I was interested to read John Seely Brown’s views on ‘A New Culture of Learning’. The book is easy to read and did not disapoint me. I was inspired to write a book review on Amazon as follows:
The new culture of learning comes from applying the boundaries and structures of a virtual or `real world’ environment to harness the vast information resources on the web. A structured environment (which can be a classroom) provides the context where learners are motivated to make use of these resources, exchange information with people with similar interests and develop their own skills and talents. The authors cite the example of massive multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft where a collective of users meet online, organise themselves to engage in challenges and aim to increase their proficiency in the game. The participants are motivated by imagination, challenges, feedback on their performance and rankings compared to others. This type of learning thrives on change and encourages learners to ask better questions to find out what they do not know.
I would like to have seen some case studies of how the new culture of learning has been applied to formal education.
John Seely Brown is well-known as a scholar and writer. He is the co-founder of the Institute of Research and Learning and director of the Xerox Parc Research Centre. His colleague Douglas Thomas is a professor with research interests in games and culture, interactive media and the intersection of technology and culture.
A New Culture of Learning on Amazon
My book review
July 28th, 2011
While PowerPoint has its detractors, I think this must be the first time a political party has been set up to combat its misuse. As far as I know, no other piece of software, has had such a powerful impact! In Switzerland, the anti-PowerPoint Party is collecting signatures to hold a referendum to reduce the amount of PowerPoint presentations given in business, education and in the wider community. Its founder, Matthias Poehm, is an advocate of the flip-chart. He is a former software engineer who has become a professional presenter, speaker and trainer. He claims vast amounts of time and, therefore, money are lost by people attending ineffective PowerPoint presentations. Presentations made with a flip-chart are more engaging as the presenter can create graphs and diagrams in front of the audience.
Personally, I think that many PowerPoint presentations are poorly designed (too much information, endless bullet points, etc) and poorly presented (reading off slides, using slides as notes). Some basic design training and presentations skills would go a long way to make the presentations more engaging, though some speakers will never be engaging no matter what tools or tricks they use.
There are probably too many meetings and presentations anyway … or at least too many people attending them… perhaps that’s where the real waste lies.
July 22nd, 2011
#edmedia11 was the most tagged tweet in Portugal during the Ed-Media conference, according to the organisers, the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). STAT – the Semantic Analysis Twitter Tool – gives a detailed analysis of the 3,745 tweets in its archive. Crismattos was the most prolific tweeter with 496 tweets, compared to my modest 11 tweets. The most tweeted terms included learning (288), open (182) and keynote (181).
While tweets are written on the spot, blog posts are typically written after the event when the writer has had time to digest and reflect on the conference. A Google search (4 pages deep) found the following blog posts and one wiki page about Ed-Media 2011:
July 20th, 2011
Donald Clark is always good for a debate and frank discussion of matters educational. In a recent blog post he listed 7 Objections to the use of Social Media in Learning … and also came up with answers to those same objections. As a regular note-taker both on paper and digitally (laptop or iPhone) I was pleased to read that he sees note-taking as one of the principal benefits of Social Media… and blogs as one of the best ways of doing so. Twitter can be useful for announcements, sharing links and letting others know what is going on (at a conference, for example). Personally, I find writing this blog helps me clarify my own thoughts. Posts are long enough to elaborate on an idea, allow comments and are archiveable and searchable.
Donald’s keynote for ALT-C in 2010 was Don’t Lecture Me – on the pedagogical value (or lack thereof) of the lecture. See previous post in this blog.
July 3rd, 2011
George Siemens, Erik Duval and others introduced openness as a conference theme to about 700 participants at Ed-Media 2011 in Lisbon.
George Siemens is well-known for his work on connectivism uses social media such as his blog to act as an influencer both with academics and the wider public. His latest ventures include Massive Online Open Courses such as his Change MOOC and the Univerity of Illinois’ Online Learning Today & Tomorrow and Mendeley,(still under development) is a social network for academics. Despite, or may be because of, his high profile and activity in social media, George is still working on his PhD.
Despite its emphasis on social networking, the conference structure was quite traditional with keynotes and lots and lots of PowerPoint presentations, some well-designed and presented others consisting of text heavy pages or lots of bullet points. Some more group activities and discussion would have been welcome.
July 1st, 2011
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