Wednesday 10 November 2010

Brandon Hall award for best in mLearning: gold medal!



What a wonderful feeling to get noticed by peers when developing a technology enhanced learning project! It was an honour to get gold (yes, gold! so happy!) in the best of mLearning category. When the Brandon Hall team was calling out all the winners, we sure got excited when they called out our names!

This was a team effort and everyone pitched in, but all of the content was redesigned for mobile by the team in Peru, so please let me mention some of the key people involved: Beto Castillo Llaque, Luis Fucay,Carlos Kiyan, Maria Zolfo, Lut Lynen and all of our colleagues.

For those interested in the project, underneath the ppt of the project.

Thursday 4 November 2010

#dl10 All of our voices on Thornton May's speech on the New Know

The new Know: innovation powered by analytics is the book he wrote, must be great fun to read.

Thornton May If you can see him speak, do it. If you want to learn how to become a great and highly demand keynote speaker…. Definitely go and listen to him!!! He pushes the boundaries of keynote speaking and puts relevant stuff in as well. He wears a bow tie, is gray haired, wears a classic suite, but is indeed engaging. An American speaker.

He describes himself as a futurist. He looks at …. The future, and he is an enormously engaging speaker, filled with humor.

MP3 this is the mp3 of much of his talk, it is fun
He is an empirical futurist.
He could not sell water to a man on fire, he says.

Because we live in a web2.0 life, we are all in this together, so this will not be a lecture, we will share. Because what happens to many people at technology lectures (sleeping learner slide).

He rebuilds his keynote into an interactive workspace. By asking 7 questions to the whole of the audience.

First question: which historical moment is closely resembles the situation we find ourselves in today:
Change behavior, the energy of the room went up after getting this question.

“Ever since the times of Socrates, no hiding in the back of the class.” He runs up and down the room, pushes his energy on the responders he chooses to give answers to the questions he poses, and gets the room animated.

What patterns can be seen in all of the responses, or do you perceive in all the responses? The humans drove these revolutions, and society. It eventually effected everyone, but the revolutions mentioned did not happen overnight.

Everyone struggles between now and next, learning and tech learning… we need to come together. He mentions the Darwinian inflection point. Or the Swedish say we are in a liminal point.

The trend here is: there are tribes, and they think insight the tribe. Thornton says, I am a mental models guy. These models must be monitored, in many cases upgraded. They are important.
He asks to put two axes, a stakeholder analysis. (nice bit on who matters). As an educator you must know the blockers, and what to do with them (they cannot be moved – easily). They are inert,

Are we of “one mind” (shows a Borg cube).

He lists what the CEO’s thinks about. Competition, revenues, changing landscape, franchises execution, risk.


Three ways you think the world is going to be different from the world we live in today.
New way of working, learning, and more sensitive of device needs for learners.
Multi channel citizenship!
The tribe is growing, media are speeding up, so we should move to earth learning.

The one monster pattern is… that change is happening.

Thornton May was a student of Al Toffler. Change is changed. Catching up is a major anxiety maker.... every five years in the meso-information age, knowledge reboot. Every 5 years, new behaviors, new change, .... we are accelerating because the pace of change is accelerating.

The highest challenge is to see the disconnects in this change, desynchronization. We - as educators - should look into this, and counter it. DARPA (not sure of name), pixel to tutor ratio (? also not sure). We are moving towards a transparent environment for learning.

Cumulative impact: every molecule on this planet will be IP addressable in 15 years.

Information overload is a feature, what is the real walk-away finding? There is nothing we cannot know !!!

Wednesday 3 November 2010

#dl10 keynote Wednesday 3 November 2010 John Seely Brown on The Power of Pull


John Seely Brown a gray-bearded man with glasses and wearing a blue shirt and blazer. He just wrote another book called "The power of pull". together with John Hagel III and Lang Davison.

Learning demand and the art of life.
The old institutions are not hacking it too well, something has to give. So we need to know where we are coming from, to understand where we should be going.

He starts with a historical view starting with Alfred Chandler who spoke on Push economy. One fundamental idea: look for scalable efficiency. => the more you do something, the better you get at it. This method was more or less authority guided.

The scalable efficiency curve drives us to keep on going, to move forward at an increasing pace.

Today we are undergoing a fundamental change, leading us to the new face of learning.

S-curve: something is introduced (slow evolution), something is picked up (fast evolution), something is adopted and continuous (slow evolution). But currently, there are new things popping up continuously, restarting an S-curve every-time, increasing the needed adoption speed.
this results in the need to relearn, again and again, in every professional domain.

This fact is undermining current education, for the world is ever changing. This constant change, the half age of any given skill is now reduced to 4 to 5 years.

The big shift: how do we move from stocks of knowledge (knowledge assets), to a world that is ever changing => participation becomes central, which redefines learning and creation. We move from stocks to flows (participating in knowledge flows).

How do you immerse yourself in the context to find the patterns that matter?

It is the big shift, the move from Push to Pull.

So we are at a crisis of Imagination: what can these technologies do, that we did not do before?
Next to this shift, we have an explosion of data at the moment. Every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of age up until 2003.

this challenges our thoughts on how we learn. We need to create a resilient mindset. The importance of the tacit becomes more important (that of which we have only a limited notion, needs to be materialized to make it knowledge that can be taught).

So how do we create a new mindset, that does not run from change, but embraces it (remark from myself: is not this counter human, will we be able to counter Roger's curve?).

Talks about a fortuitous encounter: Maui has never produced champion surfers, all of the prize surfers come from Hawaii. But Dusti Paine, from Maui, wanted to become a hardcore, professional surfer. Dusti searched for peer surfers, to create competition and collaboration to learn from each other, to become the best. It worked, and he became a world champion surfer. What makes this story incredible, is that ALL 5 are now world champion surfers. They looked at all possible surfing video's and tried and learned. Then they recorded themselves, deconstructed each others moves frame by frame... They also move to all the hot-spots, they put up 'bakens' where all surfers can come and share their experiences and moves.
This strengthening by collaboration and competition is true for social media use. Which is also being prepared to fail, time and time again. And today peers learn from each other at an ever increasing pace. And... we all become part of it. It becomes our world.

This is the passionate pursuit of the extreme performance with a deep questing disposition. This is what we all need to acquire or grow.

We must learn to learn from others, to collectively indwell in actions, and to reflect upon it afterward with all the others. Marinating together in a problem space with joint action.
We must learn to step beyond the cognitive, we must transcend cognition (remark from me, well... it is possible when patterns are embedded in the mind by repetition, which allows them to know without consciously knowing. But can we - as adults - embed patterns? or can this only be done with young minds?).

Self-organization is taking place with learners from gaming communities. People gather information from an amazing amount of sites and media, then process it into useful knowledge.

We must learn to open up for serendipity, to get out of our own comfort zone. How much will you expose yourself to, considering stuff you never saw before. We must learn to spend time out of our comfort zones (yes, this would be like following any multi learner course (e.g. PLENK).

Ends with two simple observations: the Red Queen effect (we go faster and faster, but still we fall back more and more. So we need to harness network effects, to dig deeply into learning). Secondly, we must achieve scalable capability building for firms, for institutes. We must learn from others as they learn from us (at best :-) . We must accelerate bootstrapping in a learning ecosystem.

#dl10 The benefits of using voting boxes for increased learning

Some months ago, we - at ITM - started to use voting boxes (or clickers, or some call them audience response systems). The impact of using these boxes got many teachers and trainers interested, so now we are beginning to use them for all sorts of applications.

Below you can find a ppt on the benefits of using voting boxes. This presentation is given at the Devlearn conference in San Francisco, during the mobile learning jam sessions.

Monday 1 November 2010

Yes #dl10, DevLearn 2010 has started and this is where I will present

Devlearn2010 is a blast for anyone interested in eLearning in the broad sense. Technology Enhanced learning is all the rave at this yearly conference which is organized by the eLearning Guild. I will attend, speak and of course meet many of my TELearning friends.

The pre-conference activities already started today and they will continue tomorrow. During Devlearn I will give some presentations as well, but for the full program of all the wonderful speakers click here.

To start of I will give a presentation on the benefits of voting boxes (= audience response system, or clickers) in education and training which is organized on Wednesday 3 November 2010 from 11 am until 11.40 (will publish the presentation in the next day). This is part of the mobile Jam sessions organized by the wonderful Judy Brown.

The great mobile guru Judy Brown also invited me to attend the mobile learning panel of mLearning pioneers which will take place on Wednesday 3 November 2010 at 1 pm until 1.40 pm. This panel discussion features many mobile explorers: Mobile Learning from the Pioneers: Judy Brown, Inge de Waard (me), Robert Gadd, Neil Lasher, Ellen Wagner.

Paul Clothier will be the moderator and lead for the panel discussion on the iPad for learning: hype or the future on 4th November at 10.45 am together with great co-speakers: the amazing David Metcalf (he will be presenting a brand new app), Matt Dunleavy, Neil Lasher and Ellen Wagner.

I will be meeting up with Jan Van Belle, Clark Quinn, Brent Schlenker,and many many others like you. So, if you are there, come up to me and say hello, if I do not wear glasses come up really close :-)