Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012 – Opening Night

These few days I (and 1600 others) will be attending Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012. I will be hosting a session with Marcel de Leeuwe and will be blogging about what I see.

The opening evening started with Lisa Nicole Wilkerson singing Defying Gravity, one of the themes of the conference.

Masie then made a comparison between how we watch television nowadays (everything on-demand and personalized) and how we do learning today (not quite there yet). So one of the themes is personalized learning. Another challenge that he sees is what he calls the Learning Mix: mixing live events with on-demand events. One more theme is Learning Together (he doesn’t like the term “Social Learning”). In this domain Masie touched my heart by talking about SharePoint “as a technology without a methodology”. A final theme will be Learning Everywhere.

The first keynote speaker was Richard Culatta. I first met him at this conference in 2008 when he was still at the CIA and presenting in the “trenches” of the conference. His career has progressed and he was now on the main stage. A lot of the conversation was quite obvious (at least for me), but I liked the short discussion about how learners will necessarily become designers. Richard also made a plea for there to be more “edupreneurs” and has started a MOOC, Ed Startup 101, to help this process. I’d be curious to hear his thoughts about the debatable role of VC capital in the educational world (see here and here).

Elizabeth Bryant from Southwest Airlines came to pick up a “Spotlight” award. Elizabeth talked about the learning centralization journey at Southwest.

Masie has started a program titled 30 under Thirty. All 32 of them (don’t ask) came on stage and talked a little bit about what drives them. They will be doing “reverse mentoring” at the event. Interesting concept!

Jenny Zhu of ChinesePod fame came to talk about the Masie Asia Project. This seems to be Masie’s attempt at getting a foothold in the fast-growing learning market in the East. I like Zhu’s post on 10 Chinese words that don’t have an English equivalent.

Lisa Pedrogo from CNN got a Masie award a few years back for her work with video in the learning space. Elliott shot a little video of her. He apparently did not get the memo about how to shoot video with a phone (from here, with a thank you to Marcel de Leeuwe for sharing it with me):

Lisa discussed how we shouldn’t make video more difficult than it really is. You shouldn’t be scared of using it and you should just have fun.

The final speaker of the night was Rahul Varma, the Chief Learning Officer of Accenture. It is interesting to see that Accenture has chosen somebody based in the East to head up learning for them. This probably has to do with the fact that the country with the most of their employees is India. He also talked about what he termed the talent challenge: how the rate of talent development will not keep pace with the growth of the emerging markets.

Finally, one interesting element of the conference is the Real-Time track comprising 15% of the scheduled content at the conference. This is explicit time and space for people to organize their own events. I will try to visit at least one of these events to see if and how they are working.

Facilitating “DIY” (Do-It-Yourself) Learning at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012

In late October I will be attending Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012.

This year Marcel de Leeuwe and I will be hosting a learning lab session which is described as follows:

Facilitating “DIY” (Do-It-Yourself) Learning

Only knowledge workers themselves really know what their jobs entail, which makes providing learning for them increasingly difficult. The level of connectedness in our world and the abundance of suitable technical tools now allow these workers to organize many parts of their own learning. So, what is our role as learning professionals in this new world of “DIY” learning? We can empower our employees to create those tailored learning experiences!

Examples of self-organized learning from surprising places, like MOOCs, Edupunk, the world of juggling and social media in corporations
The principles behind facilitating self-organized learning
Create your own high-level design for a self-organized learning event

It would be great if you could make it to the session. You are more than welcome! Also, I am always interested to meet new people in the world of learning and (open) technology, so do reach out to me if you would like to have a chat in Orlando. I am especially interested in truly innovative uses of learning analytics and networked learning (i.e. a Connectivist pedagogy).

Will it Blend? Blended Learning and Quality

A few days ago I presented at a teacher’s conference at the Hogeschool Utrecht (HU) on the topic of Blended Learning and Quality. Naturally I started the talk with one of the Will it blend? videos:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC8Zvl-8ziA]

I then referenced the seven problems that are written up by Kapp and O’Driscoll in Learning in 3D. Blended learning could be seen as a way to fix some of these problems. You do this through sound instructional design in which you blend working and learning (rather than face-to-face and online). I then highlighted the first principles of instruction that M. David Merrill wrote up and work that Betty Collis and Anoush Margaryan have done to expand this work into Merrill Plus.

Below my slides (in Dutch):

[slideshare id=14499735&doc=120926willitblendhu-120928033020-phpapp02]

(download them here if the embedding doesn’t work for you)

Moodle Changes its Approach to Mobile

I haven’t been blogging much about Moodle lately, but this news excited me very much, so I’ll do a quick write-up.

Moodle HQ has decided to move away from native mobile Moodle app development and will switch to developing with HTML 5 and the open source mobile development framework Phonegap. This will allow developers to work on a single codebase and compile a release for all mobile platforms simultaneously. The important part in the news item is this:

The app will be highly modular, and allow the community to contribute to development just like Moodle itself. [..] Although we will lose a little speed and smoothness in the interface when moving to HTML5, I think the idea of building up community effort around a cross-platform mobile client will far outweigh that and sets us up better for the long term. [..] The app will be licensed under the GPL. You are allowed to fork it and build your own custom apps if you wish. (Institutions may want to rebrand it and modify it for their own purposes).

This is the first open source project that I know of that has taken this approach. I’ve always found the way that the mobile space fragments development efforts irksome. I’ve also seen very few true open source projects targeting mobile technology. This masterstroke of Martin Dougiamas solves both of these problems. Once again he is at the vanguard of community based software development. His has my attention!

You can read more about the app here or check out its roadmap.

Update: I’ve now learned that this approach towards mobile started at CV&A Consulting, a Moodle partner in Spain. Kudos to Juan Leyva for coming up with Unofficial Moodle Mobile which will now drop the “unofficial” part!

#4T2 at the Dutch Kennisnet

In the Netherlands we have an organization called Kennisnet (literally translated as “Knowledgenet”) that was created by the Dutch government to be a center of expertise, facilitation and innovation around the topic of Information Technology and learning.

Recently they have started a project titled #4T2 where they bring together 42 people to shape their innovation agenda. The group of 42 consists of 21 learners, young people who have shown that they are special in some way and 21 professionals, people with an interest in learning and technology (I am part of this second group):

We had our first session on May 21st. The presence of 21 young and extremely bright people made me feel old (and inconsequential) to be frank. I realized that there is a new generation and that I have lost touch with them since I left my teaching job more than 5 years ago.

I had interesting conversations with Robert van Hoesel who is helping kickstart a new mobile provider for young people *bliep and with Niels Gouman who runs the website and consultancy business Strategisch Lui (“strategically lazy”) where he teaches freelancers how to be more effective with their time.

The young people had to introduce the professionals and vice versa. Dzifa Kusenuh had the task to introduce me. Her printer wasn’t working so she decided to draw two pictures and talk to them.

I loved seeing what she picked up on from the 30 minute phone conversation we had (check her interpretation of the org-chart for example). I guess this is the “essential Hans”, thank you Dzifa!

I’ll try and make sure to blog about the next meeting where we will discuss some of Kennisnet’s innovation themes.