Elearnspace

I’ve never really actively “looked for work”. In my late teens, my brother and I started a series of restaurants (we owned and operated seven in total). The hospitality field is very hard, however, on families and relationships as it consumes an enormous amount of time. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, I left the industry and started working in training and development and returned to University of Manitoba as a student.

Earlier this week, I delivered a presentation to TEDxEdmonton on why openness and learning analytics are critical for rethinking the future of education. The theme of the event was on open source culture and whether the promises of open source have been oversold.

In mid-January I spent a wonderful day at American University learning about (and presenting on) the changing educational landscape, technology, and the practices and activities of learners. The slides from my presentation are below:

On February 8, I’ll be delivering a talk at TEDxEdmonton’s event Rethinking Open Source Culture. In 2003 I posted a few articles online on open source movements and learning: Open source p.I, Open Source p.II, and Why we should share learning material. I have benefitted enormously from open learning.

Open online courses really mess things up. The force educators/funders/learners to question the value point of traditional education. Over the past four years, many different open online courses have been offered – some through formal universities (U of Manitoba – Stephen Downes and I, BYU – David Wiley, U of Regina – Alec Couros, Stanford – Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, U of Illinois -Ray Schroeder).

There is more activity in online learning (or, at minimum blended learning) in higher education than most universities realize. When I was at University of Manitoba, we tried to get a sense of what faculty were doing with technology in their courses, particularly with what was then called web 2.0 (doesn’t that almost feel like I’m referencing a trend in the 70?s? you know, like bell bottoms?). First, we looked at the formal university reports – annual reports of department activity. We found very little.

2012 is shaping up to be a good year for open online learning experiences (Sanford is actively promoting open courses, David Wiley is running an openness in education course, Alec Couros will likely be doing his EC&I831 again, etc.).
I’m involved in several open online learning projects this year:

In eras of dramatic change – such as militarization in ancient Rome and the French Revolution/Industrial Revolution – existing mindsets and institutions are, in Schumpeter’s words, creatively destroyed. The newspaper, recording, and TV industries have experienced this recently as digital information comes into its own and sheds legacy structures (such as the “album” or the “newspaper”). Politicians have certainly felt the inability to control narratives and restrict information flow in 2011.

I just listened to a great video discussion – Khan Academy and Stanford AI Class: Reinventing Education – with Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, and Sal Khan. It’s a candid discussion of what each of these educators wanted to achieve with opening up their courses and content and some of the challenges they faced in the process. Most importantly, they (particularly Sebastian) discuss where they were wrong in their previous assumptions about learning.

Learning analytics are increasingly relevant, and prominent, in education. Startups and established software vendors are targeting learning analytics in their product offerings for the education and training and development sector. Many of the companies that serve the higher education market– including Sungard, Blackboard, and Pearson – are already heavily committed to analytics. Analytics is quickly becoming a term that gets slapped onto any existing product (remember social media from a few years ago? Suddenly, everything was “social”.