This week I needed to create a small presentation which could help learning professionals do some forward thinking. I decided to repurpose an earlier keynote given to the Dommel Valley group (you can find that presentation here), strip out many of the slides and record a voice-over including cheesy sound effects.
Please find below 9 non-exhaustive things I see happening in corporate learning in the near future and 9 questions that every Learning Professional in 2011 should ask themselves based on these points. I realise that the presentation might feel rushed (it had to fit in 15 minutes) and that many of the points need more explanation to be sensible to the average reader of this blog. However, I do hope that these questions could prod at least a few learning professionals into action.
Today I had the pleasure of doing a guest lecture for Bits of Freedom at the University of Leiden in a course titled Anthropology of Information Society. I used many examples to try and drive home two points:
Technology is not just a tool, it is not “neutral”
You can help change technology for the better
One thing the students did, was write their own personal data policies (kind of like a reverse terms of service for using a webservice). This is something that I intend to explore further in this blog pretty soon.
Bits of Freedom is doing important work (and are effective in the way they do their job). I am therefore honoured to ocassionally field some of their speaker requests. Today I presented at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam on Privacy and the Internet and had some good talks with the students afterwards.
I am not sure the slides make a lot of sense without the audio, but if you augment them with a visit to some of the links in this bundle, then you might understand a bit better in which ways the Internet’s permance, replicability, scale and searchability (thank you danah) should affect the way we think about privacy going forward.
On November 8th 2010 I delivered a keynote at the second Symposium of the Dommel Valley Group in Eindhoven. The theme of the day was “Informal Learning”. My presentation touched on the “Learning DNA” of the company I work for, looked at some of our efforts in the informal learning space and brought up nine (non-exhaustive) things that I see coming up in the near future.
Please check out my slides (or download a 4.3MB PDF copy of them):
The nine points led me to ask the audience nine questions:
Have you shared something explicitly in the last week?
Do you feel you are an expert on what makes a human brain tick and where motivation comes from?
Do you have the capability/capacity to capture and deliver video?
Are you creating multiple learning strategies (i.e. are you diversifying)?
Do you own an Android/iOS/Windows 7 smartphone?
Have you ever started with the best performers to see how something should be done?
Have you been the steward of an online community of practice?
Does your organisation have a meta-layer on top of its content/information?
Is your first instinct to find the great learning materials that exist before you create your own?
I personally cannot answer “yes” to all of these questions, but I am committed to work towards a “yes” on all of them in the next couple of months. To how many of these questions can you answer “yes”?
Finally, this is the first time I used the the concept of Social Contextualization of Content in a presentation. I look forward to exploring the concept further in a future post.
Yesterday morning I got up at 6:30 to deliver a presentation at the very first virtual Moodlemoot: iMoot 2010. All in all it was a hugely enjoyable experience. I had people attending from among other the United States, Ireland, Zambia, Australia, Japan.
The platform for delivery of the session was Elluminate, which worked flawless. I am still amazed at the fact that we now have easy access to the technology that makes a virtual conference with a worldwide audience possible.
My talk was titled “The Future of Moodle of How Not to Stop It”, an adaptation of the book by Zittrain.
I showed how Moodle was conceived and developed when the web was less mature then it is now (the social web as we know it was basically non-existent) and how a teacher can create a learning experience for his or her students using nothing but loosely coupled free tools. Horses for courses.
I then looked at the two mental models that Moodle could adapt from Drupal:
Drupal’s tagline is “Community Plumbing”. I believe Moodle’s could be “Learning Plumbing”.
Drupal sees itself as a platform. This is exactly what Moodle should reinvent itself as.
In the final part of the presentation I looked at how the new Moodle 2.0 API’s (repository, portfolio, comments and webservices) will be able to help make the shift towards a platform. I finished with asking people to imagine what an appstore for repository plugins and what an appstore for learning activities would look like.
The slides are on Slideshare and embedded below (you can also download a 2MB PDF version). The session has been recorded. Once that recording comes online, I will update this post and try and share that here too.
The one difficult thing about a virtual conference, by the way, is communicating the dates and times. Timezones add a lot of complexity. iMoot, for example, provides users with a custom schedule for their timezone and replays each session twice after the live event. I am starting to believe in the Swatch Internet Time concept again. Wouldn’t a single metric .beat not be great? See you @850!
