Wednesday, October 10, 2007

More cool stuff this week

Last week we learned about productivity and efficiency. This week we learned some Physics. Oh, I also made some notes:

Horizon 2007 – 4th ed

Higher Ed teaching, learning, creative expression

Next 1-5 yrs: 6 trends

1. Higher Ed rapidly changing – cost up, budget down, enrollment down, working, commuting students. Competition from for-profit sector and instant access needs.
2. Increased globalization – competition form Asia. Wider perspective; new learning space.
3. Information literacy – not necessarily automatically improving.
4. Academic review & faculty rewards increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship – interdisciplinary and collaborative work vs. peer-reviewed papers. Traditional tenure/promotion constraints adoption of new scholarship modalities.
5. Collective intelligence and mass amateurization poses challenge to traditional authority of scholars. E.g. Wikipedia.
6. Students' view of tech differs from that of the faculty. Students use tech in greater breadth and depth.

Critical challenges:

* Assessment of new forms of work poses challenge to educators and peer reviewers. Learning in context rich environment such as games and simulations is still hard to evaluate. Portfolio now consists of blogs, podcasts and videos!
* Shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression and learning. Leaders not clear about what to do with it.
* Copy-right and intellectual property issues with digitized content.
Skills gap in using these tools
* Collaborative learning pushes academia to develop new forms of interaction and assessment
* Higher Ed expected to deliver content to mobile and personal devices.

Significant platforms:

- User-created content – blogs, wikibooks
- Social networking – myspace, facebook
- Mobile phones as mobile devices – data, music, i-phone stuff
- Virtual worlds – on-line communities
- New scholarships and publications – ??
- Multiplayer games - ???

Implications:

Quick sharing of resources. Facilitated collaboration (and tool development toward this end). Collective wisdom through tagging causes information to float to the top. Low cost-low-risk ways to upload content. Ready connectivity with each other. Implications to learning:

Create collaborative, student-authored resources,
Enable synchronous public feedback on assignment
Give voice to communities and encourage idea sharing

Social networking:

+ Encourage community and self-expression
+ Immersion in foreign language environment
+ Extend impact and lifespan of conferences

2 comments:

Dr. Patrick Faverty said...

Hak, nice summary, but I already read it too. what about the meaning? What does it mean to you as a future leader? (reflective synthesis not summary)

Hak said...

I look at this as substantive information. Unlike scholarly paper presented with evidence, this is an opinion paper or best guess of the future by the informed. I look at it in the same way as Fortune magazine picks the best mutual funds to invest in. I take them as informed guesses. I think they have a better than 50% chance of being right and maybe off by plus or minus several months or years. There's not much reflective synthesis per se. I can't forecast the future any better than they do. Whether I agree or disagree has zero impact on how the future unfolds.

On the other hand,I posted my personal thoughts on the chat room. I think that's a better forum for group discussion. Jumping around to each one's webpage is fragmented; nothing more than e-mails visible to the public. Sakai is the better platform for collaborative, group production.