למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

One might say, then, that a sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one’s being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends. In fact, if it were up to me, I would forbid anyone from talking about the new information technologies unless the person can demonstrate that he or she knows something about the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, and telegraphy. In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies.

Today’s life and work environments require far more than thinking skills and content knowledge. The ability to navigate the complex life and work environments in the globally competitive information age requires students to pay rigorous attention to developing adequate life and career skills.

We live in an era where it is widely believed that we face an epochal challenge to guide our students into an information age of immense complexity, promise, and peril. We expect our students to spend countless hours working on computers. Yet we push their hands-on online engagement into a virtual environment that does nothing to equip them with practical and transferable web skills. Nor are they engaging the world-wide web in a spirit of critical inquiry. They are in a system, they are being managed.

I recently heard a short episode of the science podcast Radiolab entitled Brown Box. In it, reporter Mac McLelland goes to work at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. one of the mega-warehouses that feed internet retailing. If you are wondering what a fully-rendered data-driven workplace looks like, these people have made remarkable progress in that direction.

At some point, listening to this episode, I realized I had my perspective aligned completely wrong. Here I was thinking that by confining teaching and learning within a managed and artificial space, we were neglecting to provide an opportunity to develop the skills and critical thinking needed to thrive in an increasingly digitized world.

What I realize now is that by directing our students to adapt to a world in which they can exercise no control over their environment, where every click and eyeball twitch is monitored and analyzed by inscrutable algorithms, we are in fact preparing them for the real world of work (and society) that they will be living in. The Learning Management System is in fact a near-perfect training ground for the life that awaits them.

we have concluded that in order to elevate elearning to the height of its promise, we need to begin with a personal commitment to a new set of standards.

If I were writing a manifesto it would be more about making my profession unnecessary, so that people wouldn't need specially designed materials in order to learn, but rather, could forge learning out of raw materials for themselves.

But in business, our goals are not learning, our goals are improving performance. And courses, particularly the “event” model for courses, are one of the worst ways to go about achieving learning for performance!

I strongly believe that describing digital as a tool diminishes its profound impact on the world we live in. Digital has transformed society, government, culture, business, media and more. Barely an aspect of our lives has not been touched in some way.

Therefore, when I write about forming a digital strategy, I am not referring to a strategy for using a tool. I am talking about forming a strategy to adapt to the fundamental changes that digital has brought upon society.

Too many educators still discuss “digital” as a nice-to-have add-on, grafted onto what we’re already doing (as in “digital” learning, for example), rather than adapting the tools to fundamentally change what we do. (הקישור מוביל למאמרון אחר של סטאמר שמאד כדאי לקרוא.)

Education’s most energetic and innovative leaders from all backgrounds of the learning landscape including teachers, administrators, university professors, business and policy leaders converge each March at the SXSWedu Conference & Festival. The four-day event is a platform for the growing SXSWedu community to connect, collaborate, create and change how we teach and learn.

Inside every BrainRush, our Adaptive Practice™ technology applies the science of learning to your gameplay. Each game engages your brain in rapid-fire practice that adapts to your exact needs, so learning is maximized during every second of play.

Next up: I'll be live-tweeting Nolan Bushnell's #SXSWedu talk on "Education and Gaming"... unless my brain explodes or I run out screaming

"In 5 years learning will be 10 times faster" -- Nolan Bushnell #sxswedu #taylorism

"What is the best breakfast for a student? Maybe it's a protein mix. I believe we'll know the answer in 2 years" - Nolan Bushnell #sxswedu

"Students today have different brains" - Nolan Bushnell #fuckyeahscience #sxswedu

"Learning should be active with extreme time pressure" - Nolan Bushnell #WTF #makingshitup #sxswedu

If institutions provide an institutional eportfolio system, doesn’t this imply a larger burden of support? Moving beyond the forget about the student once they graduate approach to maintaining a life-long relationship? I’m sure I read something like that in some marketing spiel.

But in the last few years, the web has gone stagnant. Certain models of development, and certain tools, have become dominant, and online teaching has become far less exciting.

The entire process promotes the idea that ed tech is too complex for ordinary faculty, promoting dependence and lack of agency.

Oh, how far we have fallen! Just two decades later the LMS, not the web, has become where universities do most of their web-related work with students. University websites are little more than glorified admissions brochures. In a depressing twist of fate, higher ed has outsourced the most astounding innovation in communications history that was born on its campuses. Through a process that started in earnest during the late 1990s—roughly at the same time the dot.com market boom—universities moved to a market-driven corporate IT logic. Digital communications were understood as services, and the open web got lumped with email, intranets, and the LMS as a business application. Somewhere during this time the internet was confused with efficiency and the web was mistaken for an interactive fact sheet.