Source: http://www.evidencebasedteaching.org.au/the-value-of-feedback-infographic/
Archives For Learning
Image credit: http://www.ubertas.co.uk/blog/5-it-predictions-you-need-to-know-about
Tis the start of the season for predictions. At the recent EDUCAUSE conference in Indianapolis in October a panel of leaders came up with a list of 10 IT issues that will be important to address in 2016. The following is a comparisons of the 2016 list with 2015 as one can see many of the issues are despite having different formal labels are very similar:
2015 Optimizing technology in teaching and learning and 2016 Optimizing educational technology
| 2015 | 2016 |
| 1. Evolving staffing models | 1. Information security |
| 2. Optimizing technology in teaching and learning | 2. Optimizing educational technology |
| 3. Funding IT strategically | 3. Student success technologies |
| 4. Improving student outcomes | 4. IT workforce |
| 5. Demonstrating IT’s value | 5. Institutional data management |
| 6. Increasing capacity for change | 6. IT funding models |
| 7. Providing user support | 7. Business intelligence and analytics |
| 8. Developing security policies for the institution | 8. Enterprise application integrations |
| 9. Developing enterprise IT architecture | 9. IT organizational development |
| 10. Balancing information security and openness | 10. E-learning and online education |
Elearning has been a top priority on many lists since the late 1990 so perhaps this year Educational IT will finally get this priority sorted out.
For a learning theorist and Professor there are few things more invigorating than working with a group of highly motivated learners. My long time colleague and friend Dr. Craig Montgomerie often asks me to join his online Athabasca University class MDDE 610: Survey of Current Educational Technology Applications to provide his students the opportunity engage with a professional like myself who has extensive experience in promoting the use of Educational Technology.
In the MDDE webinar for November 3, 2015 titled Leading learning and technological change we focused on the most difficult challenges in any organizational change — dealing with an organization’s culture and implementing strategies that require a cultural shift. Through examining a case study of the ACU Connected Mobile Learning Initiative we explored how addressing the following four key principles increase your chances of success significantly:
- Start with Why
- Identify and engage key influencers
- Install an effective execution strategy
- Enlist and empower self-differentiated leaders
We also analyzed how ignoring even one of these principles can contribute to failure and how these principles are currently being used in the BCIT School of Health Sciences Future of Learning initiative.
Webinar slide deck – MDDE 610 Nov 2015.pdf
The following resources were mentioned or briefly discussed in the webinar and can be used to gain a deeper understanding:
The Head Won’t Go Where the Heart Hasn’t Been
This post stresses that:
If you really want to bring about change in people then you need to appeal their hearts and not to their heads. The sharing of more information or engaging in more rational discourse on its own doesn’t appear to help people to make significant change but an appeal to values, attitudes, and feelings first can motivate people toward making changes.
People who like this stuff…like this stuff
Includes a short annotation and links the books Start with Why (Simon Sinek), Influencer, Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX) and Freidmen’s Failure of Nerve.
Connected The Movie by the ACU Connected Initiative
Link to the ACU Connected mobile movie that started and provided the fundamental Why or vision for Mobile Learning at ACU.
Additional resources on Change and Innovation:
If you pay attention to any type of media that has a focus on education, teaching and learning you will have inevitably seen the argument that all children/students should learn to code. The argument runs along this line… computers are everywhere today which means coding is the new literacy or skill of the future; therefore everyone should learn how to code. While this argument makes some sense I have always been hesitant to fully endorse it because I see so many other fundamental skills that our children need. I am not alone in this hesitation.
Jeff Atwood a career programmer who founded two successful software startups is deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code. Atwood believes that basic exposure to computer science is fine but it should not come at the expense of other fundamental skills like reading, writing and math. He also wants:
children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically. Where did that Wikipedia page come from? Who wrote it? What is their background? What are their sources?
Atwood reminds us that many programmers would be much more successful if they could read and write better, think critically and communicate effectively–essentially be better learners.
The longer I spend in the education the more I am convinced it’s about the learning, it’s about making meaningful connections and sharing those connections with others.
