Education4site

“Booksprints” – fast track to rigorous open educational resources

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Tryggvi Thayer

A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students got together this past weekend (Sept. 28-30, 2012) to produce a mathematics textbook in three days. They’re not quite done, but at almost 130 pages so far, they’re pretty darn close! Too bad my Finnish isn’t good enough (actually non-existent) to evaluate the results. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable achievement any way you look at it. Especially when you consider that a group of teachers did something similar here in the Twin Cities last year and it took them an entire summer – which I then thought was a pretty remarkable achievement.

The Finnish group used a methodology called “Booksprint” which was developed to produce manuals for Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). The method has already been used to produce over 40 FLOSS manuals. Booksprints involve a large number of individuals with various relevant backgrounds working collaboratively, either remotely or locally, to produce published books, usually within 2-5 days. The method requires intensive pre-planning culminating in an “unconference” at which the text is written, edited and prepared for publication. Participants make extensive use of open source methodologies and tools to facilitate sharing, versioning, and tracking, ex. using GitHub.

The Finnish math textbook project is the first open educational resource project that I have come across that uses the Booksprint methodology (I love that they’ve included students in the process). It seems ideal to the task and, in fact, what I have tried to promote for many years now with little acceptance. Hopefully Booksprint is exactly the concrete methodology that is needed to push this way of working forward. I’m sure that the Finnish appreciation for collaborative work in education is helpful, too.

Posted in Education, ICTs, Information Society, Knowledge development, Technology foresight | Tagged OER, Open Education Resources | 2 Comments

Shhh… My environment is talking to me

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Tryggvi Thayer

One of the ways that I like to describe augmented reality (AR) technologies is with the somewhat metaphorical, “AR makes it possible for your environment to tell you about itself.” Well, I guess it’s not a metaphor anymore! Google has just released its new Field Trip app for Android, with an iOS (iPad/iPhone) version to come soon. When enabled, the app sends notifications to your device about “interesting things” in your vicinity. If you have headphones connected (bluetooth or plug-in) it’ll even read the notifications to you.

I haven’t been able to really test the app yet to see what kind of info it passes along. I guess Google thinks I live in a rather uninteresting neighborhood. The only notification I’ve received is about a new restaurant a mile away from my home. It’ll be interesting to see what it tells me when I start moving around the city.

My biggest worry is that it’s going to be mostly advertising disguised as “useful info”. It is possible to adjust some settings to control the type of info it passes along. Some of the categories available are architecture, public art and historic places & events. I do worry, though, because I know that there are various interesting things around where I live (ex. the University of MN’s St. Paul campus – lots of public art there, Gibbs Museum – farming dating back to the mid 19th century) but, as I mentioned, the only thing the app has deemed worthy of my attention is this new restaurant.

I have yet to see how useful the app turns out to be for me. Although the app looks good and functions well, it has been getting some iffy reviews regarding its usefulness. It seems that others’ experiences are similar to mine, i.e. they know that there’s stuff out there, but the app isn’t showing it. Because of the seeming lack of info, the app is likely to be more of a fun toy to begin with than a reliable source of information. But, given time, it’s sure to get better.

Field Trip will have amazing potential for use in education once the current limitations of the app have been worked out. I’m sure that innovative teachers at all educational levels will have no problem finding ways to put the app to good use. One thing that would increase its usefulness for education is if data sources were customizable. That way instructors and learners could set up their own specialized “field trips” to fit specific learning objectives. Think how cool it would be if an instructor could integrate something like that in an electronic textbook!

Posted in Education, ICTs, Information Society, Internet, Technology foresight | 2 Comments

Honey, I shrunk your reality!

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Tryggvi Thayer

Why is Apple’s map fiasco such a big deal? It’s only one app of the hundreds of thousands available for it’s mobile platform. And it’s not like it doesn’t work entirely, there are just some glitches – albeit some pretty significant glitches, but not unfixable and not that render the app entirely unusable. Here’s why I think it’s a big deal: When Apple replaced a perfectly good, well-functioning mobile mapping app with one that is perceived as untrustworthy, they robbed users of a newly found sense of greatly expanded functional reality. In other words, they shrunk their users’ world. Continue reading →

Posted in Education, ICTs, Information Society, Internet, Technology foresight | Leave a comment

How do we get from foresight to policy? Identifying knowledge gaps.

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Tryggvi Thayer

I’ve allowed myself the dubious luxury of not strictly adhering to academic practice concerning references, since this is not strictly an academic forum. For those who are interested in references much of this is based on the excellent Handbook of Technology Foresight: Concepts and Practice, various works by J. Irvine and B. Martin (written jointly and separately), European Commission/JRC foresight projects, and many of the resources cited in previous postings on this site.

In some previous writings I have tried to make the case that foresight and long-term planning can be a beneficial approach to policymaking in times of rapid technological development (see for ex. here, and here). However, using foresight for social policy is quite a different process than using it for research and development planning, as it was originally intended. Using foresight for social policy planning involves a broader range of stakeholders and is more about shaping, and committing to, social and cultural change. But, for that to work, we need to understand how foresight programs can be made to produce outcomes that are likely to contribute to lasting change. In a lot of what has been written on foresight programs there are unambiguous references to a link between foresight programs and qualitatively different social policies as a primary outcome. Yet, it remains unclear to me how, precisely, foresight programs lead to policy decisions and, consequently, how foresight programs should be coordinated to ensure positive policy outcomes. So what I’ve done, and what I will discuss here, is to map the processes involved in foresight programs and their outcomes to identify potential gaps in our knowledge about them that can affect the ability to produce the types of policy outcomes that are hoped for. Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Information Society, Knowledge development, Leapfrogging development, Technology foresight, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Foresight and educational planning: Engaging stakeholders to construct preferred futures.

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Tryggvi Thayer

Image credit: Jason Tester/IFTF

Foresight (or “technology foresight”) is a future-oriented approach to policy planning. Foresight programs involve the use of multiple futuring methods, such as scenario construction, Delphi surveys, trends analysis, etc., to engage diverse groups of stakeholders in activities that promote the construction of shared visions of the future, and figuring out how to achieve preferred futures. In the past decade foresight programs have been used to address a range of social policy issues, including education. The use of foresight for educational policy planning has, however, been limited. Considering how the increasingly rapid rate of technological development affects educational organizations through students, teachers, expectations of learning outcomes, etc., there is ample reason to reconsider how foresight can be used for educational policy planning.

In this article I describe how foresight has developed as a policy planning tool and describe some examples of how it has been used for educational policy planning. Finally, I’ll talk about some of the pros and cons of using foresight for educational policy, in particular whether education should be treated as a topic in its own right or as a dimension of broader social concerns. Continue reading →

Posted in Education, ICTs, Information Society, Knowledge development, Leapfrogging development, Technology foresight | 4 Comments

This is not the future of learning.

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Tryggvi Thayer

A video produced by Good Magazine and the Unversity of Phoenix titled “Future Learning” (see video below) has been making the rounds on the Internet. In the video a bunch of so-called “eduvators”, that are likely well-known to anyone involved in education: Salman Khan, Sugata Mitra, Ntiedo Etuk, etc., describe learning through things like engaging videos, video games and youth working together to collaboratively to figure things out in authentic settings. This is not the future of learning. It is the current state of learning. Show me a youth in any developed region of the world who hasn’t learned something using any, or even all, of the methods described in the video in the last week…

The main problem with this video is that it doesn’t distinguish between learning and education. As I’ve said, all of the methods for learning that are described in this video are used daily by youth all over the world – and they learn from those experiences. They don’t always learn what we want them to but they learn something nonetheless. The issue then is, how do we construct purposeful educational environments that are mindful of these ways that today’s youth learn? And more significantly, how do we create educational environments that can keep up with the rapid change in the ways that youth learn? If we build educational environments today that take as their starting points the ways of learning that are discussed in this video, then we’re really just trying to catch up. That falls somewhat short of forging our way into the future.

The future of learning will be driven by augmented reality technologies, cheap 3D printers, sophisticated authentic simulations, ambient intelligence, etc. Youth starting school today will be mired in these technologies long before they complete even their compulsory education, not to mention by the time they enter college or the workforce. What are we going to do in education today to make sure that youth are best prepared to use these emerging technologies to be active and critical self-motivated learners? It’s when we start seriously considering questions like that that we really start engaging with the future of learning.