A cheery title for a Friday morning, dont’ cha think? I seem to be bombarded with articles that question the readiness of the education system to meet the needs of students in our tech-whizz-bang age. I’m not sure if it’s just become a trendy topic or whether I’m just looking out for it more (have you noticed when you buy a new car, suddenly everyone else on the road seems to have bought the same one?)
Which is very nice for SocialLearn. We’ve spent 2 years really understanding how the social web can provide a solution for those that don’t fit in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ education system. But we are also a team who like to question everything, so it was refreshing to be handed a copy of Neil Selwyn’s The digital native – myth and reality. In Neil’s own words, he “offers a critical perspective on popular and political understandings of young people and digital technologies – characterised by notions of ‘digital natives’, the ‘net generation’ and other commonsense portrayals of expert young technology users”.
Learning 2.0Comments Off on Dissent and dissatification
With just over a week to go before the deadline I’m trying to get together a pitch for TechCrunch50. I may be defeated by the fact we are a teeny tiny bit behind schedule in our development. But nevertheless I’m trying to shape the pitch which has been on my to-do-list for a few months. We have to submit a video pitch so I’ve been looking around for inspiration and stumbled across this Kaplan University ad on Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine blog. It made me smile… maybe I’ll do a parody. All I need is access to the UK’s equivalent of The Fresh Prince’s Uncle Phil.
This week Richard Katz was at The Open University giving a talk called ‘Digital Age – Real Disruption’. He talked about The Busyness of Scholarship and how digital discovery, retrieval, assessment, annotation, tagging, indexing and storage has made scholarship more efficient. He also talked about the liberation of knowledge and the challenge of curation.
One of the nuggets that has stuck in my mind is a quote he used from Marshall McLuhan:
“The past dissolves before the future resolves”
SocialLearn might be The Future of Learning – albeit a small piece of a loosely joined future. In fact Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation model has encouraged us to develop a learning platform on the social web in order to shape the future of distance education. If we accept that a) technologies are changing what is possible in education, and b) a new generation of learners will have expectations based on their use of technology, then we should be hearing the hiss of the past as it starts to dissolve. We should grow our business on the assumption there are significant changes coming in the way people teach and learn – technically, pedagogically and philosophically. As a business we need to adapt quicker and be better than our competitors. As a distance learning institution we are perhaps most at risk from new offerings in online learning. On the flip side we also have most to offer and gain and we should be the quickest to adapt in the HE sector.
Yet the past has not yet dissolved and so the future is anything but resolved. It remains to be seen whether SocialLearn is the solvent to the current Open University model. When the past dissolves, we might begin to see what a future solution looks like. In the meantime the mantra is innovate, experiment, iterate. Richard raised the issue that the ‘cheap, quick and dirty’ approach (taken by many disruptive innovations) was a problem for universities. I wish he had elaborated.
One of Richard’s slides suggested a future solution might be “An education as simple, rich, accessible and diverse as applications from the Apple app store”. He also said:
“In the next decade the modern university is less likely to be a place, than an idea instantiated in architecture – physical and virtual”.
