Tag: social media

Cognitive surplus and participatory pedagogy

2nd September 2011

Clay Shirky’s notion of cognitive surplus holds a lot of appeal and I think it provides a solid theoretical rationale for educational models that embrace a participatory pedagogy.

We are told by the marketing gurus that in the connected, socially-mediated world, participation is the new consumption, and that consumers increasingly see themselves as stakeholders in, and co-creators and champions of brands. Shirky argues that this is so because people are allocating more of their time to creative acts (rather than consumptive ones) as a result of the increasing availability of online tools that facilitate new forms of collaboration. The most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that those engaging in the creative acts are rarely motivated by any tangible or pecuniary gain, the incentive to participate appearing to be largely sociocultural in nature.

Applying this same logic to formal education, there is a very strong argument for maximising opportunities for learners to be co-contributors to the curriculum. Student engagement will be greater and — of course — so will the cognitive surplus for learners to tap into.

Social media is not about technology

26th June 2011


The latest version of the Social Media Revolution by Socialnomics was uploaded to YouTube last week. Some of the statistics have been updated and there are a number of new slides. For me, the most compelling is the very first which simply reads: social media is not about technology. This is so true. I have been campaigning long and hard for several years now to drop the ‘e’ from e-learning. It’s just learning! It’s how we do things now … or at least it’s how our students do things. Social media to a digital native is as normal as pen and paper to a digital immigrant, and yet there is still resistance to the mainstreaming of social media for formal education purposes. The argument that students don’t have sufficient access to technology is starting wear a little thin. In the Sustainable Development and Competitive Advantage MBA class I delivered at Christ University in Bangalore, India, earlier this month, the students twittered about #SDCA so much, it was trending in Bangalore at one stage during the week. On the last day, without any notice, the students made videos documenting their learning outcomes, because 56 of the 57 people in the class either had video capability on their hand held device or on their laptop.

Remember the old days when we had to go to class?

2nd March 2011


Image source: dreamstime.com

There is a nice article in The Chronicle this week by Jeffrey R Young entitled, Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century. I liked this piece not because it told me anything new, but because of the sub-text that it is incredulous so many academic institutions still trot out the same tired old didactic teaching model and believe they are providing a high quality learning experience. “There is definitely a broader array of options available to students who wish to forgo the commute to class altogether in exchange for online classes that essentially provide the same content that professors regurgitate to students in lectures,” says one student in the article. Frankly, there were a sufficient number of options when I made my PowerPoint slides available ahead of class back in 1996. Now there is a veritable cornucopia of options! Who in their right mind would go to a lecture nowadays unless you were guaranteed some form of active engagement or ‘edutainment’ from an academic with stand up comedy skills?

‘Connectivism’ and Connective Knowledge

6th January 2011

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc]
Just signed up for my first MOOC — a massive open online course — which starts on 12 January and runs for 12 weeks. It should be an interesting experience and by the end of it I hope to have greater clarity on some of my thinking on this type of pedagogy. It will also be a good opportunity to try out some of my new educational iPad apps like GoodReader!

MBA via FB

1st December 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=0qX80isox4Q]
The sceptical amongst us will no doubt look upon the Facebook-delivered MBA by the London School of Business and Finance as a gimmick. This may be the case, but 12000+ hits in just over a month it is hard to ignore if you are a struggling bricks-and-mortar b-school! Another metric that is hard to ignore is the population of FaceBookLand which, last time I checked, was the third largest country in the world.

Predictions from Bill Gates on textbooks

15th October 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqf3rvg742g]
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.

An Inkling about socially mediated textbooks

25th August 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaX1Is5hyvY&feature=search]

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.

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!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8]

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.

123