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Is the Post-PC Age a Catalyst for the Start of the Digital Information Age?

Dwayne Harapnuik — January 17, 2012 — 1 Comment

In the Business Insider post Proof that the PC is dying a slow painful death Steve Kovach makes the argument that PC sales are flat-lining and are on the start of a decline. The chart does show a flattening or even a decline in PC sales and when one factors in the explosive growth of the iPhone, iPad and Android it is clear we are seeing a disruptive innovation begin to overtake an established technology. On June 1, 2010 at the All Things Digital Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Steve Jobs made the claim we are living in Post PC era. When asked if tablet will eventually replace the laptop, Jobs replied:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.

PCs are going to be like trucks

They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people.”

This transformation is going to make some people uneasy…because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable.

A great deal has been written about the post-PC era since Jobs interview in 2010. Many people agree with Jobs and as many disagree. Regardless, the sales data regarding the PC does point to the flattening and decline and does show Tablets and other mobile devices in a disruptive growth pattern–so something is happening. In a Forbes article The Post-PC Era Starts To Make Sense, Todd Hixon a long time technology innovator, leader and investor who also writes about entrepreneurs and how they can help reboot complex industries suggests that the post-PC world starts to make sense if we look at how we now use mobile devices to manage our lives. Hixon suggests the post-PC era means three things:

1. Your life is in your Device.

2. Your media and your information are always there, wherever there is.

3. Boundaries between work, home, and friends vanish.

We now have near ubiquitous access to all the world’s information through our Device–access to information all the time everywhere. From an educational perspective the challenge of getting content to our learners can now be solved. I have been cautious to state that we have “near ubiquitous access” because the devices that we currently use are very immature as are the information ecosystems that are emerging. But with the exponential growth of the Internet and now mobile devices the technology piece of the move into the information age can finally be realized.

Technology is the easy part of this transition and we will see it evolve over the next few years.. Moving our society and societal structures is still our biggest challenge. We have spent hundreds of years and immeasurable resources on building our education systems to bring people to the information. It started with the building of libraries and then building of schools and universities around those libraries. Teachers and professors have grown into the information or content experts within our system and students traditionally go to the location of the information to get access to the information and hopefully to learn. Our educational system has focused primarily on the acquisition, management and the delivery of information. In an era when information was scarce or difficult to access this model worked very well. Accessing information is no longer a challenge–our new challenge is assessing information.

Consider the following:

When I searched the term post-PC era in 0.19 seconds I received 42,200,000 results from Google. I knew that I was looking for the interview with Steve Jobs so I was able to quickly move through the results and find what I was looking for. My ability to use Google search effectively and accurately was dependent on my prior knowledge and understanding of the information that I was looking for. Because I am well read and have an extensive background in this subject I was able to quickly and easily discern what was valuable information and what was not. But if one didn’t have the ability to assess what information was valuable and had to look at all the 42 million results it would take a person over 60 years to look at all the results if they spent just 5 seconds on each and reading for 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is more information than a person would have encountered in an entire career 50 years ago and more information that people would have encountered in a lifetime just a few hundred years ago. My friend and colleague, Bill Rankin the Director of Educational Innovation at Abilene Christian University offers the following train of thought regarding the role of educators in this age of digital information:

If I imagine my primary job as a teacher is to serve information, am I helping solve the current informational problem or make it worse?

And given the vast complexity of the informational network, if I insist on my centrality, does that establish or harm my credibility as a teacher?

If assessing information – and the wisdom & experience that requires – is the central challenge of the current informational age, are teachers more or less necessary?

I would argue that teachers, professors and all educators are more important than ever before. Learners need their expertise to help them to learn how to assess the overwhelming flow of information. We are well into the Digital Information Age and our learners need help navigating and assessing the flood of information that they have access to in the palms of their hands. I don’t see this as a challenge but as an opportunity to help prepare our learner for a future that is uncertain. We need to equip our learners with the tools and ability to discern what information is accurate and valuable and to ultimately solve problems that, presently, don’t even exist. What an opportunity!

In mLearning Disruptive innovation, PC, post-PC era, tablets

Innovation in Education – A Return to Teaching & Learning

Dwayne Harapnuik — November 1, 2011 — 4 Comments

http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2011/10/20/where-will-innovation-begin/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Next – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

Reviewing Jeff Selingo’s article Where will Innovation Begin in the Chronicle of Higher Education was the culminating event for the past two weeks of travel, meetings, presentations and conference attendance. Selingo points to the creation of the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology as an example of Educational innovation because the four year university focuses first on the learning needs of its students, has no departments, offers interdisciplinary instruction, has direct involvement from the corporate community, requires students to participate in internships and doesn’t require students to come to class to learn. While this collection of characteristics may sound incredibly innovative to those who are only familiar with Tier 1 research universities, for those in the academic community who have been involved in liberal arts instruction everything other than the lack of classrooms is generally the norm. When we consider focusing on learning, a well rounded foundation of instruction from an interdisciplinary perspective, and real world learning experiences as innovative is there any wonder that there is a looming crisis in Education in the US and in many other countries that follow the US model. Most social constructivists (myself included) would view the type of learning environment that Harrisburg University has created not as innovative but simply effective if one expects to enable students to think critically and analytically and prepare them learn how to learn in any environment. This focus on, what I would like to refer to as, the fundamentals of effective teaching and learning was also central to all of my activities over the past several weeks.

The four days that I recently spent at EDUCAUSE 2011 in Philadelphia confirmed that even the technology leaders in Higher Education are recognizing that technological innovations are often wasted on Higher Education if they are done outside of a foundation of teaching and learning. EDUCAUSE is the annual conference of Educational Technology and Academic leaders who come together to share their insight on how technology can be used to improve Higher Education. I co-presented in a session titled, Assessing for Deeper Learning, with my colleague from Abilene Christian University as well as colleagues from Wake Forest University, Indiana University at Purdue and from the SimSchool. We all shared our progress in our NGLC/Gates Foundation funded research. In this session we discussed how teaching simulation (SimSchool) can be used to prepare future teachers, how a biology textbook (BioBook) doesn’t have to be a tradition book but can be collection of online resources, media and interactive technologies that can be used to engage learners, how a Peer instruction model (CPLTL) can be moved online using Adobe Connect Pro and finally how mobility can be used to enhance inquiry-based learning (MEIBL). The central focus of all this research was how the learning environment could be enhanced using technology–the emphasis was the learning NOT the technology. In all these cases the technology essentially “went away” and simply enabled the students to learn more effectively. Many of the concurrent and keynote sessions that I attended had this same focus of technology enhancing and enabling learning or providing a level of engagement that was otherwise not attainable.

In addition to the focus on teaching and learning the predominant focus at EDUCAUSE 2011 was mobility. This theme was also the predominate focus at EDUCAUE in 2010 but the difference between the two years is that compared to 2010 there were NO questions that mobility is a given and there is NO denying that this is not just a passing trend but a reality that is unleashing the true connective power of the Internet. The explosive growth of IOS and Android devices means that most people are carrying or have immediate access to some sort of a device that will connect them to the Internet. While this was initially a consumer growth, the adoption of iPads and all other forms of mobile technology in the corporate world as well as education indicate that this is a global trend that is changing the way we learn, work and play. A PEW presentation on the trends in mobile learning revealed 2/3 of all people access the internet via a wireless connection. The research revealed by the PEW foundation also revealed that people in the lowest socio-economic categories primary access to the internet was through a mobile phone or other mobile device. (Watch the full PEW foundation presentation)

This use of mobile technology also means that we are moving away from the push economy where corporations, governments and academia decide what everyone will want or need and attempt to fill that need without fully exploring the actual needs of the constituent. Mobility creates a much higher degree of engagement and interactivity and is a key factor in the emerging pull economy which shifts the focus to understanding what is needed first and then coordinating or pulling together resources as they are needed to fill the need or want. The key change is that there is a more significant focus on the end user. From an educational perspective this means that the students needs are more closely examined and resources are then utilized as they are needed-which results in a much more learner centric perspective.

This emphasis on the learner and the pulling together of diverse resources was a sentiment that was presented repeatedly at the National Vice-Presidents’ Academic Council (NATVAC) conference I attended a week before EDUCAUSE. In a presentation to our group, Chad Gaffied the President of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council stated:

An international consensus is now emerging around a people-centered model of innovation for successful change in businesses, government, and communities. In contrast to the linear lab-to-market approach of the 20th century, the new model puts people—ideas and behaviour—at the centre of an expanded and dynamic innovation picture that better portrays the complex interplay of creativity, technology and society. ―NATVAC, October 2011

Gaffied also pointed out that some of the most innovative corporations are looking for graduates who have the ability to work in an interdisciplinary setting and are able to pull together and condense information from a variety of perspectives. For example, of the 6000 people Google will be hiring in the next year more than 5000 will come from the Humanities and Social Science. Similarly, OpenText and Canadian technology company will be looking to hire 4000 university graduates in the next year and they expect to take more than 3000 from the Humanities and Social Sciences. The global marketplace is extremely diverse and requires leaders who are able to work within and through that diversity to solve problems in flexible and unique ways. It appears that while we still need high specialized graduates we need even more generalists who are able to embrace a future that we are unable to predict.

This same message, that we need many more broadly prepared graduates, was also shared by Paul Davidson the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada at NATVAC. Davidson shared how both the Federal and Provincial governments are starting to question the value of the past 15 years of intensive research funding and how they believe a greater emphasis must be placed on teaching and learning. He also referred to the newly released book, Academic Reform: Policy Options for Improving the Quality and Cost-effectiveness of Undergraduate Education in Ontario that is highly critical of the current focus on research and strongly recommends a greater emphasis on undergraduate instruction and a much greater focus on teaching and learning.

Over the past few weeks this same message “higher education must have to adopt a greater emphasis on teaching and learning and our graduates must have a more diverse interdisciplinary foundation” keeps on coming across loud and clear from a variety of sources. What the critics and pundits are asking for is a return to a more traditional Liberal Arts education which is the mainstay of institutions like Concordia University College of Alberta. Concordia’s challenge is not changing our curriculum and focus to meet these newly identified needs–our challenge is that the consumer needs to be educated as to the value of the education that our institution provides. Our innovation has to come from a unique and vibrant marketing message that promotes the exceptional educational foundation that students will receive at Concordia without denigrating other institutions who have a much more significant focus on research.

We also face challenge of convincing our potential students that what is good for them is really what they need. Unfortunately, we all know the challenge of getting enough fruit and vegetable into our diet…just because it is good for you doesn’t mean you will want it. Richard Arum in his book, Academically Adrift, argues the higher education consumer really isn’t interested in teaching and learning. His research shows that just under 60% of students who finish a four year degree in US institutions scored no better on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) which test critical thinking and problem solving skills than when they first started university. The remedy for this problem is to have students read and write more which can be achieved by a greater emphasis on teaching and learning. Unfortunately, Arum doesn’t see this happening any time soon and points to research that shows that potential students are more interested in campus life, the sports teams, recreational activities and an institutions research reputation rather than on how well an institution can prepare them to think and to learn. Similarly, student’s parents are more concerned about return on investment (ROI) than on how well their children will learn how to learn. They want the most significant and prestigious degree for their children in the least amount of time. Arum is doubtful that Higher Education will improve in the US because institutions will continue to give their consumer what they want.

While the challenges for Higher Education in the Canada and the US are significant they are not insurmountable. Ironically the highly funded and highly acclaimed research institutions will have the hardest adjustment because they have more the farthest away from a foundation of teaching and learning. In contrast, Institutions like Concordia that have always had a focus on teaching and learning can take a leadership role in promoting a learning environment that prepares students to work in an interdisciplinary setting where they will be required to pull together and condense information from a variety of perspectives.

In Learning liberal arts, teaching and leanring

Horizon Report and Mobile Learning

Dwayne Harapnuik — September 26, 2011 — Leave a comment

This is an update of the original post that only went as far as Horizon 2010 ACU Connected blog:

Since 2002, the 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.

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 January of 2011, 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. 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:

Horizon Report 2011

Technologies to Watch:

Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less

Electronic Books
Mobiles

Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years

Augmented Reality
Game-based Learning

Time-to-adoption: four to five Years

Gesture-Based Computing
Learning Analytic

Key Trends:

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.

Horizon Report 2010

Technologies to Watch:

Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less

Mobile Computing
Open Content

Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years

Electronic Books
Simple Augmented Reality

Time-to-adoption: four to five Years

Gesture-Based Computing
Visual Data Analysis

Key Trends:

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.

Horizon Report 2009

Technologies to Watch:

Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less

Mobiles
Cloud Computing

Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years

Geo-Everything
The Personal Web

Time-to-adoption: four to five Years

Semantic-Aware Applications
Smart Objects

Key Trends:

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.

Horizon Report 2008

Technologies to Watch:

Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less

Grassroots Video
Collaboration Web

Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years

Mobile Broadband
Data Mashups

Time-to-adoption: four to five Years

Collective Intelligence
Social Operating Systems

Critical Challenges:

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.

Horizon Report 2007

Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less

User-Created Content
Social Networking

Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years

Mobile Phones
Virtual Worlds

Time-to-adoption: four to five Years

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.

Horizon Report 2006

Technologies to Watch:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

Social Computing
Personal Broadcasting

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

The Phones in Their Pockets
Educational Gaming

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

Augmented Reality and Enhanced Visualization
Context-Aware Environments and Devices

Key Trends:

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:

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.

In Horizon Reports, mLearning 21st century learning, Educational Technology, Learning, mobile, mobile learning

CSLE

Dwayne Harapnuik — May 10, 2010 — 3 Comments

Creating Significant Learning Environments (CSLE) – An integrated approach to creating flexible, engaging and effective learning environments.

We design information systems, smart buildings, ecological friendly communities, learning spaces and so many aspects of our society but we, unfortunately, do not apply this holistic approach to designing learning environments. Apple has always designed excellent hardware but with their iPhone, iPad and the whole IOS ecosystem they have gone a step further and have designed a mobile communication or networking environment that just works. If we apply a similar purposeful design to our learning environments we also can create a significant learning environment that just works.

Whether we are purposeful in its design or we just allow the circumstances to dictate its development, educators at all levels are providing some form of learning environment. Rather than allow the environment to come together on its own and respond reactively to the learning dynamics that arise I suggest that educators become proactive and create significant learning environments. If we start with a student-centered approach and purposefully assemble all the key components of effective learning into a significant learning environment we can help our students to learn how to learn and grow into the people we all hope they will become.

The following mandala highlights the components that we need to consider when we are creating significant learning environments:

Creating Significant Learning Environment

Origin and Development

The development of the Creating Significant Learning Environments (CSLE) summer institute in the summer of 2010 was a response to Abilene Christian University’s (ACU) 21st Century Vision of educating global leaders who think critically, globally and missionally. To satisfy this vision ACU faculty and staff were required to create courses based on modern instructional design principles that incorporate significant, active and collaborative learning.

Elements of Dee Finks Creating Significant Learning Experiences were combined with the foundations of Inquisitivism and years of practical experience in developing significant learning environments to result in an approach that enabled faculty to design and build a significant learning environment that facilitated engaging, active and authentic student-centered learning.

Several 5 day workshop were run from May to December of 2010 resulting in the development or redevelopment of over 30 courses.

CSLE uses Finks taxonomy and backward design principles but moves well beyond Finks focus on the classroom experience to incorporates the following factors that make up the whole learning environment:

Student centred
Teaching roles – Presenter, Facilitator, Coach, Mentor
Ubiquitous Access & Social Networking
Instructional delivery formats – face2face, technology enhanced, blended, online
Instructional Design
Assessment & Evaluation
Academic Quality & Standards
Support & Infrastructure

CSLE evolves and the CSLE workshop are re-developed after an observation of an informal learning environment in 2012

An observation of my boys experience on a 2012 trip to Whistler and a visit to the Whistler Air Dome, commonly referred to as the foampit, reaffirmed the importance and power of formal and informal learning environments and caused me to take a more significant stand on the role that the environment and circumstances play in learning. I have been arguing since the mid 90’s that learning is dependent upon the creation of an effective learning environment and the immersion of the learner in that environment. A learning environment can be a classroom, an online course or anywhere for that matter where learning can take place. I have also argued that learning is the responsibility of the learner and that teachers are not able to make a student learn–the best that teachers can do is develop or establish the environment, immerse the student in that environment and then motivate and inspire the learner to take ownership of their learning. When learning takes place a teacher is really just the facilitator who helps the learner navigate the learning environment and process.

You can read about the informal learning environment that motivated me to formalize the CSLE approach and revise my workshops in the Significant Learning Environments post.

In 2013 and 2014 several CSLE two or four-day workshops have been conducted for the general faculty, School of Health Science and the School of Business faculty at British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). Because the CSLE approach is holistic it can incorporates a variety of Instructional Design approaches and can, therefore, be modified to suit a curriculum development process, general instruction and most recently a focus on blended and online learning.

Future of CSLE

Work on formalizing CSLE into an “official” approach has begun. I have presented the approach at several conferences, workshops and in seminars and will be working on a CSLE white paper and peer review publication. I will also be using the approach in EDLD 5313 Creating Significant Learning Environments which is a Masters level course I will be teaching as part of Lamar University’s MEd. in Digital Learning and Leadership.

Finally, I will continue to write about CSLE in my blog. You can view several previous posts that address components or aspects of the CSLE approach:

Links to the all the components of the CSLE+COVA framework:

Change in Focus
Why CSLE+COVA
CSLE
COVA
CSLE+COVA vs Traditional
Digital Learning & Leading
Research

Revised July 14, 2018