Free course on Learning Design #MOOC #oldsmooc

Open Learning Design Studio, a free and open course on learning design (how learning can be designed, how a curriculum can be build...)! That is something I cannot resist. Admittedly, the organizers are still getting all the locations and spaces ready, but there is a lot to be seen already.

Starting on 10 January 2013 (and lasts for 9 weeks, clocking off on 13 March 2013) a set of UK based learning institutes are rolling out a MOOC on learning design. Although the course is free, you do need to register.

They offer a list of new approaches to MOOC (and proven one's), which will make it of interest not only to us who look for a more in-depth knowledge into learning design, but also for those contemplating on setting up a MOOC.

What I like already:

• Oldsmooc is using different online environments
• At point of registration the registering participants are asked some relevant questions (type of learner, experience with online learning/learning design, ...)
• they provide badges, embedded in parts of the learning environment
• the fact that they start on a Thursday (leaving the weekend as work time for those in full time jobs)
• visible resources
• they have asked Martin Hawkey to strengthen their analytic approach
• ... 
• and I can just relax and learn, not having to worry about anything else... ahhhhhhh

So that simply looks great already!

A bit on the course (from their course site):

Study weeks start on a Thursday to allow those who cannot devote time during work days to participate over the weekend. The MOOC takes an active and collaborative approach to learning. Facilitators will provide resources and guidance, and participants are invited to critically engage with and add to these, and use them to create design artifacts that they will share and discuss with others. Committed participants will work individually or in groups on a learning/ curriculum design project that they will initiate and define. Additionally these participants will associate themselves with a study group, with which they will work throughout the MOOC. These groups will act as the primary learning support mechanism.

The course is structured to reflect a proposed process for design, and combines a number of design thinking methodologies (see http://www.ld-grid.org/resources/methods-and-methodologies/ideo-toolkit and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking), inquiry learning (see http://www.pi-project.ac.uk/) and educational design research (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design-based_research).

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Mobile #Moodle ready for beta release: feedback welcomed

It has been more than 2 years since the Moodle4iPhone project http://iphone.moodle.com.au. Unfortunately it was not ready to be officially released, but after additional work from Beto, Carlos and Ludo, the official release will be rolled out in the following weeks.

For all of those interested, we kindly request you to go to http://m.ideas4ict.com/and enroll to the course and give us some feedback (at the social forum http://m.ideas4ict.com/mod/forum/view.php?id=4) in order to improve this theme before to make it public for the whole Moodle Community.
Two themes will be released, 1 for mobile devices and the second one for tablets.

The timing towards the official release is as followed: try-out and feedback in the next two weeks. Than one week of tweaking based on the feedback received and ... release! So, for all of you interested in mobile Moodle, get your devices out and join the community to get this project launched. 

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Tin Can: learner #analytics for the next #research frontier

What if you are looking for an easy, accessible learner analytics that does not only map access and timings, but actually allows trainers and teachers to take a more in-depth look into the actual learning? THAT is what I am looking for. As I am researching learner interactions in a mobile accessible open, online course – I can see that access pushes forward learner interactions, and even meaningful, constructive learner interactions (research snippets will be shared soon, still getting my thesis together). Looking at Tin Can will reveal a bit of the future of learner tracking and open opportunities for future educational research. The most essential challenge that emerged from my research (at this point) was the fact that meaningful mapping of learning was lacking due to a number of reasons. 

So this is where Tin Can enters (@tincanapi), and thanks to Danny De Witte (@paravolve ) for getting me back on this topic! Tin Can builds on SCORM, but takes learning/training data to the next level. What Tin Can does is enabling teachers/trainers and as such also researchers to see which type of learning appears within a learner community. Not only the formal learning (access to course content, etcetera), but also the informal learning, not only web-based but offline as well as online, and adding ubiquity to the analysis as well. So in a nutshell Tin Can wants to push learner analytics to the next level.

Tin Can is not yet in a version to provide a widely audience a userfriendly version, but … you should have a look at where they are heading (currently 1.95 version, so near public release). What Tin Can does is getting all the diversity of tools that all of us use to build brick-à-brack solution for learner analytics, and centralizing them so that it becomes more intuitive.

The problems tackled with Tin Can as it is developed:

• Mobile tracking – any device tracking: so allowing focus on the actual learning, no matter what device.
• Simulations: allowing to move away from the browser, into where the actual learning takes place.
• Educational (serious) games: gamification is a great way to learn, but it gives rise to a lot of learning challenges, let alone tracking. Currently a lot of serious games are being played by young children, which can actually show the actual learning going on (algebra, math, language…), but this (informal) learning does not seep through to the actual teacher/trainer… however, this could create a much more personalized and in-depth profile of the actual learning of a particular individual.
• Performance support: point-of-need, just-in-time learning is essential for learning. But the barrier with scorm was the actual ‘login, path….’ Which gave rise to a bit of demotivation. But Tin Can takes tracking outside of the LMS, as such it is much more directly accessible.
• Track real world activities: a webinar, training attendance… any tracking that is GPS enabled and such.
• Offline and long running content: spaced learning enhances all of our learning as we know, but this was tough to track, with Tin Can offline tracking will be enabled. Tin Can will not program spaced learning, but will provide data that will make it easier to develop spaced learning.
• Security and authentication: Tin Can will upgrade the security a bit: secure the security between a learning provider and the actual material. It will not be fully secure, but a bit more secure.

Deeper layers: multi-level tracking: in the cloud and on the device:

• Everything is learning: if we do something that increases our knowledge, this is essential to get an idea of learning: making a mistake, writing a blog, reading up on a specific topic …. The holistic learning environment.
• How it works: bookmarks are gathered (in Tin Can), book scanner (to add the books you read), tapestry api addition…. It is all about capturing learning events.
• Key enablers: tracking does not need to be done inside an LMS, it can be launched from anywhere. The asserter of the learning material, can be different from the learning event => as such everything on the web can be used as a learning object, and can be tracked for its learning, it does not be ‘scorm-enabled’.
• Free the data: LRS: this is a great concept, LRS is a Learning Record Store: the thing that accepts all the Tin Can data and enables other instruments to analyse the data. This is where specialized analysis comes in: improve content delivery, content analytics, point towards learning pathways…
• Training data portability: allow to take along training records.
• Personal data locker: that might give the learner herself/himself to learn more on their learning: ideal meta learning tool!

Major challenge: how can one filter out the signal to noise: what makes up relevant learning, what not?

And of course, if you look at Tin Can and put this next to MOOC’s and take socially intelligent agents into consideration, than you must agree that it will offer an amazing learning advancement for the next decennium. And the effect on educational research is ENORMOUS:

• How do people like to learn?
• Which learner profiles are there?
• Can you deduct a professional profile based on learner profiles?
• Can you filter out skills and consequent opportunities based on learning?
• Can you find topics that arise from learning … from what seems to be missing?

This will shed light on actual learning apart from neuroscience monitoring. Great!

If you want to learn more about Tin Can, have a look at their website here (http://tincanapi.com ), or get a broader idea watching this webinar.

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A one access point for all books and music? YEAH

Hans De Zwart got me onto this site and ... what a great resource for avid readers and listeners! I admit I need to finalize my thesis, but I just could not resist taking a break to peruse through the content shared by the Internet Archive. I learn every day and ... will do for ever no doubt.

The Internet Archive gathers all types of content, and allows people to add it as well. They have wonderful initiatives (admittedly most of them are US oriented, but the idea is universal):
A bundle of Open Educational Resources with lectures on several subjects. 
TV archive with search option, for any media editor this is a dream. You just search for your favorite politician or fact, and start editing an overview of what they said versus what they do, or how certain facts get a different perspective as time goes by. Wonderfully educational stuff. 
Something called the waybackmachine that allows you to filter content that you think should be archived for future generations.
Open software location, with a list of freely downloadable software's (always fun, looking at a list of open source software)
A free music download page (where I searched for live recordings of Sage Francis and they had it! So went on to Hive Mind and yes, they also had a link to an album!)
After which I started to look at the open library and saw a list of books that are in part freely available, but some also simply linked to make up a complete digital overview of all books.

The great thing about this is that everyone can add to it. So a nice example of crowdsourcing, or maybe the term crowdcontentaddition fits more appropriately. Such fun! And now... back to thesis typing (some additional coding of messages; some additional references...)

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Blogphilosophy: Education makes the world a worse place

These last few days were pushing the truth into my face again: education does not change the world. In fact: it helps destroying it. So why bother? Why do I put so much time and effort in researching education?

It is not about Israël, it could just as easily be North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, waffles baking Belgium, … or the tiny country of Andorra for all I care. It is any region empowered by the educated that decides ‘the other’ should be destroyed (read murdered under a false flag of well-meant excuses). It is never about a nation or patriotism, those are just words used by the educated to feed propaganda, the media and lead up to destructive action. The nations never die, its citizens die, the children die. The powerful, educated few that decide they will bombard innocent people … they live. They are educated in surviving, constructing mind weaves to make them and others think violence is permitted, they understand how to fire guns pointed away from their homes. 

Universal rights are simple: you kill someone on purpose => you are a murderer and should be trialed.

Annihilating the powerless is the best way to keep people down. Annihilating the powerless and educating the thinking. Give those that have some intelligence something to do. Give them the illusion their education will make the world a better place. It will never do it. Power is not in education, power is in the elite network, the willingness to be part of the network, the willingness to engage in destruction to keep power to those already in it: “for that is how it should be. We know what is best for them”.

Palestinians are educated people, israëlis are moslims too, jews struggle for peace and all of us suffer from death and destruction. Killing someone makes anyone a murderer, even if they do it from 10 miles further down the road. That is basic knowledge we all know. But it does not matter that we know it. There is no world for the peaceful, for the balanced, for indigenous people, for any of us just wanting to live in harmony.

Delivering primary education to all?! I think not. Reaching the millennium goals is a nice sounding motto. Something to keep many of us busy, working, researching. But unless the few really want to achieve it, it never happens. And it does not happen. We could. Social science has many frameworks, theories, even pilot studies to prove its potential realization. But it does not happen. Because rebuilding cities, rolling out roads for tanks, pumping fuel from the core of the earth to regions consuming it in a rush to go to work, to professions that put all of us between brick walls for the biggest part of our day, for workers hurrying of to any space that is not their family so they do not have to talk to their fellow man/woman, even if those are their partners, their next of kin, their spouse. Let alone make them think about easy dilemma’s that might make a change.

What gets us on the streets? I don’t know. But I can tell you what does not get all of us walking the pavements, hammering on doors of our so called democratic elected leaders: technologically strong, educated  armies blowing children to oblivion.

Education is manipulated and misused. Maybe it is just there to keep us busy, to keep me busy. But for the life of me I cannot come up with anything else to try and change this world and hope that at some point we will find a cure for mindless aggression in name of the father, the nation, the god… or any of those iconic lies.

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Harold Jarche on the need for #corporate #networking and learning

During the Learning Day at the European Environmental Agency (EEA), an organisation filled with knowledge workers, I had the pleasure of hearing a keynote of Harold Jarche ( @hjarche and www.jarche.com ). These are my live blognotes.

An interesting central idea is the fact that all knowledge workers need to have time to do nothing, simply relax, get their heads into an open, wandering, creative state. I totally agree. Without pauzes, my brain would not be able to compute and emotionally process all the input absorbed by the day.

Breaking down barriers
Change is human. Although at every moment in time, we - as people - feel that something will be there forever. But we are only surrounded by artificial barriers. These barriers are artificially created. Organizations are the same, the barriers, guidelines are provided... These barriers are sometimes set up to create an idea of trust, balance, ... but in fact these barriers can be restrictive. If we want to grow, we need to share knowledge. As such we need to break the barriers down, enabling fruitful change. 
hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (from the cluetrain.com manifesto)

Moving from local to global
We live in a less barriered world: self-publication, group forming across the world, unlimited information. In the past we linked up with people with similar interests locally, due to simply physical realities... now we can link up with people from around the world. So from a learning perspective our learning group grows (personal addition: this also means that the group that lives inside the personal zone of proximal development grows, as more people can potentially be in this). Groupforming is now becoming networks. This has an effect on mentorship: per mentor you can only have so many learners, but with the growing group more mentors can stand up and the learners themselves can become mentors.

The web has changed the way we work.
How we start businesses (get online financial support), couche surfing....

An interesting question put forward by Harold is from Robert Kelley, "What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?" research. The percentage decreases, but ... I am not sure about this, as the brain builds on its experiences, as such - even if we look up something, the basis of what we pick up is actually stuff we know. So - to me - the 'new' is not that new, it is only a small part of new, but mostly it is building upon personal knowledge.

Anything that can be automated will be automated
Anything that can be automated will be automated: production, outsourcing, law (when big corporate law goes to court, all the information needs to be organized. Now this search is done by computer data software), banking.... even to drive through: you go to a MacDonalds, someone in India takes the order and sends the 'burger computers' the order...
So if you are looking for work, look for the far right handside, otherwise you will loose it. (I agree!)
Talent is seldom outsourced, labour is. Live and work is in perpetual beta (I agree so much!).
So byebye teachers?

(personal note: although the above is true, I feel this is only true because we belief in the non-human at this point in time, money and profit is the goal, but that is not human. Because of this focus on non-human factors, humanity is out of balance. We should use the web, the new world order to shift back to the central goal: humans - think Star Trek society, the technology serves humans, no money needed).

Connections drive innovation
We need input from peope with a diversity of viewpoints - Tim Kestell (or Kastell?).
How do we connect the open world with the corporate world.
Communities of Practice: weak and strong social ties. "You know you are in a CoP when it changes your practices".
Rob Cross, et al. The Hidden Power of Social networks, HBS, 2004. is mentioned => the people that are more connected are the most connected, it is not the smartest people.

Collaboration versus cooperation
collaboration: working together for a common objective. Cooperation: openly sharing, without any quid pro quo. Corporation is linking with each other: yin/yang balance. 
Knowledge sharing networks is build on openness, for it enables transparency, which fosters diversity of ideas => trust! (agreeing here, any willingness to communicate openly is based on the feeling of trust).

We should all move into transparency to get to innovational drive.  Mentions Nancy Dixon on knowledge management: do not go to hierarchy, but to a networked corporational architecture.

Some nice quotes:
"All models are flawed, but some are useful.
"Assume positive intent" says Harold, things work better with this as a starting point.
"To change behaviour you have to do it 40 days in a row for change to stick".

Social network analysis shows trust (e.g. twitter traffic can show those persons that are trusted)

These are his presentation slides

Eea learning day copenhagen from Harold Jarche

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Solutions for learners with #disabilities using specific #social media

Karel Van Isacker from PhoenixKM and VIPI just gave a presentation on social media in an accessible learning perspective. He gave an amazingly interesting talk. The reason of interest was his focus on the actual usability of a broad range of alternative social media tools that people with disabilities need to use in order to actually access social media. I had no idea and I am very grateful that Karel got me so excited. So if you are looking for inclusive education that can be accessed by all people, have a look at his presentation.

Here are the slides provided by Karel, 15 slides with a mountain of information for people with and without disabilities.

Social media in an accessible learning perspective from Karel Van Isacker

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