Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies | Jane Hart’s independent resource site about learning trends, technologies and tools via kwout
Note the new categories that Jane has added to her lists.
Creating Significant Learning Environments
Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies | Jane Hart’s independent resource site about learning trends, technologies and tools via kwout
Note the new categories that Jane has added to her lists.
Clayton R. Wright has released the 35rd edition of the conference list. The list below covers selected events focused primarily on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Educational Technology & Education Conferences #35, June to December 2016, Clayton R. Wright
The consider the following from Clayton:
Attached is the 35th version of the educational technology and education conference list. Since the previous list was published, 89 events were added to June 2016. This version of the list contains basic information regarding 1, 511 confirmed professional development opportunities. Additional events are noted, but dates and/or locations could not be confirmed.
If you re-distribute all or part of this list, please ensure that the contact information (Clayton R. Wright, crwr77[@]gmail.com) is provided as that is how I receive updates. If you do not want to receive future lists, please send me an e-mail. If you can supply the missing information for some of the events on the list, let me know.
Do exercise your own due diligence regarding unfamiliar conferences that you may want to attend or submit a paper to. Thus, CHECK the specific conference website not only for basic information (dates and locations may change as well as the URL), but to assure yourself that the conference is legitimate.
You may recall that I wrote a rationale for the list and provided some conference tips to conference organizers in an article I wrote for the Association for Learning Technology, UK. Since I wrote that article, I have visited thousands of conference websites and can assure you that these three simple suggestions from the article are still valid:
Help viewers of your conference website by placing the title, date, and location of the event in a prominent place on the first web page of your conference site. Throughout the world, different standards are used to represent dates. For example, does 06/07/16 represent June 7, 2016 or July 6, 2016, or does 06/07/11 represent November 7, 2006 or perhaps June 7, 2011? Avoid confusion by spelling out the month and indicating the year in four digits. Remember, if this information is provided in a graphical form or is an overlay to a photograph, this essential information also needs to be placed in the text below the graphic or photo so that text-to-voice readers and on-line translators can interpret the data. Perhaps for stylistic reasons, numbers are used to represent dates, months, and years, but it can be confusing to the viewer. Listing only the month and day without listing the year is also confusing as a viewer never knows whether he or she is looking at the most recent web page – once an event has passed, not all web-pages disappear into the virtual ether.
Provide an explanation of all abbreviations used, including the name of your organization or association. People want to know who is organizing or sponsoring the conference so that they can decide whether the conference is aimed at them. Conference organizers often make the assumption that everyone knows the meaning of the acronym for their organization or conference. But if you are not a member of the organization or didn’t attend the previous event, what does the acronym mean? Not all organizations provide an explanation of their acronym – not even on their home page in tiny print at the bottom of the page! And, these organizations or conference organizers are less likely to make it easy for you to contact them by e-mail. I wonder how many potential conference attendees don’t make an effort to learn more about a conference because the organizers don’t provide enough information upfront and/or a way to contact them for additional information.
Link last year’s conference site to the new one. When an event is hosted by a different institution or organization each year, it is understandable that the new hosts would want to place the conference website on their institutional servers. But, there needs to be a link from the old site (URL) to the new site – how else will people who attended the previous year’s event find information about the future event?
Do share the list with your colleagues as they may find an event that aligns with their interests and professional growth. Please include 2017 events as your colleagues may be looking for a professional development event that is not held in 2016 as it is a biennial event. You could send them the attachment or direct them to Stephen Downes’ website, http://www.downes.ca/post/65309
May your day be a productive and rewarding one!
Clayton
P.S. You may want to change the font for the entire document. If so, press the “control key” (Ctrl) and the letter “A”. The entire document will be highlighted. Then, select the font and point size you prefer from the drop-down menu in Word. You may also need to change the footers separately by selecting “Insert” from the ribbon at the top of Word, then “Footer”, then “Edit footer” at the bottom of the drop-down menu. Next, press the “control key” (Ctrl) and the letter “A” so that all the items in the footer are highlighted. Finally, select the font and point size you prefer. crw
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:
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
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
Key Trends Accelerating Higher Education Technology Adoption
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
Mid-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education within three to five years
Long-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education in five or more years
Significant Challenges Impeding Higher Education Technology Adoption
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
Difficult Challenges: Those we understand but for which solutions are elusive
Wicked Challenges: Those that are complex to even define, much less address
Source: 2014 Horizon Report
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.
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
Key Trends
Significant Challenges
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.
Source: 2013 Horizon Report: Higher Ed Edition
Horizon Report 2012 Highlights
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
Key Trends
Significant Challenges
Source: Horizon Report 2012
Technologies to Watch:
Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less
Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-adoption: four to five Years
Key Trends:
Critical Challenges:
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.
Source: Horizon Report 2011
Technologies to Watch:
Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less
Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-adoption: four to five Years
Key Trends:
Critical Challenges:
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.
Technologies to Watch:
Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less
Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-adoption: four to five Years
Key Trends:
Critical Challenges:
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.
Technologies to Watch:
Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less
Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-adoption: four to five Years
Critical Challenges:
Significant Trends:
Seven Megatrands identified in the past 5 years:
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.
Time-to-adoption: one Year or Less
Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-adoption: four to five Years
Key Trends:
Critical Challenges:
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.
Technologies to Watch:
Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Key Trends:
Critical 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.
Image credit: http://www.ubertas.co.uk/blog/5-it-predictions-you-need-to-know-about
Tis the start of the season for predictions. At the recent EDUCAUSE conference in Indianapolis in October a panel of leaders came up with a list of 10 IT issues that will be important to address in 2016. The following is a comparisons of the 2016 list with 2015 as one can see many of the issues are despite having different formal labels are very similar:
2015 Optimizing technology in teaching and learning and 2016 Optimizing educational technology
2015 | 2016 |
1. Evolving staffing models | 1. Information security |
2. Optimizing technology in teaching and learning | 2. Optimizing educational technology |
3. Funding IT strategically | 3. Student success technologies |
4. Improving student outcomes | 4. IT workforce |
5. Demonstrating IT’s value | 5. Institutional data management |
6. Increasing capacity for change | 6. IT funding models |
7. Providing user support | 7. Business intelligence and analytics |
8. Developing security policies for the institution | 8. Enterprise application integrations |
9. Developing enterprise IT architecture | 9. IT organizational development |
10. Balancing information security and openness | 10. E-learning and online education |
Elearning has been a top priority on many lists since the late 1990 so perhaps this year Educational IT will finally get this priority sorted out.