Singular Vision for a Disparate Future--innovateonline.info Article for You

I have to share this (no, it's not my ISTE member profile feature finally online!), an innovateonline.info article projecting the higher education classroom of 2035. It's rather densely written, stylistically speaking, but it has some things to say that you need to hear, if, that is, you care about the future of education, teaching and learning. Here's a little sample:

Similarly, the idea of campus-based learning communities will continue to cede ground to distributed immersive models in which a larger percentage of students' time-on-task is spent engaged in participatory knowledge creation across networks of dispersed learners and learning communities (Foreman 2007; New Media Consortium 2008). The most engaging content will be online and will build on trends in virtual worlds (Exhibit 1), gaming (Exhibit 2), and personal feedback (Exhibit 3) (van Dam, Becker, and Simpson 2005). Today’s Web feed protocols (Exhibit 4) are forerunners of a comprehensive data network that will provide learners with a continuous and personalized stream of information and perspectives.

Read A Singular Vision for a Disparate Future: Technology Adoption Patterns in Higher Learning Through 2035. If you haven't registered, you should. Doesn't cost a nickel...

I'm Catching Up

Or not. I'm actually finally getting to my Netvibes after a very busy day at work and then at home. I've been treated in the last 15 minutes to (via Netvibes) David Warlick's opinion-challenging commentary on pedagogy and Alex Courosa's (via Twitter) provocative slides for his Web 2.0 pressie. I love, btw, David's occasional typos and grammatical boo-foos: They remind me 1) that he's in the moment when he posts and 2) that he's human--the man works 'way harder than anyone should have to...

The conversation is about the value of pedagogy, or what Clay Burell calls "schooliness" in the service of learning. What do you think? Be bold. Talk to us...

Here's Alex's slideshow:

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U.S. Students Below Average in Science and Math

From THE Journal*, a favorite source for current trends, a report that I'll add to my resource bank for an upcoming presentation in San Antonio about university outreach to K12 schools. Go read the article, and what's up with Canadian science education that places it in the top 5? Mind you, results are based on one of my favorite whipping-boys, standardized testing. But still...

And in math...

See the line at 500? That's the international median line. Clearly, something's wrong with the long-running argument that the poor performance of our students in science and math is "urban myth."

We clearly need some work here. My sense is that there are a passle of well-meaning educators out there working as hard as they can with out-dated tools and restrictions to teach kids content and skills, but if they were to be set free to innovate and energize the imaginations of their students, engage them, draw them into the larger context, "performance" would follow. What we need is teachers who are knowledgeable in both the current collaborative learning technologies and in ways to make sure that new ones don't fly under their professional radars. Wheels turning again...

*Nagel, Dave. "U.S. Students Below Average in Science and Math." THE Journal December 200712 December 2007 1,2. 12 December 2007 .

Innovate---Journal of Online Education Redesign!

I'm pretty proud of my very first peer-reviewed professional journal paper, released in the October/November volume 2, 2005, issue number 1 of innovate-Journal of Online Education; and this exraordinary resource for educators K-20 (and learners of any level) has gone on since then to release issue after issue of valuable research driven papers and webinars. It's just this month released a GREAT site redesign. Hence this post. See my paper, "Videoconferencing K-12: The state of the Art," at the new site. Check out the one hour webinar (a condition of publication, and a free archived continuing resource for both authors and audience) I subsequently delivered. If you're not impressed yet, check out the "About this Journal" page.

Bookmark this site! And sign up for the listserv for once-a-month receipt of new publication announcements; I've just been approved to submit an article for a future special issue on education in Second Life--more news on that later...