Would love your feedback on the list of trends created by my students. I have had a strictly advisory role in the creation of them… in the “i fight but don’t win” kinda way. A pretty solid first day from my perspective. We made a list of trends, we brainstormed, and rebrainstormed and stormed some more. This post describes the work done during the day and then lists the trends that the students came up with. Feel free to add more trends or just make comments.
I started the day by creating a powerpoint of their responses from day one showing them (if they didn’t know) that with all their ideas combined, we could teach a course. community. as. curriculum.
Trends
These trends are the meat of the whole exercise. We’ll be using them to talk about our decision making and then going over them to rate them, to cross-examine them, to think about how much control we might have over them and then, finally, what effect they may have on the future.
Intro to trends… what are we looking for in the first place?
We first need to create boundaries around what we mean by trends, by drivers and develop some language to talk about them.What does a trend look like? What would an example of a trend look like?
Brainstorm no. 1.
First list created by students in a brainstorm session. Two students at the board, me stomping around rallying the troops. We did the first list on the white board and then moved to the web. One student suggested that we start with etherpad… which worked very nicely. The students cowrote the early draft of the trends… i’d guess we had close to twenty of them after the first brainstorming session. In retrospect it might have been better if i’d been on the marker encouraging a bit more ‘statement’ and a little less ‘two words’. It might have saved in the editing process.
Insert-able exercise
Future of Singapore in 2015. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1OFZlE7CeU&feature=player_embedded We watched this video (with the sound off) and tracked the trends that were being described in it. We added the ones we didn’t have to our list…
What is actually different and what is superficially different?
Brainstorm no. 2
Is the list relevant? Is there something else out there? Lets take this list and compare it against the outcomes that are mentioned in the department of education’s future document. What are the trends that are driving us in this direction? Which are the critical trends, which are less involved? Create a new list of things missed in the first list.
Interlude and brainstorm 3. a walk on the wild side.
What potential wildcards are on the horizon?
We watched the apple video from 1987. Talked about some of the comparisons between this and the earlier video. What is knowledge in this world? What does it mean to ‘teach’.
Reviewed list with the group
We added numbers to the trends… a painful process that forced us to demarcate between explanations, thoughts, reasonings and trends.
Review and grades
We then went back into our groups, took 11 trends each and graded them for inevitability and for their impact on education. The groups were also responsible for making them tidy. As you can see from the trends below, i should have said more about format 🙂
Which seem inevitable or pre-determined?
Which forces are most likely to define or significantly change the nature or direction of education?
- big list
- The size of computers and other devices are becoming smaller and more portable
- The power of computers and other devices are increasing
- Capability has become portable.????
- An increasing amount of computing tasks will be done on mobile devices, such as PDA, mobile phones, tablet PCs, etc., over desktop type computers
- Real-world learning objects are increasingly tagged thus becoming available to the mobile learning community
- Work and Play will become increasingly mobile (‘on-the-go’) through the use of multiple resources besides equipment and space
- Tied with accessibility. Concerns are two ways, you have more access to the public and the public has more access to you due to portable devices.A, [E] C: open coursewares
- Advantages: More work can be done on the go. A,C: efficiency, e.g.google docs can collaborate w others
- Disadvantages: More work is expected to be done on the go (regardless of where you are, what you are doing).A
- Portability will lead to learning outside of confined spaces and common schedules towards a more user-determined environment
- People expect instantaneous response and feedback to work and assignments
- Greater wireless connectivity.
- Greater wireless power
- More collaborative learning
- Trends towards more affordable means of collaboration
- Better language translation capabilities
- Trends towards outsourcing
- People increasing using multiple identities
- Growth in Social Networks and use of social networks in professional life
- Increased use of Virtual Reality technologies. More adoption in Education specifically healthcare simulation etc.
- Trend is towards democratisation of information and human activities, including learning
- Realtime time, multiuser communication across borders
- Copyrights: Increase in the use of Creative Commons license and it becomes easier to remix content
- The trend is towards less use of paper.
- The trend is towards more comfortable reading experience off the screen.
- The trend is towards more efficient and more secure transmission of data.
- The trend is towards more accessible information online.
- The trend is towards a more realistic and richer virtual reality experience.
- The trend is towards a more pervasive availability of 3D experience, from entertainment to education.
- The trend is to attempt to pack in more activities at the same time.
- The trend is towards a better ability to scale information larger or smaller.
- The trend is towards faster (real-time) online translation.
- The trend is to make more location based services available.
- The trend is towards easy access to online services e.g. e-doctor
- The trend is towards lifestyle-based mobile phone rather than function-based.
- The trend is towards technology-enhancing human abilities (eg, Spellchecker, Online Dictionary, Thesaurus.)
- Convergence – More devices are moving towards being multifunctional (a mobile phone to call, email, IM, tweet, Google, etc)
- Unstructured Learning Environments – People are learning out of the traditional structure by seeking out information on their own instead of having it delivered to them by conventional means (schools, teachers, etc.)
- Collaborative Learning – Learning is becoming more collaborative (discussion boards, online forums, social bookmarking, etc.)
- Companies like Google and Delicious are organizing data on the Internet for users to find more easily.
- People are becoming more trusting of information found on the Internet
- New laws and regulations are being drawn up by the Government with regards to the Internet and online communities.
