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).
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:
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.
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!
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):
The 42 of #4T2
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.
Who is Hans? (Click to enlarge)What does Hans do? (Click to enlarge)
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.
I hadn’t been there before and was pleasantly surprised with the level of game-related development activity the directors Viktor Wijnen and Jan-Pieter van Seventer have managed to organize in a single building. More than 30 game organizations have their offices in the building, they have an incubator function and they sponsor a Game Developers Club geared for increasing the level of collaboration between students of game design. Commercial companies and educational institutes are mixed. Smart concepts like the option to have a virtual office or the renting of single desks have made this the obvious place to be for anybody interested in the gaming scene.
It must be possible to use this cross-pollination concept for other domains too. Where is the “Dutch Industrial Design Garden” or the “Dutch Journalism Garden” or the “Dutch Indie Multimedia Publishing Garden”? It will be hard to think of a better way to induce innovation in a domain on a particular location.
Kars showed me his book collection and talked about some of the design projects he is doing. I’ve written before about Code 4, he is working on a game for Het Universiteitsmuseum in which parents and children use a single iPhone to explore the museum and compete with each other and he gave me some background on the ideas behind Pig Chase, a game that will be played between humans and pigs:
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/29046176]
A new theme for my thinking about learning and working will be the idea of the reflective practitioner nicely defined in Wikipedia as somebody with the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of contineous learning. Kars obviously embodies this spirit (read about his talk at Lift12 if your are in doubt: The Social Contract Put at Play). I have not often seen this level of deep thinking about what you are trying to accomplish with games with any of the other game “vendors” that I’ve met in the last year. Actually, I think we lack reflective practitioners in general in the learning industry. How can we change this?
I thoroughly enjoyed playing some of the games at the lunch by the way. My personal favorite of the afternoon was “Tennes”, made by the two-man game studio Vlambeer. Below an interview with the duo:
Their games are insanely fun to play. I’ve just lost two and half hours on Radical Fishing, their “simulation of the noble pastime that is traditional redneck fishing”, and I love everything about Luftrauser:
