobile learning is only mentioned in the context of BYOD and the emphasis is not on the technology itself but on the fact that we now have ubiquitous access to the worlds information in palm of our hand or in other mobile devices. There is no denying that mobile learning is now widely accepted and we are now exploring what we can do with the flexibility that mobility provides.
This shift away from the technology itself to a focus in innovation in learning is clearly revealed in the experts panels focus on:
advancing learning environments that are flexible and drive innovation.
The language of the following report headings confirms the focus of the 2015 report is clearly on learning innovation and learning environments:
blended learning
learning spaces
measuring learning
blending formal and informal learning
personalized learning
BYOD
flipped classroom
adaptive learning
rewards for teaching
This is a good thing! We are finally focusing on the fact that technology is just a tool that we use to enhance learning and that the best technology disappears and simple empowers us to do what we need to do.
The following infographic provides a summary of the six key trends, significant challenges and the important developments that make up the key sections of the report:
The two short term trends of blended learning and redesigning learning spaces are examples of sustaining innovation and really point to the fact that higher education is simply keeping up with the times in these two areas. Innovative educators have been doing/using blended learning for over twenty years and many of these early adopters would simply state this the the most logical way to use technology to enhance learning and create significant learning environments (see the CSLE section of this site for more details). Similarly many early adopters have been using OER and have been measuring learning for a very long time. We are just able to do this in a more sophisticated manor because of ease of access and big data.
Perhaps one area that deserves special mention is advancing cultures of change and innovation. We (academics) are finally understanding that the technology is the easy part of innovation and the change process and it is the people or more specifically the culture that is the challenging part to move forward. This is clearly a long term problem or challenge and I suggest that it should be moved to the “Wicked Challenges” section along side rewards for teaching.
The Horizon Reports are a very good starting point for a discussion on mobile learning because they discuss emerging technology trends in direct relation to the needs of the learner. The following is a list in reverse chronological order of Horizon Reports summaries starting from the most recent, which was released in February of 2014, back to 2006. The first Horizon Report was released in 2004 but doesn’t have have any reference to mobile technologies, nor does the 2005 report, so neither are included in the summaries.
The key to viewing these summaries is to notice a significant pattern within the reports that points to mobile technologies as the foundation for most advances in the use of technology in education. For example, in the 2010 Horizon report all technologies to watch, except for the Visual Data Analysis, are somewhat or totally dependent on mobile learning. By 2013 and 2014 mobile learning is a given and the reports begin to focus more on what is possible with mobile learning than just the technology itself. Mobile technology is changing the way that we live and this is also changing the way that we learn. The following summary content was extracted from each respective year of the Horizon Report.
Notice the patterns and the significance of mobile technologies and learning in the following:
Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education
The 2014 Horizon report deviated from the previous years by pulling out the key trends and putting them in a context of how they could potentially accelerate technology adoption. The time frame of fast, mid-range and long-range were added to provide an estimate on when these changes could be realized. This change in the report takes into account the reality that there are groups of technologies or interrelated technologies that play a role in the change. For example the integration of online, hybrid and collaborative learning will involve a wide assortment of technologies ranging from simple consumer based social networking tools to more sophisticated enterprise ready web and video conference tools all of which can be access via a mobile device.
Fast Trends: Driving changes in higher education over the next one to two years
Growing Ubiquity of Social Media
Integration of Online, Hybrid, and Collaborative Learning
Mid-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education within three to five years
Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment
Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators
Long-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education in five or more years
Another difference in the 2014 report from early reports is the inclusion of the Significant Challenges Impeding Higher Education Technology Adoption section. This section moves well beyond the immediate impact of technology and touches the societal and cultural challenges that higher education faces in moving into the 21st Century. A perpetual problem in this area is the Low Digital Fluency of Faculty. We know from the research and years of experience that this is NOT a technology issue–it is a people or a cultural problem. We also know that changing organizational culture is something that doesn’t happen from the outside but from the inside and that this type of change is very slow. While this is a solvable challenge one could argue that the time required for this to happen should move this challenge into the “Wicked Challenges” category.
Solvable Challenges: Those that we understand and know how to solve
Low Digital Fluency of Faculty
Relative Lack of Rewards for Teaching
Difficult Challenges: Those we understand but for which solutions are elusive
Competition from New Models of Education
Scaling Teaching Innovations
Wicked Challenges: Those that are complex to even define, much less address
Reflections from a Mobile Learning Perspective:
By 2014, the smartphone has reached a saturation level in North America and the practice of accessing information from ones mobile device is a given. The discussion of mobile learning in the report is minimal as is the notion of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) but the report refers to many activities like the flipped classroom, the quantified self, virtual assistants, social media and the integration of all online, hybrid and collaborative learning which are dependent on the ubiquitous use of mobile devices. The 2014 report points to the fact that we are moving well beyond the simple notion of accessing information on mobile devices and moving from consumption to creation. The the mid range trend “Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators” is just one example of how our mobile connected world is providing learners the opportunity to learn all the time and everywhere while they work on real world or authentic learning opportunities or as they create solutions to genuine problems.
Perhaps as higher education moves from the passive educational environment of main lecture points, rubrics, individual competition and standardized testing to an active educational environment of interactive learning, critical and analytical thinking, collaboration and meaningful projects we may then be able to address the “Wicked Challenge” of keeping education relevant.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
Assessment and accreditation are changing to validate life-long learning.
Both formal and informal learning experiences are becoming increasingly important as college graduates continue to face a highly competitive workforce.
Education entrepreneurship is booming.
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.
Increasingly, students want to use their own technology for learning.
Massively open online courses are proliferating.
Open is a key trend in future education and publication, specifically in terms of open content, open educational resources, massively open online courses, and open access.
Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and judge the quality of content and contributions.
There is an increasing interest in using data for personalizing the learning experience and for performance measures.
Significant Challenges
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Complexity is the new reality.
The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Dividing learning into fixed units such as credit hours limits innovation across the board.
Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
MOOCs have put a spotlight on residential campus education and its unique value; the challenge is to identify and articulate that value in the context of MOOCs and financial issues.
Massively open online courses are compelling, but universities must critically evaluate their use.
Most academics are not using new and compelling technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research.
Reflections from a Mobile Learning Perspective:
Mobile learning is finally an accepted practice by 2013 and it is mentioned only in context of Mobile Apps and Tablet computing which are on the year or less adoptions timeframe. Perhaps the most significant perspective from this years report is that we are starting to see the beginning of the disruption of higher education by mobile and online technologies. The challenge of getting students information has not only been solved but the move to digital media in every industry other than education is putting huge pressure on institutions and academics to adopt. Similarly, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have garnered national attention and are clearly putting pressure on higher education to consider signficant changes. Unfortunately most institutions are unable to move forward with effective ways to deal with new technologies. Perhaps the most damming indictment on higher education is that:
Most academics are not using new and compelling technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research.
This would explain why education entrepreneurship is booming as organizations outside of academia are looking to satisfy the need that is currently not met. The only thing saving higher education from a full disruption that we have seen in music, newspaper, travel and other industries is that institutions still maintain control over the parchment. However, with the emergence of badges and other forms of recognition and the sobering fact that we have created a class of overeducated and underemployed generation perhaps this control may soon be disrupted as well.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models.
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.
The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.
Significant Challenges
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
Critical Challenges:
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university.
Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
Mobility is a technology to watch in a year or less for the past three years. The reason we are still looking to mobility as a technology to watch over the next year, and that many of the key trends have not changed, is that unlike PC technology which has an eighteen to twenty-four month processor upgrade cycle and much slower upgrade cycle on the OS and related software, mobile devices are advancing much more rapidly. We have seen a new and significantly improved version of the iPhone each year since its release in 2007 and the release of the iPad in spring of 2010 changed everything (to quote Apple) and changed it again in the Spring of 2011 with the release of the iPad 2. When you factor in the equally explosive and rapid growth in Android phones and tablets the impact of mobility society is unlike anything else we have seen.
The publishers have also recognized that mobility and the cloud are making the deployment of ebooks a reality. Even though ebooks are still in their infancy and what we consider an ebook today will be a fraction of what will be available even two to three years down the road the impact of ebooks on education is starting to take effect. Partnerships between the major content management system (CMS) providers and publishers, the move of many academic journals to the electronic format, digitization of library resources, and the digitization of millions of books by Google is bringing us to the point where digital learning is finally a reality.
Because People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to we have become dependent upon cloud-based computing and our notions of IT support are decentralized. Our expectation for IT have shifted from anytime anywhere to all the time and everywhere. The demands of cloud and mobile based computing have put extreme pressures on traditional universities and only those institutions that are able to help their students, faculty and staff flourish in this new mobile computing environment will survive.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross- campus collaboration between departments.
Critical Challenges:
The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives – is changing.
New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
There is no denying that mobile computing is a technology to watch over the next year. Nor is there any doubt that electronic books will also be something to watch given the recent flurry of ereader releases over the past 6 months and most recently at the Consumer Electronics Show. We need to do more than just watch!. The Key Trends section of the report stresses the fact that people expect to work and learn wherever they are. Thanks to the Cloud and all that it offers we live in an “all the time everywhere” type of world but is academia doing enough to keep up with, or even address, these advances?
Mobile Phones were introduced as a technology to watch in two to three years back in the 2007 Horizon Report and again in the 2008 report but for the most part we are still at the early pilot stage in 2010 with these technologies. The examples of mobile technology implementation that we see in the 2010 report point to very small pockets of experimentation and other than ACU, very few institutions are experimenting with broad scaled adoption of mobile learning devices within their institutions. Given its nature, can academia hope to keep up with the rapid changes the move to mobile is pushing everyone to?–this is perhaps our biggest challenge.
Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.
Critical Challenges:
There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not.
Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
Other than Smart Objects all the technologies to watch have mobility at their foundation. Perhaps the most significant aspect to the 2009 Horizon report is the the Critical Challenges section that clearly identifies Higher Education’s need to adapt. The statement “students are different, but a lot of education material is not” sums up our challenge. Academia is expected to deliver services to a mobile student population and prepare them for the challenges of the 21st Century but many of our teaching and research practices are mired in the 20th, and some would argue the 19th, century.
Our scholarship of teaching and learning, research and assessment practices must all adapt to these changes if we wish to keep up with the pressures of globalization and increased mobility of our learners and ultimately society.
Significant shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning have created a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.
The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
The academy is faced with a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s tools.
Significant Trends:
The growing use of Web 2.0 and social net- working—combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization—is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship.
The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases.
Access to—and portability of—content is in- creasing as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced.
The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.
Seven Megatrands identified in the past 5 years:
The evolving approaches to communication between humans and machines;
the collective sharing and generation of knowledge;
computing in three dimensions;
connecting people via the network;
games as pedagogical platforms;
the shifting of content production to users;
and the evolution of a ubiquitous platform.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
2008 was a pivotal year for the development of Mobile Learning and the Seven Megatrands identified in the previous 5 years of the Horizon reporting confirmed that society had started moving in a direction that would radically change all our lives. Like the earlier and past years mobile technologies of some sort were identified as needing to be watched but it was very clear by late 2007 and early 2008 that we were living in a mobile world. The evolution of a ubiquitous platform was a mobile platform because people started to connect and communicate with each other at work and at play in ways that we had never seen before. The explosive growth of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites was happening because people could not connect to their networks all the time from anywhere.
The iPhone 3G was released in the summer of 2008 and ACU initiated its Connected project in the fall of 2008 and put an iPhone or iTouch into the hands of over 1000 freshman who entered the institution. When these freshmen received their devices there were less than 3000 apps in the app store but by the end of their first year (April 2009) there were over 35,000 apps. In hindsight (this is being written in January of 2010) the ACU gamble on the iPhone was accurate but to the leadership of ACU it wasn’t a gamble because all megatrands that the Horizon Reports as well as many other sources had been pointing to was the need to make this sort of move toward a broad scale adoption of mobile learning.
The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming
Key Trends:
The environment of higher education is changing rapidly
Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
Students’ views of what is and what is not tech- nology are increasingly different from those of faculty.
Critical Challenges:
Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers.
There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.
While progress is being made, issues of intellectual property and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done.
There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content.
The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
This is the second year that Mobile Phones were identified as a technology to watch and was also the year that social networking and user created content were identified as key indicators of change. This is also the year that the Horizon researchers started to explicitly challenge academia to keep up with these rapid changes. Key gaps were identified in the understanding of how to use tools for new media creation and more importantly how to use to those tools to make meaningful content. The Horizon group also started calling for leadership in the educational community to not only recognize these opportunities but challenged them to embrace these changes to move the academy forward.
Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.
Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.
Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.
Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope.
Critical Challenges:
Peer review and other academic processes, such as promotion and tenure reviews, increasingly do not reflect the ways scholarship actually is conducted.
Information literacy should not be considered a given, even among “net-gen” students.
Intellectual property concerns and the management of digital rights and assets continue to loom as largely unaddressed issues.
The typical approach of experimentally deploying new technologies on campuses does not include processes to quickly scale them up to broad usage when they work, and often creates its own obstacles to full deployment.
The phenomenon of technological “churn” is bringing new kinds of support challenges.
Reflections from the Mobile Learning Perspective:
2006 was the first year the the Horizon Reports identified “Phones in their Pockets” as a technology to watch and placed it in the two-three time frame. The seeds for mobile computing were also be sown with technologies like social networking, personal broadcasting and off on the far horizon augmented reality environments and devices. A key trend of mobile and personal technology as a platform for the delivery of all kinds of services was also significant.
References:
2014 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. 2013 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2014.
2013 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada, V., Freeman, A., and
Ludgate, H. 2013 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2013.
2012 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Cummins, M. 2012 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2012.
2011 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K., 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2011.
2010 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, Smith, Rachel S. and Stone, Sonja. 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2010.
2009 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2009.
2008 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2008 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2008.
2007 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2007 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2007.
2006 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F. and Smith, Rachel S. 2006 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2006.
