Cooper-Taylor Training

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The new Horizon Report is out.

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R. , Smythe, T., & Stone, S. (2009).
The Horizon Report: 2009 Australia–New Zealand Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Here is my take. My comments in italics

For those of you new to this report, “The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that aims to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry within education around the globe over a five-year time period. The project’s central products are the Horizon Reports, an annual series of publications that describe promising emerging technologies and highlight their relevance to education. This edition, the Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition, is the second in the ANZ series and focuses on emerging technologies as they appear in and affect education in Australia and New Zealand particularly.”

Key Trends:

• The perceived value of innovation and creativity is increasing. Many jobs that will be sought and filled by educated young people require the ability to improvise, though this skill is neither taught nor prized in school.
  So please people stop teaching facts and examining what students can remember. In today’s world facts can be found and don’t have to all be remembered. Start teaching in a way that encourages improvisation and looking at the world through different lenses.
  
• Technology continues to impact how people work, play, gain information, and participate in communities. … the Internet has now become firmly established as a key medium through which people connect with one another. It provides virtual spaces where people who share interests can congregate; … .
  So why aren’t we using FaceBook et al to form communities as a means for our students to learn? I know some tertiary institutions where FB is actually blocked on campus as they don’t have enough bandwidth. Institutions you have to get up with the play here. Having adequate technology is as important as buildings and faculty. If you want to get $$$ from your online students you have to invest the $$$ to get adequate and even better technology.
• Technology is increasingly a means for empowering students, a method for communication and socialising, and a ubiquitous, transparent part of their lives. For many students, technology is a primary means of socialising and managing one’s own learning. … It places the power to communicate firmly in the hands of students, connecting them to experts, to information, and to one another in powerful and immediate ways.
  So let’s teach with the tools they are familiar with. Turn mobile phones off in class? Not any more. In a large lecture txt, tweet and email me your questions.
• The way we think about learning environments is changing. Because technology is so pervasive in our lives, the learning environment is no longer limited to a physical space. …  institutions must reflect and support the transformation of the learning environment by embracing the means that make it possible: social networking tools, semantic applications, mobile devices, virtual worlds, and other emerging technologies that facilitate collaboration, communication, and learning.
  Faculty have to get familiar with this stuff. So there needs to be a big push in institutions to invest in professional development to inject the pedagogical philosophies of teachers with technology enabled learning experiences. Institutions who wait around on this essential PD will be overtaken by those who meet the need head on. Put every teacher through PD? Provide them with the tools and expect them to be used? No excuses? You got it.

Critical Challenges:

• Practices for evaluating student work will evolve in response to the changing nature of learning and student preferences for receiving feedback. … effective methods of assessing non-traditional work must be developed … new ways to conduct and deliver evaluations and grades must be adopted … and for delivering feedback in ways that are meaningful and convenient for students.
  So can I blog my homework and have you comment on my post?
• Ageing learning environments do not easily allow for embracing the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), or enable the sorts of learning support systems being promoted by modern theorists. Many classrooms are not equipped to support the number of students who bring laptops … and are not conducive to collaborative group work. … many course and learning management systems that are used in schools … do not reflect students’ desire for flexible, customisable tools.
  One for CMS/LMS providers here. Allow the student to interface the institution’s LMS with the web apps they use – to find experts, community, information. Learning is no longer that prescribed purely by the teacher. The student is the driver. LMS’s can no longer be predominately content dumps.
• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy. … There is an increasing realisation that these skills are as important as written, spoken, and information literacy, and they must be formally taught.
  Yep employers want a literate worker. The three Rs no longer cut it. Hours spent forming perfectly formed letters should be a thing of the past.
• There is a growing recognition that new technologies must be adopted and used as an everyday part of classroom activities, but effecting this change is difficult. The difficulty lies in creating new opportunities for learning in a well-established system.
  So new curricula must be created and teachers supported with PD (anyone noticed how this keeps cropping up).

Technologies to watch:

• Mobile Internet Devices.
  Open book exams? No thanks I want open Internet exams. I am marking your synthesis of the information, the presentation of your argument, new conclusions drawn, etc
• Private Clouds.
  So that’s Internet resources with the institution in control. Not so much risk.
• Open Content.
  How long have we been hammering on about sharing resources? Seems like forever. Perhaps economic necessity will finally bring this home.i
• Virtual, Augmented, and Alternate Realities.
  Simulations have now become much easier to do. But lets not forget the PD required for the steep learning curve of learning to do things in the likes of Second Life.
• Location-Based Learning.
  Any time any place really is possible now. But make sure you set the ground rules with students. “Yes, I know you txt me at 4 AM, but I told you to expect replies within 48 hours. I have many other commitments to juggle.”
• Smart Objects and Devices.
  Smart objects and devices are able to connect the physical world with the world of information.
  Mmmm, I need to get my own head round this one. Anyone give me some educational examples?