Technique has a way of forcing standardization on systems, minimizing innovation in the process. We need technique at some levels, but with rapid change, it (technique) becomes a hindrance. Technique is about duplication and scale. Innovation is about novel, serendipitous connections. I gave a talk at University of Queensland on [...]
Simple, single functionality tools are great for collaboration. I’ve been involved in several implementations of larger-scale systems for collaboration (like Sharepoint). Adoption is generally slow, unless the tool is marketed heavily in the organization and integrated into workflow. In contrast, simple tools like wikis, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and social networking [...]
Since July, Dave Cormier and I have been hosting a monthly session on Social Media: Trends and Implications. The recordings for all sessions, including December’s, are available here. We are continuing the series in 2010 and will provide more information on dates soon. It has been one of [...]
I’ve been waiting for this report for awhile (the last report was from 2003, produced by UC Berkely) How Much Information – now produced by UC San Diego:
[C]omputers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being [...]
This is an important point – How to Get the Right Information to Improve Performance: “Some organizations undercut their ability to discover their way to greatness by confusing the information needed to see problems with the information needed to solve them. So, they overburden staff with establishing the former [...]
If you want to give a conference keynote – especially in education – the template used by many speakers is “look, here is a picture of the classroom. It hasn’t changed in 100 years”. This is then followed with a discussion that branches into either: “It’s no longer about scarcity” [...]
Earlier this week, I was in New Zealand (first in Auckland for the ASCILITE conference, then for a few talks at University of Waikato). In Auckland, I was involved in a panel on Cascading Change. Seb Fiedler shares his views of academic engagement:
For me this is not a [...]
Social media is now a stratospherically ambiguous term. I mean, really, what does it mean? Apparently, everything is social media – a blog, a youtube video, a mobile phone. What isn’t social media?? This lack of clarity is always a good indication that the hype cycle is feeding itself.
With [...]
The physical and virtual worlds are blurring. The internet of things (physical networks objects) moves in this direction. However, Google’s announcement today of Goggles – the worst-named product in their arsenal – is quite interesting. Basically: take a picture and Google returns search results. Soon we’ll search the physical [...]
DARPA ran a Red Balloon challenge last week to explore “the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems”. DARPA positioned 10 red weather balloons in different locations around the US. The first group that [...]
I’ve paid for all of the music on my laptop. And images (through istockphoto). I don’t use P2P services for sharing music or movies – as I type, I’m downloading Important Things with Demetri Martin off iTunes. I don’t mind paying for content if I find value in it. So [...]
My presentation in Barcelona – Socializing Open Learning – is available as an elluminate recording. Slides are available here.
Stephen Downes’ presentation on Role of Open Educational Resources is also available.
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has posted a short commentary on most of the presentations during [...]
Wall Street Journal (motto: we’ve never met a URL we can’t complicate) looks at the trend for More Scientists Treat Experiments as a Team Sport. I don’t think team is the right term. If you’ve spent time in higher education, you’re likely aware that the only team that exists [...]
University of Oslo has posted a video recording of my talk last week on Directions in Education and Learning
[...]If you’d like to get up to speed fairly quickly with the state of Stephen Downes’ thinking on education, technology, and learning, have a listen to his presentation on New Tools for Personal Learning – slides and audio are available. I’m surprised at the resiliency of concepts (complexity, ecology, [...]
HASTAC is running a series of forums related to education/media/society. A current topic – Grading 2.0: Evaluation in the Digital Age – is being actively discussed. The introduction to the discussion states:
As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators [...]
During our LearnTrends conference last week, I experimented with the Cormier Live Slides method. Dave would say I went a bit soft – I had an established structure for the slides, instead of free flowing. However, it did generate a fair bit of discussion and contributions from the audience. [...]
I’ve been reading a combination of Tocqueville and the Federalist papers over the last few weeks. I’m fully convinced that these two documents need to be recast in terms of the web. While I’m a huge fan of openness, personal choice, democracy, and rights of individuals, a brief [...]
Our ability to do things with technology far exceeds our ability to understand implications. Consider the brain chip: “Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists today that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to surf the Internet, manipulate documents, and much more”.
This got me thinking about how far [...]
Lots of reaction to Google’s Chrome OS (web operating system, in theory, a means to do away with Windows, Mac, Linux). Running Chrome OS at this stage is no easy task (see steps required here) – it’ll be a while before it will be available for most users. And, [...]
Salesforce, like many other companies, is jumping onto the enterprise social media bandwagon with the soon-to-be-released Chatter. Basically, Chatter introduces some of the functionality found in Facebook and Twitter into a secure enterprise system. Reactions vary (have a look at the comments on the article), including: “everyone’s on Facebook [...]
Controversy aside, Modern Warfare 2 is an interesting “sign of the times”. In its first week of release, the game generated $550 million (in UK and North America). What other media even comes close? What’s a big weekend for a new movie release? $50-60 million? I’ve been looking for [...]
After three days of 5+ hours work of presentations, we’ve (Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and I) wrapped up our third annual LearnTrends conference. Scott Skibell of Skillcasting has completed and posted recordings of the event. Topics include: convergence, mobile learning, design, social learning, managing information, microlearning, enterprise 2.0, [...]
Clayton Wright publishes as complete a listing of educational technology conferences as you are likely to find anywhere. Tony Karrer has posted the list on his site, so I’ll just link to it…
Thanks Clayton – an outstanding resource!
I’m in Oslo. I have a total of four face-to-face presentations and three online presentations to deliver this week. We’re also running the LearnTrends conference online. So it’s a bit hectic.
I’ve posted two presentations on slideshare:
Learning in 2020
Educational Trends and Social Networks
Reminder, next week, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and I (with support from many others!) are running LearnTrends 2009. An outstanding list of presenters and provocative topics. Free to join.
[...]Moving Away from Social Media to Business Focus – a confused and rambling post, but the underlying point – moving beyond the hype and buzzwords and recognizing impact of what is commonly called social media – is something most organizations are now focusing on.
In a post on my connectivism site, I argue that the future of learning will be in social networking services, not in learning management systems (an assertion not everyone agrees with – see the comments in the post). Additional commentary on Jane Hart’s post as well…and Moodle [...]
Readers of this blog (or newsletter) are likely aware that I recently made a transition from University of Manitoba to Athabasca University. With the joys of geographical moves (I’m now located in Edmonton), life is a bit chaotic.
I’ll write more on this in the future, but I’m now with [...]
Like the rest of society, universities and colleges are reacting to social networking technology – Networking U
The good news is, universities over the past decade have been adapting to meet students at the level of technology they’ve come to accept. That means not only deploying state-of-the-art hardware and software, [...]
The one dominant effect of the web is the externalization or giving-shape to aspects of our daily lives that used to vaporize. For example, the ever prominent water cooler provided a space to converse. But, once the conversation was done, it vaporized. With today’s social web and the increased data [...]
Common Craft explains Cloud Computing in Plain English. It’s a (very) broad overview of cloud computing, explaining it from the perspective of a business owner. But it seems unsatisfying and too simplistic. Most internet users have experienced some aspect of “the cloud” (in some ways, the cloud is a [...]
I’m an advocate for technology use for learning, teaching, and interacting. Not quite at a transhumanist level, but still an advocate. Sometimes, I’m enthralled with the limitless potential of the web. Or with the tremendous opportunities that exist when people are able to connect without boundaries. Or the “brave new [...]
Of course, the web is not social. Just like technology isn’t social. Or media isn’t social. We use these resources for social means, but that’s a function of use, not of the characteristics inherent in the web or media. We compress “social uses of the web” to social web for [...]
A good name is often as good as (or better than) a good idea. The age of the informavore displays both provocative thinking and a memorable term. The video (about 30 min) is a loosely connected flow of thoughts on the impact of the web on humanity, information abundance, [...]
IRRODL just released a special issue on Openness and the Future of Education. Future of education is not an explicit focus in the articles, but can be anticipated as a result of the focus of the articles. Topics include: openess and textbooks, peer-to-peer learning, impact of openness, disaggregated future [...]
Meaning is found in associations. It’s simple concept, but has substantial implications. To get an accurate picture of “something”, context first needs to be understood. This short video – can’t squeeze knowledge from a pixel – summarizes this point. An email address, for example, means very little unless we [...]
I haven’t had the privilege of visiting Saudi Arabia. As a result, I particularly appreciated reading Tony Bates’ experiences of leading a series of workshops in his post: a personal view of e-learning. The limited adoption of technology in universities isn’t that unusual from my experience. A growing number [...]
Technology use is routinely equated with social isolation. We are often told (and in turn tell our youth) to “log out and interact with the real world”. Barry Wellman – with his Netville research – was the first researcher that I’m aware of who questioned the tech use=isolation viewpoint. [...]
I posted this last month, but by way of a quick reminder: Call for Chapters: Personal Learning Environments/Networks. Deadline for a two-page abstract is November 15, 2009.
[...]Nielsen’s research states that 18% of time spent online is spent on social networking sites and services. At first glance, this seems a bit high – especially considering the figure is 3x’s greater than last year. However, if accurate, it provides strong support to the reports claim that “this [...]
Google just announced Social Search. The services helps you “to find publicly available content from your social circle”. Google extracts information on your social circle from three sources: Google Reader subscriptions, Google Profiles, and Google chat (GMail). They use the term “surfacing” connections to describe not only adding your [...]
Interesting thoughts from Eric Schmidt – CEO, Google – on the web in five years. It’s interesting to note that we are seeing increased consolidation of ideas and concepts around the future of technology and the web. Schmidt’s comments don’t provide anything new. It’s a laundry list of topics [...]
By now, I think the view of innate generational differences in technology use has been sufficiently debunked (see Mark Bullen’s Netgenskeptic site). NY Times highlights the appeal of technology among the elderly: “Some of the highest growth rates in broadband use are happening among the elderly. The Pew [...]
I’ve been following Indexed – a site that uses simple visuals to communicate complex relationships and interactions. For example: the relationship between information and confusion. The simplicity of the approach somewhat hides the impact. We live life in flows, but we are remembered by artifacts. A blog post, a [...]
When change happens in a networked environment, it’s rapid. We’ve seen it in the financial markets, music industry, TV (YouTube), and, perhaps at it’s most pronounced, the newspaper industry. For example, consider these results from major publications in the US. Only one had increased circulation – others had enormous [...]
At Open Education in Vancouver in August, Gardner Campbell argued that cPanel could be used as an LMS. If you’re not familiar with cPanel, it’s a fairly accessible interface (similar to Ensim) for managing websites on a server. Adding a wiki, a forum, a blog, or a chat room only [...]
Twitter has been criticized for its lack of relevance to younger internet users (teens). Some progress is being made on that front, according to a new Pew report. In terms of numbers, 1 in 5 internet users utilize Twitter (or similar status updating) service. From a quick read of [...]
In preparation for Networked Learning 2010, conference organizers have arranged several “hot seat” sessions. A hot seat is basically a week long (mostly asynchronous) discussion on a particular theme/topic. Starting Oct 26, Stephen Downes and I are hosting a discussion on the impact of learning on networked technologies. [...]
Mary Meeker delivered a presentation to Web 2.0 conference recently looking at the state of the economy and the Internet (powerpoint/pdf slides). From slide 28, a quick look back over the last few years:
2004 – China Internet – Opportunity is Immense 2005 – Broadband – Becoming Pervasive, Driving [...]
