Category: Authentic Learning Blog

The future of learning: Five trends that could change the face of Indian education

30th January 2017

The education system in India is in trouble and everybody knows it, not least of whom is the Government, whose inputs to the National Education Policy 2016 — currently in draft form — do not shirk away from the scale of the problem. In this preliminary document it is acknowledged that learners are disengaged, teachers are untrained and unmotivated, school leadership is lacking, and infrastructure is poor; factors which contribute to learning outcomes that fall a long way short of those required if India — soon to have the largest working population in the world — is to fully exploit its demographic dividend.

5 minute read >>

Teacher education in the developing world: Why it’s time for educational technology to live up to the promise

17th March 2016

© flickr.com/photos/irex/7421138946

Image source: flickr.com/photos/irex/7421138946

Followers of Audrey Watters and her essays on the ‘History of the Future of Education’ will know that there has been a tendency to over-hype what technology can deliver, with 20th century notions of the future closer to science fiction than present day reality.

So why did the education futurists of the 20th century get it so wrong? …

[Please click here for a 7-minute read on Medium.com]

 

#IWD2016: India’s untapped reservoir of talent

8th March 2016

IMG_0805

How online teacher education can be a boon for stay-at-home mums … and society at large

Today is International Women’s Day, and the media will be chock full of articles bemoaning the plight of women the world over, trotting out the usual string of platitudes about the pressing need to address the deep-seated structures in society that contribute to gender inequality.

[Read more here.]

Realising the demographic dividend: Why India needs a new paradigm for early years teacher education

25th February 2016

2016-02-06 10.59.05

Image: SAIBSA Workshop, 6 February 2016: ‘What is the professional responsibility of an early childhood educator?’

Even those who do not follow the education industry closely will be aware that all is not well in the higher education sector right now. Type the words ‘disruptive innovation in higher education India’ into Google and you get 390,000 results. Type in ‘crisis in higher education India’ and the number of results rises to 22 million.

[Read more here …]

Whither the university learning management system?

15th November 2014

Most educators would agree that it is important for pedagogy to guide decisions about technology and not the other way around, and yet there is relatively little debate in academic circles about the limiting effects of the LMS.

Why is this?

Read More

Getting my head around cPanel

16th September 2014

So I sat through a recording of the second ‘call-in show’ for Connected Courses last night.

This was the one I was waiting for to be honest. I am a fairly proficient WordPress user (albeit a dotcommer rather than a dotorger), and much of the first half of the show that focused on the functionality of WordPress I was comfortable with. The critical information I’m after is how to set up the ‘mother ship’ — so to speak — so that I can create courses in a Levinesque way with Groomlike confidence.

Read More

Nude emperors

3rd September 2014

So I signed up for Connected Courses.

It may reboot one of my blogs — if nothing else — which have become increasingly neglected as I have become more of a microblogger these days.

Amazingly, I just sat and watched a YouTube without shuffling in my seat for one hour and six minutes courtesy of Jim Groom, Howard Rheingold, and Alan Levine. (I even smiled at their blokey in-jokes.) Seriously, though, these guys need to be taken seriously. I will stick this course out if it kills me because there has to be more to life as a university learner than the ‘LMS’, and I’m confident these guys have the answers.

Read More

The internal marketing of participatory pedagogy

27th February 2014

I was invited to give a presentation to new students and alumni of the Griffith University MBA last night on the future of higher education. I routinely talk about this topic with my colleagues but far less so with the learners themselves. It occurred to me that what I might say would confuse, worry, or excite them, according to how well acquainted they were with the current debate about the direction of the higher education sector. In the end, I decided it was important to lay out everything that is going on in terms of the economics of higher education, the disruption caused by technological innovation and, most importantly, the latest thinking on pedagogy.

Read More
123Next ›Last »