Tag: online education

Predictions from Bill Gates on textbooks

15th October 2010

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The man who said that “640K ought to be enough for anybody” (which he denies) and who failed to anticipate the growth of the Internet is predicting that, five years from now, the best education will come from the Web. Given his powers of under-estimation, one might speculate that the best education could be web-based in three years’ time, or maybe it’s available now, given the creative ways social media might be harnessed for education purposes, and it’s just a question of taking advantage of it.

Less teaching, more learning

18th September 2010

This has to be one of the most inspiring TED talks I have seen this year. Sugata Mitra talks about education as a self-organising system, or at least how it has become so with increasing access to information and communication technologies. Mitra takes learner centric pedagogy to a new level, and if his thinking were to be applied on a large scale, much could be done to raise educational standards around the world, in both developed and developing nations.

An Inkling about socially mediated textbooks

25th August 2010

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There was a piece in the New York Times the other day which gave me cause to think that the iPad may not end up being the iFad that some people have suggested. A company called Inkling is setting the pace with an app that brings Web 2.0 functionality to textbooks. Aside from the ease of navigation, the lower ecological footprint from using less paper, and the portability factor (the weight of an iPad is 1.5lbs compared to the several stone’s worth of paper-based textbooks one accumulates over a semester or two), I think the really powerful aspect of this innovation is the interactive annotation tool. Reading textbooks need no longer be a solitary experience because Inkling provides learners with the capacity to leave notes for their classmates in specific areas of the book, and also view commentary from teachers. I predict that the digital natives will go for this in a big way. The key success factor will be the extent to which Inkling can grow its library of texts in a short period of time to get the critical mass it needs for this product to take-off.

Education needs pull not push

4th August 2010


A very persuasive presentation from Charles Leadbeater on how social entrepreneurs are setting up schools in slum areas around the world that have pulling power because there is some extrinsic motivation to attend, namely an immediate pay-off in terms of productive outcomes. There is no national curriculum or standardised testing, but one theme that is common is that these schools reach the people they most need to serve in a personalised manner. The impersonal mass education systems that students are pushed into in many wealthier communities around the world might take heed. These systems are failing because learners are starved of opportunities for creativity. How perverse would it be if, with economic and social progress, these poor communities ‘developed’ to the point where children start enrolling for GCSEs, to become part of the ‘sausage factory’ education systems characteristic of ‘advanced’ countries.

The Facebookese: citizens of the 3rd largest ‘nation’ in the world

8th May 2010

Socialnomics author, Erik Qualman, has updated his original social media stats video from last year. One of the changes is that if Facebook was a country, it would now be the third largest country in the world, having passed the US earlier this year. Another amazing statistic is that Facebook beats Google for weekly US Internet traffic which says a lot about the exponential growth of social media in the last year or so.

Other stats that stand our for me in terms of the implications for the education industry include the following:

• More than half of the world’s population is under 30;
• 96% of ‘digital natives’ are members of a social network;
• 50% of mobile Internet traffic in the UK is on Facebook;
• More than 100 hours’ worth of video is uploaded to YouTube during the 4:25 minutes it takes to watch the video; and
• Amazon sold more electronic books for the Kindle than physical books at Christmas … and this is before the arrival of the iPad!

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Twitter University

8th February 2010


Image source: xaraleeportfolio.wordpress.com

A lot has been written in the last year or so about how twitter might be used in the classroom, and it has even been suggested that it could conceivably replace a course management system. Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has taken this thinking one step further and set up a site called 140 University, “to build and extend your general education”, but “short courses delivered via Twitter and Facebook” are slated for delivery in the near future. Is it possible that formally certified, accredited academic courses could be delivered in 140-character tweets any time soon? Now that would be disruptive innovation taken to the nth degree!

Did You Know 4.0 and the implications for education

20th January 2010

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The Did You Know video received an official update in October 2009 (there are impostors) and, once again, it includes some mind boggling facts and figures on converging technologies and the changing media landscape. There is no direct reference made to education, it is difficult to imagine how educational institutions can remain immune from these influences.

From teacher to content curator

23rd November 2009

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In this interview, Curtis Bonk discusses how a new breed of teacher is set to emerge; what he refers to as a ‘super eCoach’, or ‘super eMentor’. These people, he says, will have three skills: (i) domain expertise, (ii) an understanding of how to use the Internet for learning, and (iii) counselling skills that further human development. These people will be in high demand, Bonk opines, because not many people are ‘thinking about Google from an educational point of view’. Educators need to become content curators, re-purposing and remixing material, to help learners navigate their way through the content without becoming overwhelmed by the huge volume of information. In other words, it is about guiding learning so that students can process the plethora of information in an orderly fashion, to convert it into knowledge and understanding.

The edupunks are coming

14th August 2009


umwdtlt’s photostream

I was referred by a friend to a very good article in Fast Company magazine this week by Anya Kamenetz that provides a good overview of the edupunk movement that is starting to disrupt the higher education scene in the US and elsewhere.

The term edupunk was coined by Jim Groom and is defined as an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude, and one that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard. The ‘punk’ part of the word is to draw a parallel with the rebellious attitude of 1970s bands like The Clash. The punkesque nature of the phenomenon has been captured admirably in this mashup by Tony Hirst.

In the Kamenetz article, Groom argues that higher education institutions are ‘financially cannibalising’ their mission in that they have become outrageously expensive. Meanwhile, he says, there is a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies.

The end game here is disruptive innovation. As more and more ‘edutechpreneurs’ arrive on the scene, the transformation of the education sector may happen faster than people think.

The word ‘university’ comes from the Latin ‘universitas’ which, as the Kamenetz piece points out, does not mean campus, or class, or a particular body of knowledge, but ‘the guild, the group of people united in scholarship’. Nine hundred years ago, such groups formed in Bologna, Oxford, and Paris ‘around a scarce, precious information technology: the handwritten book’. Images of this era show the sages of the time at a podium lecturing from these revered books, with rows of students sitting attentively with quills and inkwells at the ready; a format not too dissimilar from classes in universities almost a millennium later.

As Kamenetz concludes: ‘Today, we’ve gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance’ and it is only natural, therefore, that new, rapidly evolving information technologies will convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions.

Time to teach naked?

4th August 2009

Image source: isabellawallace.com

There was an excellent article (and accompanying video) in The Chronicle of Higher Education last week about the US professor, José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, who has challenged his colleagues to ‘teach naked”, by which he means, without machines. In particular, Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint which he argues is being used as a crutch rather than as a creative tool. Class time, he says, should be reserved for discussion, especially as students can download lectures and podcasts online prior to attending class.

To support his stance, a study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions.

Dr Bowen, it is worth noting, is not anti-technology. Laptops can be plugged into projectors for use as and when this is necessary, but the desktop computer fixed to the lectern that was primarily used for death-by-Powerpoint lectures has gone.

By all accounts, most students now seem more attentive, although a few feel they are being short-changed. Having become accustomed to being spoon-fed material and participating in the educational process in an essentially passive way, having to tune in to what’s going on has been a shock to the system for some students.

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