Here’s an infographic illustrating the mentality that not only community managers (those with that official title) but also learning designers, employees, students, EVERYONE in a community need to have. We are ALL community managers and relationship builders.
Investing in relationships, online and offline, is the key activity in this hyperconnected world. Relationships are one of the most important forms of currency.
We need to have the mindset of every action (again, online and offline) being that of investing more of this currency into our knowledge economy. So, let’s put on the hat of community managers. Take a step toward being a meaningful relationship investor.
It’s now about the “media” in social media. It’s about the social, not matter what media. It’s about relationships that can be fostered through different medium types (media). Don’t get the “media” confused with electronic objects/assets… media as in means, medium.
Let’s all treasure our communities.
What does that mean to us Learning professionals? Let’s foster discussions in our different social media channels, let’s consolidate groups, let’s share best practices for creating communities and better utilizing the relationships we have across the board.
Let’s make it easy for people to communicate openly, let’s clean up, let’s facilitate, mediate, instigate…
When we normally think of reusable learning objects we think of reusing them in other traditional learning settings, be it a chapter of a student manual or a video used in a different e-learning course (yes, e-learning is traditional, isn’t it?).
When we think of modular, reusable learning objects we have to think of them as not just reusable in a traditional sense, but imagine them as shareable learning objects. Media elements to be spread in different social media sites by us (designers/developers) and learners themselves. For instance, when creating a job aid about a process or concept, make it attractive, publish it on different social media sites like Pinterest (the new fad now) so others can also share it. Or perhaps you design a video that can not only be used in a course, but also shared via YouTube. Those are simple examples, but we have to think of learning as a continuum, not just self-contained experiences.
Don’t just design self-contained experiences, design pieces of a whole that can also function separately. Pieces that can be reused, shared in different social networks.
Don’t just design learning media, design potentially social media.
It”s not not uncommon for geeks to do some wishful thinking a line any mortal hoping their tech dreams will come true in the new year to come.
Id like to make some predictions for 2012 as well. Just a few humble predictions and observations.
1. Education everywhere
And by everywhere I don’t mean the whole any device anytime anywhere hype. I mean, everyone in every part of the world (except cultures that don’t accept technology and our views of Education of course) will have access to quality Education and educational technology. We will see more initiatives such as EducateNCare, which encourages professionals to provide some of their knowledge and time to tutors children in developing countries online. With initiatives such as this, others will see the need to equip this on the other end of the connection, the local students and teachers. We’ll be even more aware of the need to capacitate professionals in their own native countries.
2. Open educational content will actually be OPEN
Many institutions offer open courseware and content for anyone to access. What we will see is more open source content out there, not just open access content, but content that can be reshaped, and shared forward with other educators and learners via a license such as Creative Commons.
3. Learning on smart TVs
With all these smart devices proliferating, Education should take more advantage of them and be, well, smart Education. eLearning is made mostly with the old desktop metaphor in mind. But thing about all kids of fantastic learning experiences we could have of we designed for different smart devices. I’m not talking just about mobile devices with gyroscopes, location awareness, multitouch interfaces, I mean even (smart) connected TVs. If even the good ol’ tube is changing; why cant we innovate in how we do education in it as well?
4. Micro-location learning and information
We’re all familiar with the concept of GPS devices or mobile map applications taking you from point A to point B with guided turn-by-turn directions and pop-up traffic/trip conditions and events warnings. However, these technologies are normally only for outdoors navigation. You’re lost inside a building. This is a problem that Google has taken on now with their new solution Google Maps indoors feature, which offers guidance inside buildings such as airports. However, in 2012 we’ll see the rise of microlocation-based learning, which can provide guidance within buildings and institutions indoors. Imagine the educational uses of such mobile applications: exploring the workplace, accurately connecting with others inside of buildings to share information and perhaps serendipitously meet up for lunch (yes, learning is about forging relationships with others with whom we share or not interests), on-demand information about machines as a learner walks by it. Better yet, as the learner walks by that very same machine, s/he will be prompted by an alert on their location-aware device that there is something wrong with it and that it needs repair, not only that, but the alert will show what exactly is wrong with it and give the user an option to follow an interactive strep-by-step repair “tour”. On the job support, information, and true task-based learning about specific concepts, tools, processes as the learner actually does it.
5. Education institutions will allow more social media
With the advent of better content aggregation and curation techniques, Education institutions will appreciate more of the educational applications of social media and feel safer in letting students access social media resources to learn. Youtube has recently released it’s Youtube EDU which allows educators and schools to allow access (mostly) to content they approve on their channel by using technologies such as filters. Students will be given access to a variety of social media services in school as these services start to offer options for content access based on some of the issues faced by schools, issues such as inappropriate or distracting content.
6. [Bonus Prediction] Motion-based learning gets popular and affordable
As devices like the XBox Kinect and Playstation Move start to become more popular, we should see more affordable motion-based learning experiences in the field. Moreover, we should see precise motion training and job aids coupled with Augmented Reality HUDs as employees try to solve real-life problems in the workplace.
There is a vast sea of information out there. In fact, it’s hard not to avoid drowning in it if you, as an educator or learner (which we all are) don’t put strategies in place to organize content by aggregating it using different bookmarking and sharing Web applications (which are a dime a dozen. Tools like Diigo and Pinterest, for instance, are excellent examples of aggregation tools which employ bookmarking and sharing mechanisms.
However, content aggregation can still be an overwhelming task. That’s where content curation comes in play. Services like Smartbrief thrive at selecting target news for users by means of curators. Only the “best content” (at the curators will) are included in perdsonalized newsletters or news briefs which the users can select to receive via email.
Similarly, Youtube is launching Youtube EDU to solve what has been a major pain point for educators trying to use Youtube in the classroom for a long time: inappropriate and irrelevant content. A curation platform for educators, Youtube for Schools allows teachers to select just the right educational videos for their students.
According to Mashable, there are already over 400 playlists curated by Youtube itself in partnership with 600 Education venues including major ones such as the Smithsonian and TED, all organized by grade level, content area (such as Lifelong Learning) and subject matter.
Educators can learn more about producing and sharing their own Youtube videos in the tutorials presented here as well as submit their own playlists to Youtube EDU.
Intel’s Museum of Me is a must-see exhibition of a famous online personality: you.
It pull videos, photos, “likes”, friends, and other information about you on Facebook (with tour permission) and organizes a (fake, you didn’t think they’d really open a museum with photos of you, right?) exhibit featuring your data. Pretty interesting visualization… Will they also include Twitter and others soon?
I’ve been meaning to play with Paper.li for a while but haven’t found time to do it (even though it takes 30 seconds to set up). I know.
This is a great visualization tool for information shared on your (or someone else’s) Twitter stream. Links, photos, videos and other media are all nicely distributed on a newspaper-like web page. You can create newspapers from a username (@[username]), a hashtag (#[word]) or a Twitter list. These days, when most of us suffer from information overload, this is a great tool to help you aggregate, organize and skim through a lot of information.
Here is my newspaper “The Enzo Silva Daily” based on my username and those I follow (basically lots of instructional design, social media, tech and learning people).
I also created one for the Learning 2010 conference (#L2010) here.
The Google Apps team published a blog post explaining improvements to the Forms tool allowing form creators to easily configure branching of pages depending on the respondent’s choice for every question.
This feature has a lot of potential for digital story telling. Teachers or students can create interactive stories that evolve with the reader’s every choice.
In fact, the Google Apps team emphasizes this possible use on that same blog post with the sample interactive adventure “The Hunt for the terrible Dr. von Schneider”. To interact with this story, just click this link and then click “Choose this template” on the next page. This will add the form to YOUR spreadsheets. Go to your http://docs.google.com account and open the “Copy of Choose your own adventure form” spreadsheet. Click “Form” and “Go to live form” on the tool bar. Voilà!
It is a short little adventure but it illustrates the concept fairly well.
Based on the Google Apps team’s post, as easy as 1, 2, 3:
1. To create a story, go to Google Docs and create a new form with an enticing choice at the beginning.
2. Check the box next to Go to page based on answer while editing the question. Select the corresponding pages they should be directed to based on their answer.
3. Users can be sent back to the same page after being split apart during the story. Under the Add Item menu, select Page break. Then, select what page you’d like your form respondents to be directed to under the drop down menu in the page break.
I came across a short presentation by Grace Poli from Union City High School on Slideshare.net. The presentaion focuses on practical ways for using the iPod Touch in class, but of courses the uses of all of Apple’s mobile devices are interchangeable most of the time since they have similar technical specifications.
Here are some highlights and resources from the presentation.
Resources and Ideas
Apple Learning Interchange – http://ali.apple.com
Learning in Hand – http://learninginhand.com
iPods in Education Webcast – http://macenterprise.org
iPods in Education: The Potential for Language Acquisition – http://e2t2.binghamton.edu/pdfs/ iPod_Lang_Acquisition_whitepaper.pdf
1. Train Doctors to Save Lives – American College of Cardiology indicates iPods are used to listen to recorded heart sounds to teach medical students how to better recognize different conditions 2. Bring Criminals to Justice – United States federal district court has started using iPods to hold copies of wiretap transmissions in a large drug-conspiracy case 3. Get Yourself Into Serious Shape – TrailRunner is a free program that helps you plan your route and then loads your iPods with maps, distances, and time goals
4. Tour Around Great Cities – iSubwayMaps lets you download subway maps from 24 major cities across the globe. They range from New York City, Paris, and Berlin to Moscow, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Audio tours of New York and Paris downloard Soundwalk narrated by a celebrity for $12.
5. Calculate the Right Tip – TipKalc helps you figure out the tip and grand total
6. Record Flight data – LoPresti Speed announced plans to use iPods as flight data recorders in light aircrafts (will have the ability to record over 500 hours of flight time data)
7. Throw a Meaner Curveball – Pitcher for the Houston Astros, started using video iPod to review pitching frame by frame to improved overall techniques 8. Learn Foreign Language – University students are using iPods to record lectures, take notes, and even create electronic flash cards 9. Memory Stick – save your Microsoft office files 10. Wikipedia – download one of the largest encyclopedias on your iPod (FREE)
More ideas from other practitioners can be found in the Apple Interchange Learning Community which I highlighted in a previous post.
In an arena dominated by Moodle, Google launches its own open source learning platform: CloudCourse.
According to the blog “Open Source at Google”, the application was released with the intention of driving developers to develop Web applications with Google’s App Engine. The team encourages developers to look into the source code to find out how specific Web application development challenges were overcome. The team of developers at Google hopes CloudCourse to become a sort of poster child for App Engine.
But what can CloudCourse do? According to the developers:
Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.
CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):
Sync service – to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
Room info service – to schedule classes in your locations
User info service – to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)
The technologies used to develop CloudCourse are: App Engine, Django, Python and the Closure Javascript library. According to the team that developed it: should be a breeze to install…
Let me know (in the comments here) what your experience is like if you do try to use ClourCourse.
“CNN Sees Facebook as Major Competitor” says Mashable’s writer Jennifer Van Grove in an article today. Even though it seems reasonable at first “well, people are getting their news first on Facebook”, media giants like CNN should look deeper into social media platforms as OPPORTUNITIES to reach more people with their news. Similar to what Mashable and many others already do, publishing their feed on Twitter, Facebook and many other channels. Readers will most likely read short blurbs from their friends about news of interest on social networks and, if the news are really interesting they will go to major websites to find more details about it. If the news giants already have their feeds going into popular social media channels, people will actually retweet, respost, spread the link, taking readers back to the main news site. CNN seems to miss the point…
And so do many people in charge of K12, Higher Education, eLearning departments at corporations, and other “authorities” in Education: they see social media as a threat instead of an ally in doing what Education is all about, constructing communities of practice, taking knowledge to the masses, letting people construct knowledge, reach out to other learners… Many times when they use social media, they simply clone a popular service inside walled gardens, missing on the wealth of knowledge already out there.
Educators fail to see even major services like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter as learning communities and channels for knowledge creation and distribution perhaps because their policies are based in “old school” (pun intended) paradigms of authoritative learning. “What will happen when we admit Wikipedia can be a legitimate source of knowledge?” “What will happen when we let our learners loose on video sharing sites?” “I don’t even understand microblogging, how can I use it in the classroom/as the classroom?” and other questions are asked by friends of mine in Education all the time. Let’s not forget our roles as “facilitators” in the new media era…
What are questions and answers YOU might have about using social media in Education?
Why don’t we see more of social media applied to learning experiences?
Where have you seen it? Have YOU used social media to facilitate learning?
