Learning Technologies of Change Blog

Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation with 2 comments The current mind-set about learning, teaching, and education is dominated by a view in which a supposedly all-knowing teacher explicitly tells or shows unknowing, passive learners something they presumably know nothing about. A critical challenge is to reformulate and reconceptualize this impoverished and misleading conception. A culture-of-participation perspective for learning and education is focused not on delivering predigested information to individuals, but on providing opportunities and resources for learners to engage in authentic activities, participate in social debates and discussions, create shared understanding among diverse stakeholders, and frame and solve personally meaningful problems. It is grounded in the fundamental belief that all humans have interest and knowledge  in one or more niche domains and are eager to actively contribute in these contexts. Read Share: Twitter6 Facebook14 LinkedIn3 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 28/05/2012 at 12:00 Posted in Creativity, Participation Tagged with creativity, participation Social Creativity – Exploiting the Power of Cultures of Participation with one comment Social creativity and cultures of participation are facilitated by meta-design that allows stakeholders to act as designers, contributors, and decision makers in  personally meaningful activities.   This paper defines conceptual frameworks  and briefly describes  different applications  contexts  in gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges how to exploit the power of cultures of participation to enhance social creativity. By studying  social  creativity in specific application contexts that foster and support cultures of participation, our research activities have contributed to and  enriched conceptual framework. Achieving and supporting social creativity is not only a technical problem; it requires new cultures, new mindsets, and socio-technical environments that provide people with powerful media to express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Research activities have only scratched the surface of exploiting the power of collective minds equipped with new media. The challenges of  the complex problems that we all face make this approach not a luxury, but a necessity. Read Share: Twitter4 Facebook4 LinkedIn3 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 25/05/2012 at 13:30 Posted in Creativity, Social creativity Tagged with creativity, social creativity Networked: The New Social Operating System with one comment Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking. Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. The new social operating system of “networked individualism” liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks. Rainie and Wellman outline the “triple revolution” that has brought on this transformation: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the Internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Drawing on extensive evidence, they examine how the move to networked individualism has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighborhoods; transformed work into less hierarchical, more team-driven enterprises; encouraged individuals to create and share content; and changed the way people obtain information. Rainie and Wellman guide us through the challenges and opportunities of living in the evolving world of networked individuals Read Share: Twitter6 Facebook5 LinkedIn2 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 21/05/2012 at 14:15 Posted in Networked society, Networking learning, Social network Tagged with networked learning, networked society, social network How Open Education Can Transform Learning with 3 comments As the open education movement grows, the ripple effects of what it means for teachers to take control of what they teach is being witnessed across all spectrums in education. Customizable content, sharing and becoming part of a community, and deconstructing entrenched ideologies about what constitutes quality learning materials — these are just a few paths that the open education movement is creating. Long is worried that all the available resources online will get into the hands of those who already have means, leaving those who don’t even further behind. “Those who have leverage, power and resources are going to pull it off, and those who don’t will be further marginalized in terms of opportunity,” Long said. If the debate is tangled around issues like “public versus private versus charter, we’re going to wake up sooner rather than later with a massive discrepancy.” Read Share: Twitter2 Facebook1 LinkedIn2 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 24/04/2012 at 14:12 Posted in Learning, Open education Tagged with blended learning, open education A Digital Library Recommendation System leave a comment » The present paper has sketched a general family of algorithms to extract meta-data about documents from the way these documents are consulted by users. Implementing such a system in a digital library would automatize much of the hard work that would otherwise need to be performed by highly trained information scientists. However, the results of this system are envisaged to complement or support traditional methods rather than fully replace them. The reason is that the proposed system focuses on otherwise difficult to formalize properties of documents, namely the subjective associations that exist in the mind of the users between their different subjects and contents. The advantage is that these associations allow us to build a system that emulates human intuition, so that it can anticipate the desires of its users and provide them with the information they would find most interesting, even when these users cannot explicitly formulate what they are looking for. This is particularly useful for multimedia documents, which do not contain any searchable keywords, and for queries that are as yet illdefined. Read Share: Twitter1 Facebook1 LinkedIn2 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 17/04/2012 at 15:00 Posted in Digital, Libraries Tagged with digital, libraries The Visual Thinking Revolution leave a comment » We are in the midst of a “Visual Thinking Revolution” and leaders in all types of organizations are embracing visual thinking as a literacy of the future. This revolution’s “tipping point” came earlier this year at the International Forum for Visual Practitioners annual conference, which drew 100 visual practitioners from across the globe. The panel I moderated with Business Models Inc. CEO Patrick van der Pijl  and Doodle Revolution’s Sunni Brown kicked off the conference with an expansive discussion on the future of visual thinking. Captured by three different graphic recorders in real time, we explored 10 significant external forces that are fueling the Visual Thinking Revolution: Read Share: Twitter10 Facebook17 LinkedIn3 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 12/04/2012 at 16:26 Posted in Visualizations Tagged with visualizations Kumu – Connect the dots. with 2 comments Create beautiful maps that bring the big picture to life, allowing you to see your data and problems more clearly. We call it 100% problem-solving complexity-busting goodness. See for yourself how Kumu can help you make a bigger impact today. Map and Connect Elements & Connections. Whether those elements are people, companies, issues, funders, or any other factors in a problem you care about — Kumu has the flexibility to handle it all. Add Context with Tags & Attributes. After building out your map, you’ll want to add rich context information to both the elements and their connections. Track whatever’s important to you. With Kumu, you’re in the driver’s seat. Bring Your Data to Life with Perspectives. Now you’re ready to create beautiful and insightful maps. Kumu makes it easy to extract insights from your data by allowing you to adjust colors, sizes, shadows, haloes, bullseyes, patterns, widths, arrows, and more (whew!) based on the underlying data. Choose whether to view all of your data, or add a filter to focus on what truly matters. Read Share: Twitter1 Facebook2 LinkedIn2 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 11/04/2012 at 18:00 Posted in Maps, Networks Tagged with maps, networks Metatrends on Education and Technology leave a comment » In January one hundred educators from around the globe were invited to Austin, Texas to mark the tenth anniversary of the New Media Consortium Horizon Project, and reflect on no less than the future of education. A Communique from the event listed 10 Major Trends that are having an impact on education globally. They were: Read Read also: Technology Trends in Education Global Trends – Technology Trends Five Trends to Watch in Educational Technology A turning point for education? Trends to watch in 2012 The Impact of Education Technology on Student Achievement Share: Twitter4 Facebook11 LinkedIn3 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 11/04/2012 at 17:30 Posted in Uncategorized “Self-Learning” is the New “Schooling” leave a comment » The idea of “student-centered learning” coupled with “networked learning” has tossed the idea that all learning should only happen through schooling. No longer do classroom walls or school schedules dictate when high-quality learning occurs. Through certain uses of networked technology programs and tools, the lines between educator and learner have become more blurred—allowing individuals to serve in both roles at different times of the day. In the past 30 years, we have gradually learned how to use technology to empower young people to be the drivers of their learning experiences—and we have also learned to expect that the “circle of institutions” surrounding those learners must work together to provide young persons with the best possible means for exploring knowledge through self-driven projects, and creating 360-degree experiences that cultivate positive and productive futures for youth. Read Share: Twitter3 Facebook8 LinkedIn2 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 11/04/2012 at 17:00 Posted in Self-directed learning Tagged with self-directed learning The Importance of Teaching Mindfulness with one comment The direction in which education orients a person, to paraphrase Plato, will determine their future in life. While educational aims should be varied, an underlying goal should be in focusing student awareness in a metacognitive direction. If schools hope to prepare students for our hyper-connected world, it reasons that training students to be proficient with digital tools is only part of the equation. Students must also be mindful of how digital tools and perpetual web connectivity are shaping their brains, perceptions and habits. To that end, several promising studies have demonstrated the power of mindfulness mediation in schools to improve executive functioning, reducing stress, anxiety and aggression. Read Share: Twitter3 Facebook18 LinkedIn3 More Written by Giorgio Bertini 10/04/2012 at 13:00 Posted in Uncategorized http://learningwithtechs.wordpress.com/ « Older Entries