Week 1 – Top articles and posts

We all spend ages, reading scanning and making sense of the masses of information posted online.  Every Sunday I will post the top posts, blogs or articles for the week; to share these with others and hopefully enable to look at the year week by week:

Each week I will find a quote for the following weeks theme.  This weeks quote is:

“You can’t expect to meet the challenges of today with yesterday’s tools and expect to be in business tomorrow?” Nelson Johnson

To get this started I’ve chosen 4 posts which I believe introduce this theme nicely:

1. Social Media + Learning = much more than Social Learning
by Jane Hart, The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies

It is clear that a huge number of people who have been using social media for their personal use have now recognised their value for professional use, and are also using the very same tools to address their own organisational problems – mainly because enterprise systems just don’t provide them with the functionality they require to do so. Forrester estimated this was around 47% business users in early 2011 and was likely to rise to 60% by then end of the year.

2. How Technology Can Improve Online Learning—and Learning in General
by Robert W. Mendenhall at the Chronicle of HE.

In an online environment that truly takes advantage of technology, the faculty role may change from delivering content to mentoring students. By using technology to measure learning, we can actually determine what students know and can do, rather than how long they spend in class. Technology allows us to fundamentally change the model to individualize learning, and in so doing improve learning and reduce costs.

3. Our Takeaways from DevLearn 2011
by Judy Unrein
Short taster, see full post for more:

…..eye-opening to see Aaron and Mike break down what tracking learning may well look like in the future. It’s much more granular and much more based on the activities the learner performs than the broad strokes we can measure with SCORM today. See some prototypes of activity stream-based tracking and even build your own at Project Tin Can; while this technology may not be in common use for another few years, it’s very interesting to think of how these new capabilities will affect our designs and the tools we use for development.

@bschlenker: “At the end of the day, it’s not about the technology, It’s about the people.”

4. Get Started with Web 2.0 and Global Learning | Asia Society.

“Universities and workplaces are increasingly looking for digital portfolios to learn about young candidates. Web 2.0 technologies make it easy to assemble multimedia material and publish online…

“You’re the new world, and I’m your Christopher Columbus,” raps one Tufts University hopeful. Another YouTube video shows a young person’s love of mathematical equations expressed through modern dance. Digital media projects about real-world issues will arguably have a competitive edge over much of what is currently out there.”

Over the next week I will be specifically looking for articles around the new challenges and era we are approaching in education and new tools and technologies.

Related articles

• Online Education in the Chronicle (ntinterpretation.wordpress.com)
• How Technology Can Improve Online Learning – Online Learning – The Chronicle of Higher Education (richardnesmith.wordpress.com)
• Clayton Christensen: Why online education is ready for disruption, now. (thenextweb.com)
• Learn It In 5 – Digital Classroom Strategies (learningwithtechs.wordpress.com)
• Revamping Education: Where Are We Going With Online Learning? (biomed20.ucsf.edu)