Facebook, Chisimba, and the Personal Learning Environment
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856 days ago
Today on the Chisimba developer mailing list, one of the developers in Kenya asked about creating a Facebook application. Another replied and suggested that the question was off the topic.
This got me thinking about Education 3.0, and the paper i gave in Tokyo last year, where I presented a mockup of a Facebook application as an example of how social networking technologies could be used to make personal learning environments. This presentation is shown below, and I think it is worth Chisimba developers having a look at it.
We already have Brent working on the Personal Learning Desktop in XUL for the IADP project, so the notion of Personal Learning Envirnoment is not outside the scope of our current activities. It is also an area that we are exploring with some of the Sakai people.
There is lots of Chisimba functionality that could become a Facebook application, not just for PLE but for any use to which Chsisimba is put. It would be good to have that capability in the framework, perhaps even a means to generate Facebook applications from an API. In particular, I think that while Facebook is widely used, it can be a connector of people and courses, or people and X where X is any aspect of Chisimba. The wonderful API created by Paul Scott makes this feasible and relatively easy.
So I would say if someone wants to work on Facebook and Chisimba integration, then it would be AWESOME! Step one would be figuring out how to get an application into facebook. Step two would be to make a really cool Facebook app from Chisimba that allows for interesting things to happen in the PLE space. I have thrown this idea out to the Kenyan Facebook developer community, lets see if there are any takers.
But there is more to this idea than just Facebook. Widgets are all the rage nowadays. We could also look at how we can implement the W3C Widget specification, and allow Chisimba to both generate and consume W3C compliant widgets. Not that would be cool! But I will write about that another time.
Given the increasing prevalence of widgets, I have decided to devote a few blog posts to widgets and how they might be used in eLearning to achive some of the goals inherent in the idea of personal learning spaces.
Adapted from a post originally made on http://ics.uwc.ac.za on Fri, 02 May 2008 11:19:22
facebook chisimba education 3.0 widgets elearning
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Draft Post: Education 3.0
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848 days ago
This post was never written.
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Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world
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832 days ago
| Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world is a paper that I presented at a UNESCO conference in Dar es Salaam last year. It is relevant to an up-coming discussion on "Open Educational Resources" in Africa, and I thought it might be useful to make it available here. | ||
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| The concept of Education 3.0 has been used to categorize a possible future scenario of change in higher education in which we will see breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning. Education in the 20th and early 21st Centuries (Education 1.0) has been based on scarcity. Professors and learning resources are scarce, so they are aggregated into institutions within which most of the key processes are contained. This containment means that the factors that contribute to quality are largely contained within individual institutions, and quality assurance is largely a matter of assuring the quality of institutional processes. An increasing abundance of free and open resources for use in education means that learning resources are no longer scarce, and a proliferation of networking and learning technologies that blur the distinction between play and study, means that sources of learning are no longer as scarce as they once were and that professors are not the only valid means to ensure that learning takes place. In an Education 3.0 world, institutions will be called on to accredit not programs of study or courses, but rather to accredit learning achieved. Learning achievements may happen in a variety of institutions, some contact and some virtual, as well as through self-study and through a resurgence of digital apprenticeships. This paper discusses the challenges of quality assuring learning achieved in the context of Education 3.0 in higher education. | ||
- You may also wish to
- download the written paper
- download a version of the presentation that you can reuse.
education 3.0 quality assurance open educational resources OER FORE
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The Coming Changes in Learning: Creating New Architectures Now!
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817 days ago
I am at the IMS/GLC/University of Michigan summit on The Coming Changes in Learning: Creating New Architectures Now! I have only captured points that I found relevant, or simple enough to capture in simple text.
Welcome: Rob Abel, CEO, IMS Global Learning Consortium
In his welcome, Rob Abel, CEO, IMS Global Learning Consortium points out that it is hard to measure the impact of technology because we do not what it means to improve learning. He introducted the changes in learning in terms of the changes in primary technologies, and suggested we might be on the verge of Learning 3.0. He didn't seem to know about our Education 3.0 concept.
IMS is trying to find a way for all the new approaches to work together in an integrated way to create "Learning 3.0", and it is important to support the architects of what should be effectively a federation of learning technologies.
Morning Keynote: Mechanisms for Transformation of Learning.
John L. King, Vice Provost for Academic Information, Professor of Information, School of Information, University of Michigan (U-M)
We know that people learn, but little about how people learn, though we are understanding why people learn. Talked about the mesolimbic system, which is where sensations of pleasure originate, and surprise is on of the things that generate pleasure sensations. The brain may have evolved to reward the organism for learning, and pleasure is the reward for learning. Learning is related to disequilibriation (e..g a 2 year old). There is evidence that if you stop learning you die, because there is a deeply wired relationship between learning and being alive. This fundamentality is the pull part of learning.
Transformational mechanisms: repositories (e.g. libraries), printing / reading. A new one is the emergence of for profit institutions. The pull is our inate pleasure from learning, and the push is the infrastructure of education - the universities. We won, but now the landscape is changing. For profit institutions is the fastest growing sector of American education, many of them significantly virtual. Traditional institutional institutions are the ones who are mainly offering doctrates, but the for profits are growing rapidly in undergraduate areas. What kind of good is education? Public or private? Change in perceptions from majority of people saying public to majority of people saying private in the USA. There has been a change from primarily funded by state to primarily funded by student. The private institutions are able to cash in on this, traditional institutions are not dealing with it adequately.
We have to lower the marginal cost of production of learning so that we can get the global population to participate in higher education: from 200 million globally to 2 billion globally. We have a successor species, cool technologies, and a the potential to really transform education.
Panel 1: Coming Changes in Open Global Learning in the Health Sciences
- Moderator: Paul N. Courant, Dean of Libraries and former Provost; Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate
Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, U-M - James O. Woolliscroft, Dean and Lyle C. Roll Professor of Medicine, Medical School, U-M
- Peter J. Polverini, Dean and Professor of Dentistry, School of Dentistry, U-M
- Stephen R. Smith, Professor of Family Medicine, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University
Points
- James O. Woolliscroft
- It has fundamentally changed learning in medicine, as well as for practicing physicians
- Relatively uncoordinated introduction of technology in medschools
- UM Introduced web-based course in Advanced Theraputics for fourth year, and now faculty thought of doing this with all courses
- Expanded to all health sciences
- OER Global Access - One way to address global disparities
Panel 2: Creating New Architectures for Open Global Learning
Moderator: Casey White, Assistant Dean for Medical Education, Medical School, U-M
Ross Mackenzie, Strategic Development Manager (Learning and Teaching Solutions), The Open University, UK
Ted Hanss, Director, Enabling Technologies, Medical School, U-M
Lynn Johnson, Professor and Director of Dental Informatics and Information Technology, School of Dentistry, U-M
Points
- Ross Mackenzie
- Open University working with Moodle, but focus is on opening up the architecture, which is why the IMS process is important in moving beyond the monoliths
- Breaking down the monolithic applicatoins to create discrete tools that can be mixed and matched in various ways
- Social Learn project that is eLearning meets social networking, something Open Univ has always done
- Ted Hanss
- Medical school should have global impact in 5 years
- UMICH can have the same impact as MIT with respect to health, but wants to collaborate more with colleagues around the world
- Wish to use Open Courseware and technologies to change medical education
- How can an outcomes-based approach change things from the medical education model developed in the late 1800s
- Architecture includes people, learning methodologies and technologies
- Wanting to have an impact in Africa
- MIT used a producer push, but UMICH wants to co-create materials in partnerships
- Want the materials to be available in a more collaboratory approach in more editable formats
- Everybody must be a learner and a teacher
- Intellectural property clearing house
- Need to get students involved in producing the materials (DSCRIBE model)
- Bypass current modes of delivery, e.g. using mobile phones
- Medical library - can we bypass physical library
- More effective and productive
- Tools to engage learning communities with students becoming peer teachers, and working across institutions, etc
- Need tools to enable this collaboration
- Want to use software as a service model for DSCRIBE (have they thought about the bandwidth issues with respect to Africa?)
- Lynne Johnson
- "I have a dream"
- Successful with course management system
- Medical school looking at learning management system
- Perhaps it should be Learner's Management System
- Global, lifelong (out of date quickly), comprehensive, Smart
Afternoon Keynote: Learning and Teaching: The More Things Change…
Paul N. Courant, Dean of Libraries and former Provost; Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, U-M
- The romance of learning
- Being like a two year old - keep disrupting until you have achieved mastery
- Social networking and social learning are important, but they are not the only thing, there is an individual aspect of it
- There is a long, detailed, tedious component to learning
- Need to have moments of pleasure that add up to the detail of complex learning
- Development of literacy in the protestant world, with salvation as a powerful motivation
- Economic salvation should be a motivator of other kinds of learning
- Don't know what the talk is about, what is the topic?
- Library portfolio: Library was expensive and undergoing tremendous change
- Librarians are generally good at making use of technology
- Historically the value of large print collections was high because it allowed people to have immediate interaction, so it paid great universities to spend a lot of money on libraries
- The technological underpinnings are knocked out from under the print library
- Library is a purchasing agency for proprietary printed materials
- Technology wants to flatten things
- Economics of great university libraries has changed
- Transmission of information at the margins is really really cheap
- Associated industries change in terms of optimal scale, and degree of organization
- It doesn't matter where things are
- Business models?
- Business models for research and teaching change as well
- Changes in the politics around higher education, and accountability and measurable outputs
- What are we good at?
- Scholarship - carefully working out what is known and not known about some problem or phenomenon
- Not the norm in most human discourse
- Engagement
- ideas must be conveyed to count as ideas
- Rip, mix and mashup
- Interdisciplinarity and learning how people learn across disciplines
- Harnessing the commentary
- Who puts out research - good universities - how to maintain the output of these institutions in the face of changes that are dangerous (three threats, but I didn't manage to get the US cultural nuances)
- Harness technology and the collaboration that it allows to overcome some of these threats
2:00 p.m. Panel 3: Coming Changes in Content and Fair Use
Moderator: John L. King, Vice Provost for Academic Information
Allan R. Adler, Vice President for Legal and Governmental Affairs, Association of American Publishers
Kevin Norris, General Counsel and SVP Global Content Alliances, ProQuest
Joseph Hardin, Assistant Clinical Professor, School of Information, U-M; Founding Chair, Sakai Foundation
Perry Willett, Head, Digital Library Production Service, University Library, U-M
Jack Bernard, Assistant General Counsel, U-M
education 3.0 learning 3.0 interoperability IMS
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Response to Entrepreneurial Education
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808 days ago
Jon Bischke, CEO/Founder of eduFire.com sent me a link to his blog post on Entrepreneurial Education (time for us to coin a phrase…), which seems to have some overlap with the notion of Education 3.0 as proposed by Philip Schmidt and I in an article in First Monday.
We regard Education 3.0 will see a breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning. That is not to say that institutions disappear, but rather they become more permeable, allowing much more interaction with individuals and other systems than the traditional bricks-and-mortor, spatially constrained institutions allow.
According to the eduFire blog:
However, I think the strictly market-driven approach has some problems of its own that may lead to replacing one problematic with another unless understanding what is good about the current systems is kept in the equation (its not all bad!).
Tertiary education, particularly universities, is able to do what it does in part because of the fact that teaching is underpinned by research. That is not to say that researchers necessarily make the best teachers, although there is a strong correlation, but that the system of innovation includes a balance between education and innovation. This is what drives the economy in well developed systems, yet, as you say, there is no direct link between remuneration and contribution. So there is definitely some need for reform, but how to reform it without killing it is a big question to which I don't have the answer. The worry I would have about market forces alone being at play is that it will gravitate towards a level of mediocrity, because on market forces alone it is hard to justify a broad range of research capability.
The other issue that you raise is less about reforming education, and more about reforming society. The reason that young people gladly spend money on games and less willingly spend money on education is two fold: society as a whole does not show that it values education to the level that it might. Thus we need to reform society. The second has to do with an area of the brain that produces pleasure sensations on the immediate result of problem-solving. We need to understand this as biological, and therefore understand that the same neuro-chemical biology can be exploited in education, instead of attaching value judgments to it and pretending that we are not chemically based life forms. A truly human education system will demand a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.
Just to be clear, I am not disagreeing with Jon, but rather imagining that in Higher Education, the strictly market-driven approach might actually not work entirely on its own. If we look at he entrepreneurial Higher Education institutions, as represented by organizations such as the University of Phoenix, we see that they tend to concentrate on undergraduate education, with masters and especially doctoral programmes making up a tiny fraction of their sales. They also have a very low research output per staffing unit. They have shifted the emphasis from research AND teaching, to just teaching (or what the market accepts as such). In the short term, this may be good for the individuals participating in this market, but the question remains whether this is what is best for society.
On the other hand, if the US becomes dominated by such insitutions, perhaps that is a good thing for Africa. Maybe we can recreate what the US lost!
education 3.0
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Education 3.0 on Terra Incognita
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807 days ago
Christine Geith and Ken Udas facilitated a session at the National University Telecommunications Network annual meeting a little over a week ago. They used a WikiEducator as their presentation medium and workspace, and it is open for modification and development. During the past week they modified their original presentation to include information included the Terra Incognita blog and expanded on it, so it refers significantly to the Education 3.0 model to illustrate the role of Free and Open Educational Resources and the Freedom culture in the changing nature of education. You can find their work on WikiEducator.
They write:
Derek Keats and Phillip Schmitt have been developing some thinking and dialog around a concept that they are calling “Education 3.0.” The concept ties together changes in technology, patterns in relationships and communications among people living in networked societies, and educational need. The ,model, which is very much under development is also tied closely with open educational resources as an foundation.
Education 3.0 points to a changing environment that has been behind the development and growth of Open Educational Resources, and sits very much at the center of the "Freedom Culture."
In a few days I am going to try to start posting some short illustrations I have made of Education 1, 2, and 3, starting with Education 1, of which I make a good example.
education 3.0 F/OER open educational resource free and open educational resource
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Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education
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764 days ago
This presentation on Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education over the next decade is from a talk I gave at Wits on Aug 4th, 2008.
It was a talk about how the technology-society evolution is affecting education, it was NOT about eLearning.
education 3.0 society higher education university enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 coevolution
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Education 3.0: why should Africa care?
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745 days ago
This presentation uses some stats about Africa and the world to suggest that collaboration is the only way for Africa to build critical mass to address some of the challenges that we face. Once vehicle for collaboration is the set of conditions we describe as Education 3.0.
Note that the license for the images used in this presentation may vary from the license for my own part of it.
You can download this presentation from our Chameleon server.
education 3.0 Africa Web 2.0 collaboration
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Education 3.0 presentation featured on Slideshare
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743 days ago
My presentation Education 3.0: Why should Africa care? was made presentation of the day on Slideshare, and I was intensely proud of it. I thought there must be some intellectual interest in the notion, and therefore some hope!
Then I took a look this afternoon, and saw that it was succeeded by a presentation entitled Return of the Bunny Suicides: Watership Down for the deeply sick. Is there a message there, or am I just too concerned that Education 3.0 might be mistaken for a suicidal bunny?
I hope I don't get in the rabbit of this.
education 3.0 Africa bunnies
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What mark would you give? Demonstrating the value of remix
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735 days ago
Assume that I am a student, and I hand in the following text to you in a Third Year Education course, where I had to do an assignment on Education 3.0.
Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia
Africa has 14.2% of the world's human population
In 2006 the World had 6 billion people
In 2050 the World will have 9.1 billion people
Out of every 100 persons added to the population in the coming decade, 97 will live in developing countries
In 2006 Africa had just under 1 billion people
In 2050 Africa will have just under 2 billion people
From 2006-2050 the population of Europe will decrease by 9%
From 2006-2050 the population of Africa will increase by 113%
Food production in Africa is decreasing
Water availability will decrease by 50% in the areas of the world with the highest population increase
In some African states half or more of the population is under 25 years old
Population is increasing in Africa in areas where it is most difficult to produce food
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world where poverty has increased over the past 25 years
61% of spending on higher education in the World occurs within North America and Western Europe
4.5% of spending on higher education in the World occurs in Africa, about a third of it in South Africa
12% of the world's population enter tertiary education
32% of North Americans enter tertiary education
2.4% of Africans enter tertiary education
Most of those are in North Africa and South Africa
Finland has 3.6 times the world average enrollment in higher education
A child born in Finland has 140 times the chance of getting a tertiary education compared to a child born in Mozambique
The world produces 103 scientific research papers per million people
The USA produces 690 and Canada 723 scientific research papers per million people
Africa produces 8.2 scientific research papers per million people
In the USA, investment in higher education is 2.9% of GDP
In the Britain, investment in higher education is 1.1% of GDP
South Africa has the best higher education system in Africa
In the South Africa, investment in higher education is about 0.025% of GDP
There are more actively researching computer science professors in a large American university than there are in Sub-Saharan Africa
There are more actively researching discipline X professors in a large American university than there are in Sub-Saharan Africa
We lack the critical mass in Africa to find knowledge-based solutions to the challenges facing us as a continent
Collaboration is the only way for us to achieve the critical mass we need to overcome the challenges we face
Education 3.0: breaking down barriers and building virtual critical mass in higher education
Structural collaboration costs a lot of money without adding proportional value
Don't make structures for collaboration; rather lower the barriers to getting higher education institutions and the people in them to collaborate
Promote the collaborative peer-production of learning content that is freely licensed by professors and students
Learning can be formal, informal, or a mixture of both
Recognition of learning achieved: Recognize learning that takes place in informal settings and in other institutions
Education 3.0: YOU can start now!
Just learn it!
Information sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Africa_satellite_orthographic.jpg
http://www.worldmapper.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/07/21/business/20080721_ArabFood_Graphic.html
Thanks to Stanley Ridge for the calculation of investment in HEI in Sough Africa as a percentage of GDP, the other GDP stats are from a Time Magazine article which I still have to reference.
What kind of grade would I get for the above information, all of which is copied from somewhere, though the words are changed? I am guessing that you would not give me a very good grade. These are not even sentences, and I must be some kind of idiot to hand in something like this. You would probably glance at it and toss it in the ZERO pile.
What if instead of doing text like that, I went to Flickr and grabbed a whole bunch of images, and just handed them in to you? What kind of grade would you give me? (Note: Click the image to advance)
OK, what if I took the worthless text, and combined it with the worthless images. What would you give me for a grade? Does it demonstrate that I know why Education 3.0 is important in the African context, and does it use power or pursuasion? (Note: Click the image to advance)
Now you understand the value or remix!
Note that the images used in this presentation may have a license that varies from that of the page contents.
rip-mix-learn reuse remix education 3.0 reusability mashup
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Educational Techniques for Young People by an Old Dude: videos
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698 days ago
Educational Techniques for Young People by an Old Dude: rap and remix as socially networked learning opportunities
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education 3.0 rap remix elearning e-learning
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