Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Apr 18, 2012

Notes from the April 11 talks at the Learning in a Digital Age Conference in Tallinn, Estonia. My presentation at the conference draws largely from these notes.



Steve Wheeler



- Creative Commons intro

- Twitter intro - "Connect with professionals just like yourself all over the world"



- Warlick: "For the first time we are preparing students for a future we cannot clearly describe."

- describing old-style spirit-based duplicators

- recall creating programs on the BBC microcomputer for nurses - early 80s

- you don't give people knowledge, you give them literacies and skills - teams, etc



- switch off for 60 seconds, what would you miss? - Kelly Hodgkins - if you aren't plugged in you're going to be left behind



- social media use - eg. FB - 850m, Myspace 260m, etc - Wikipedia - 14m articles

- when you challenge theories, that can sometimes be disconcerting



- connection - sharing a moment in time - even though all the media are covering it - sharing with people they know - SD will talk about connection



- drowning in technology, tsunami of content - we create theories to try to deal with this...



- first theory - flipped classroom - definition

- my argument is we've always been doing this, why rename it? people making money off it - the problem isn't the name, problem is we aren't doing ti right - Sal Khan vis MOOC vs TED

- we need to cut past the idea that it's all about students watching video at home

- the real flip: I become the learner, and the students become teachers - because we learn by teaching - we have what I call "bearpit pedagogy" - we let them fight it out, debate it - arguing from both sides



- second theory - learning styles - lot of nonsense

- one true thing - as many learning styles as there are people

- problem with learning styles: trying to pigeonhole students into categories - defines students by the activities you impose on them based on what you believe as teachers

- Fleming - multi-modal learning - we have all these abilities, we should be challenged in all areas

- done all over again - situated learning - deeper learning comes from all three

- Mumformd (activist - reflector - theorist - pragmatist) - copied by kolb -

- Frank Coffield - "serious conceptual confusion"



- third theory - learning in large orgs cannot be personalized - let's keep the factory model going, batch delivery of students

- individual differences need to be acknowledged

- consider - 4 people in a family in the 1950s, 70s watching tv - "we are family"

- vs Wii are family - having unique individual experiences in the same social context - the idea of individualized learning - the idea that you can access anything with a personal tool

- model of PLEs



- fourth theory - digital natives

- "my students were immersed in tech and know nothing else" - so I don't need to teach students how to use tech - and I don't need to learn it

- some children digitized before being born, but doesn't follow they are digital natives - theories focus on the idea of being born at a particular time

- vs myth: picture of old people using computers - grandfather 'LOL' for the first time last year

- it's nt about how old you are, it's about the purpose and context you use tech

- David White - Oxford - visitors and residents



- 4a - ban mobile phones - because they are used wrongly

- but if tech like mobiles used effectively, they can be very liberating



- 4b - cultural / digital divide

- what does "wtf" mean? "Welcome to Facebook"



- language is organic, language is evolving - many new words added every year

- David Crystal - techs pulling language in new directions



- BYOD will be happening much more

- they will be capturing what you say, maybe even broadcasting it out

- but mst teachers like to close doors - this will be a challenge to you - whether you like it or not - blogging live, tweeted live - you can be misrepresented, but it's important to understand students what to create



- the idea of digital cultural capital - identification through digital mediation

- Peter Yeomans - mobile phones forcing people to become more literate - without the ability to txt they cannot communicate with peers



- fifth theory - tech is neutral - like a delivery van - but - McLuhan - we sha[e our rtools and then our tools shape us

- eg. touch tools - intuitive interface - natural gesture - connected to learning network



- learning is changing - Alec Couros slides - consume, remix, organize, share



- sixth - wikipedia is untrustworthy - can you trust what you read online? (Edison quote about the internet) - learners need "digital wisdom" - need to appraise what they're looking at

- "Darwinism" - the wisdom of the crowd, what happens on Wikipedia - new crowdsourced evaluation tool

- new: course credit for Wikipedia page

- community as curriculum



- seventh - twitter is all about breakfast - titter is about much more than trivia - it becomes a stret corner, a broadcast channel, an amplification tool

- jcbarrington.blogspot.com



- John W. Gardner - giving cut flowers when we should be teaching to grow plants

- students today are tech savvy



--



The problem is, some people misinterpret theory, then it becomes myth, then it becomes fallacy - Prensky - "digital fluency, digital wisdom" - the myth is created with the theory is misinterpreted



- changing names for roles? "If you name it you tame it" - maybe not so much true in the new age - I don't think it's about naming things - that's where the myths come from, from people naming things and categorizing



- will grassroots activism force government change - response: was happening when web 2.0 came in - students were able to go outside institutional tools

- the idea of government mandates - always out of date





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Kristjan Port - sports medicine



- not an expert on elearning and I don't want to be, so be kind, don't shoot me :) - there might be some dark thoughts between the lines -

- title - 40 minutes for modern time - a lot happens in 40 minutes



I'm trying to understand how elearning happens in modern times - I think about what happens in 40 minutes in a classroom. I think the idea is that in 40  minutes life will be better the world will be better, or people wouldn't sit there for 40 minutes.



Time is relative - depending on which side of the bathroom door you're on. Teachers and students, they're also on different sides of the door. Students are sitting there with legs crossed, saying "hurry up".



Idries Shah - Afghan writer - guy meeting nice looking guy - Satan - but Satan is ugly - "My friend, you have been listening to my opponents."

- where do we get the idea that something that seems nice is good in the long term. Elearning- looks nice - but we've been with it for 10 years - but is it nice, actually?



We find traits in ourselves from the animal world - we haven't actually got very far - 5, 6 million years is actually a short time - the book "The Inner Ape" - read it. Learning and biology - is there something that we've forgotten to notice?



Development: a phenomenon of positive feedback. If we succeed, things will get better, if we have money, we can make more money. Positive feedback. If you do the right things then you will survive and feel good. If you do the wrong things you will get hurt, get diarrhea, etc.



Imagine we build a robot and sent it to a planet, where there's something we need, like an ore. So we program the robot, "the more you mine, the better you feel, the less you mine, the worse you feel." And so the robot learns to know himself, and tries to learn how to mine more. But then the robot finds the 'feel better' button. The robot then focuses on how to press the button.



What motivates a human being to develop, to move on? It's in the central nervous system, where we get dopamine, and we press this button - and the outcome is the culture of cheating. So. eg. artificial sweetener, caffeine, drugs, 'green', Facebook, etc etc. and technology is in this mix.



So what is the feeling of elearning? It gives us a confused feeling, good and bad.



10,000 years ago - our forefathers had to be successful, otherwise we wouldn't be here. In this community they had about 300 items, in Manhattan they have 10 billion items. x33 million times. So what are these things, in the cash registers, in the shops?



Humans are about 40, 50K years old. (less? : enters a racist trap) Our forefathers made maybe $100 per year per capita - bits of meat, bits of skin. $200 in the last 250 years ago. We can't compare these.



The way society is nowadays, to run it, somebody has to buy these 10 billion items, and to buy them we have to spend more than these items are actually worth. There was a time when there was not enough goods, not there is a surplus.



This feeds into culture is - culture feeds into the goals of education - it's not how wise the consumer is, it's how dumb they are, otherwise they wouldn't spend more than things are worth.



The internet wasn't introduced because it was good for providing education. The internet was about information exchange, for selling goods. This is wat propels Google, Facebook, etc. - this is what propels us to want to make information exchange more efficient, and this is what propels the rest of life.



That means we are less useful to ourselves. It was difficult to study - everybody gained their education, but the further we go away from these problems, we're learning but we're not gaining any knowledge. The modern lady is better educated, but she can do less, she has fewer skills - she doesn't cook, she doesn't sew - she knows how to gain more education, that's it.



Training - how training has developed. Look at agriculture. Try to understand what has happened in the field. Trying to understand nature and trying to solve the problems That meant you had to be independent. Talking about telemedicine - we were in Portugal, we gave people electronic devices, but a third of the people were illiterate - but they were just thrown into the fields and they were able to survive.



Eras: agriculture through to industrial age - trying to understand the process of machines. Nobody needed an artist, but you needed to do the right thing at the right time. The IT era is charaterized by the world being more complicated, the need to multitask, etc. You have to be able to analyze, it's not know-how, but know-what. Lifelong learning. The pension age will eventually be 75.



The school system hasn't changed from the industrial era. Can we use this approach for the modern era? We can't - we have to reform schools. Education was historically a ticket to the middle classes and to white collar jobs, where you don't work physically, you only manage information. Feeding into the consumer culture, that wants everything to be cheaper, that's the hedonist approach.



Consider films - 'Tarzan' is long and boring. 'Bourne' isn't. We have to capture the attention of the consumer. Attention has become an effective mediator. 'Clicks' become the business plan. All the experts are sitting in Silicon valley writing algorithms in clicks. But there is something makibg us do this. We have to invest in attention. The information revolution will choose the most efficient media, and this will change our way of living, and then the change will become the goal. It's not need that creates the change, it's fashion.



Consider the U.S. fruit industry - it used to be central, now there's only two people, a human being and a dog - the human being presses the button and feeds the dog.



You ahve to relearn, to work for multiple companies, a new career every few years.



What is elearning? Trying to gain the attention. I remember in my school days, it was difficult to focus on the teacher. Now elearning tries to gain your attention 360 degrees. A teacher has become more expensive - if you have a teacher and a classroom, you can't make this more efficient. And things are becoming more expensive. How can we compensate for this expense? learning becomes the answer here, and the problem is solved - it seems so. But education still becomes more expensive.



How can we make learning cost less? There are certain means - magnetism, electricity. "Dr Scott's electric girdle". Electricity and magnetism are wonderful ways of curing things. "Buy this device and it will make you better." This device will make education better.



Patent - how to shoot birds in a clear field (hide behind a cow). Suddenly change happened, the many companies became a few, and they are the ones who run the markets. The first phase is the slow phase and everything seems OK, but the final phase is very fast, are we ready for it? E-learning is attractuve - but can it actually reach the student to gain the education?



Do we take into account what elearning means for the physical body? The dog - "I'll just drool a bit and see what Dr. Pavlov does." Students today and then did not what to take textbooks to schools. The kids always say "give me something  new, if you buy me this thing I'll do my homework." But we know it's not true But we need this little bit of cheating.



Informal learning - it is rich, emotional, cannot be measured - but there is a conflict, feedback is inadequate, people fail. We diagnose attention disorders - and attention disorders have gone up 350 percent - but we misdiagnose. People are looking for a better school, a different school, that will give us a better... something. We'll just diagnose something, just like that.



Do schools create risk? No. Do they create meaning? No. Critical self-analysis? No. In computer games people fail 84 percent of the time, but they go back - but when schools fail, they just give them the middle finger. And we diagnose a disorder.



I remember once, I entered the classroom through the window - it's much more interesting to enter through the window.



We want to search for meaning in our lives - does school offer it? No. Does work? No. What does? Games - play.



There used to be a time when there wasn't enough information. It used to depend on who wrote the book. With the Gutenberg press, information became a standard. Carl Bridebbaugh - used to run the U.S. historical society - says literacy is falling - in the 1960s - because of the transistor radio. He imagined a machine that would read books for us.



He was wrong - there was more data - and we can't actually remember the data. We create more and more information in the process. In e-learning - is this the result we want to achieve? If we see a shark - we understand it's dangerous. But if there is no shark, it's even more dangerous. When the sharks have died out then we're in deep shit.



If we innovate the tools of learning, then the schools will change - but are the schools ready to lose power, their position in society. Replace the shark fin with ths school - do we really want a world without schools. It's not the positive drive, it's a consuming drive, this drive to learn.



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Q. Is elearning really wrapped, shiny and new? It feally came as a Satan, it was ugly and not accepted by most. Now it's different, but that's a different discussion. Also - one of elearning's objectives is to help us manage the ever-growing amount of information, to help us select the right thing.



Response - yes, Satan is ugly - but it's just a second to change into something nice. You ask children what they want: "No books, no books, just a game, games." And on filtering: we need to get education back to being selective - there may be 20 different types of jam on the shelf, but the owner knows which one he wants to get rid of, and draws attention to them.



Q. What's the constructive program of yours?



A. It was once 'keep smiling be happy'. Then there was a pessimistic period, where you had to express your feelings. Then there was the in between version, the neutral version. It always depends on how big a picture you want.









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Mervi Jansson; InnoOmnia Learning Solutions



- the world of education in Finland, pretty much in silos

- and then there are the boards, the experts, who play their own games

- this is what we wish to change in InnoOmnia



- we wanted to look at the trades, the service sector - not just technology

- we wanted to take the idea of innovation and business parks and apply that to service and vocational education

- we wanted to foster creativity, thinking out of the box, but also the idea than learning can be fun, but also the idea of resilience, because learning can be a tough job

- innOmnia is about lifelong learning, it's about serendipity (that's why I like twitter), but also about entrepreneurship - e-learning, m-learning, etc. - are goals to help people meet their goals

- it's about people and teachers learning for themselves, hopefully having a better life (reflection on how people view lifelong learning as negative - "oh God I'm never going to be out of school.")

- also: confederation of finnish industries - competence needs study - came up with 9 insights:

- ability to learn and work in networks (vs silos of education and the working life)

- ability to improvide

- readiness to grapple problems with an entrepreneurial zeal - in Finland ent. and ent. thinking are embedded in every part of the discipline. - perhaps we should have some sort of rotation where teachers have to go out and make their own living somehow

- ability to add value by combining competences - eg. Nokia hired only engineers, and that's where their problems started

- born global - if we think of Angry Birds, if they stayed only in the Finnish market, that would not mean very much bread and butter

- listening to and understanding people's needs - vs. "living out loud" - int the future, a bob is to be a 'listener'

- learning in ubiquitous environments

- teacher = enabler and teamworker

- divergent thinking - creativity in everyday life



- we often think it's about technology, but in reality it's about people - what are they ready to do, how can we lure them into doing new things



- InnoOmnia brings together students, teachers and entrepreneurs - a mixture of age, education and experience - we believe in this mixing and mingling

- it creates new and natural opportunities for learning - 40 entrepreneurs who rent office space from us - but we want something out of them, we interview them and ask them what they will contribute to the community, how will they add value? It's not just cheap rent - there's no such thing as a free lunch.



(SD - if there's no such thing as a free lunch - then society would be filled with dead babies)



the learning landscape looks like this:

- peer-to-peer learning, including teams of 3-5

- on-the-job learning

- they have projects with our entrepreneurs

- m-learning - when they start they are given an iPod, and training on using it

- game-based learning



What we believe is important is acquiring skills in context, so it has a real meaning for students. We want to create opportunities to fail, but also succeed.



Teachers play multiple roles in the system. A lot of teachers teach the way they were taught themselves, and when they come for training, they regress back into being a student, very passively. We dont allow that - the teacher participates, produces and consumes information.



The intent is to bring out the expertise in everyone - somewhere along the line everybody does have expertise than can be shared. We're going from a world of one solution to multiple possibilities. Yes, they do get a diploma - but that's not where it ends.



Teaching should be about empowering people - and the best place to start is with yourself. There aren't excuses (no time, no internet) - if there's a will there's a way. linked.in/mervijannsson



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Q. What is your education? You are not graduated from teacher college, who taught you how to teach?



A. I have 10 years experience, and a teaching degree. And 15 years experience as an entrepreneur.



Q. Who should pay for network-based education: state, EU, commercial ad vendor...?



A. If we do not give, we will not get. The institutions that hire us should give us time. But also, I don't believe in a 9-5 job. The notion of 'teaching time' is in the past.



(The answers are always in the equivocations)



If we thought of learning as entrepreneurship - we would do a lot toward ending poverty. (My response: oh good, magic thinking.)





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Kristjan Korjus; University of Tartu



Contrast between Manchester and Tartu

- fixed enrollment system (Manchester) vs open organization of studies (preferred by audience 60% - 40 )

- tutoring system - should it be employed in Estonia?



Feedback to staff - students give comments, instructors reply

Also, quantitative feedback at the end of the course - all answers are public and can be viewed by all students - you can look up an instructor and see a table of all the questions for each instructor - so people can choose eg. between an instructor that is precise, who e=inspires, who speaks well, etc.

(+ 70 percent attendees favoured)



Materials - very comprehensive - everything available online, lecturers had to explain why they were standing there. Do you support a system where all materials are available? (85 percent say yes)



Clickers - in Manchester, they are loaned to students, and in 3 years time you return it and get your deposit back. You use it in every lecture. Mostly content-related questions. So both students and lecturers get direct feedback. Example of a professor stopping and re-explaining a key point. In math, computer science, they are not very communicative - they are good at what they do, but not communicative. "When they see that people don't understand their subject they lose their complexes."



Technology itself doesn't give this added value - it's something else, the will, or the motivation, of people. What is it that makes it so different? There's less hierarchy - the professor isn't so much on the pedestal.



Video - protest at Manchester - against the idea that education/university being turned into a commodity - "As students we occupied a building and made ten demands to the university." They occupied for a week, and after the week the university complied. Imagine if you did this - after this, it's your university - you don't skip classes any more, because this is your university, the way you wanted it. (demands were about library opening hours, smaller practical class groups, about having to buy study materials, about financing, etc).



Young people are the way we raise them, this is their view of the world, that they get from their elders. (most people voted in support - 90% plus)



"The students must do it on their own. Academic staff cannot make students protest against their university."



Q. by acceding to their demands, didn't the uni show they were commercial?



A. yes, you can answer it like that - they demand more education, which makes it seem like they are consuming a certain product.

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Allison Littlejohn; Glasgow Caledonian University





social, economic and political imperatives - why we have to redevelop learning



Banksy

we're living in a society that's changing rapidly

- concerns about the environment

- stem cell research

- energy demands / with environment - I work with Shell & BP whp say the easy oil is gone



Hardt and Negri 2004 - political society and the transformation of society

- knowledge work - labour that is not restricted to material production but penetrates also the social, the political, the cultural and ultimately life itself



Three trends in society:

- increased trading in knowledge

- bigger problems to solve

- distributed expertise



People have to learn how to solve these real world problems more effectively



Banksy: "If graffiti changed anything, it would be illegal"

- what have schools done in response?



IBM global human capital study:

- industry needs an adaptable workforce

- change in  organization



Why collective knowledge?

- what is it? the knowledge that is out there, it's in tweets, papers, ebooks, etc. - sometimes in people, sometimes codified



Questions:

- how do people make sense of collective kn

- how do people use it?

- what are the binding forces that draw people together?

- what literacies and mindsets do people need to learn in this way/



Theoretical perspective: activity theory

- tools

- roles

- community

- rules



Siemens: "Learning is a process of creating networks..."



In a study we did with Shell International, we looked at how people develop expertise. Wanted to student the problem of distributed teams. New graduates took between 5 to 7 years to become competent.



Method: used use cases, critical incidence method. Questionnaire, interviews. Asked about a critical incidence o opportunity people had to learn at work. The problem is that the learning is so embedded with work people don't realize they're earning.



What we found: people first connect, then they consume or use the knowledge, then they create new knowledge (eg. an artifact, a report, a conversation, or traces in the way they create the knowledge), and then they contribute this back to the environment. Above all this, we have to find a way to enable this - we cann that 'charting' - it's not just navigation, it's about using and contributing. Charting can be viewed as a kind of lens, a way of interacting with everything that's out there.



Some prototype tools were developed, and are being tested with PhD students. Used Google Swirl to visualize knowledge (didn't really work).



Use case: from 'you' to 'your goal'. Sally the new chemist, who has to create a new substrate for drilling a new type of rock. You draw from a whole range of different resources. You also draw from knowledge of a different range of people. At any point, you may be working as an individual, group, network, collective. You connect, create, contribute. Or you join with others with similar goals. You have to be able to connect with the right sort of expertise.



Is this a new paradigm for learning? In this case the individual is learning with the collective - we're bringing together the individual and the social. So our roles must be changing.



What are the binding forces that draw people and/or resources together? via social constructivism: people communicate via knowledge objects. People create knowledge, working in networks. Eg. from OU - an iSpot - people go out to the country and find things, upload images, and a botanist answers their questions.



We need something - an object - that brings people together. But what is that object? In charting, we use a goal as that object. If people are trying to achieve a similar end point, this draws them together. But - goals shift and change, and not every activity works toward the goal. So we think of it as an iterative move toward a goal. So there are various social objects:

- work or learning activity

- reports (eg. patient health case report)

- common problem (eg. find Higgs boson)

- learning goals



What literacies and mindsets do they have to have? Because this is very unstructred and very different from the sort of learning they have today. Seely Brown wrote about 'open participatory learning systems' (2008) - what factors lead us toward this?



UKOER Program study: problem - rapid development of knowledge. method: design-based research. They have been creating and releasing OERs. Method: Analysis, Design, Evaluation, Devising key principles. Using 'activity system' criteria (Engstrom 2005).



We identified some tensions, which may be specific to OER, but may generalize. Eg., tension between traditional resources, normally assessed within a stable educational context, and OER, assessed in several types of context. It means that the rules in the educational environment don't apply to the open world. Also tensions around the tools people are using - resources were thought of as static resources, but many OERs are dynamic, being constantly changed using social technologies. There are tensions around different roles - what is the motive for anyone to release an OER: promoting individual vs. promoting the university. And again a tension between tightly bound communities vs. loosely bound networks.



We are not seeing a response to these tensions in prctise, so there is a very long way to go.



Valjataga and Fiedler - all this places a much greater onus on students to select, use and manage their own technologies,



Banksy: can we follow our dreams? What would we do in a world where we were responsible for our learning?



Tools - allow people to make sense of the information



roles - shift



rules - are changing



Q. What are the new tools? Community - 15 years old. Social object? They might have their own social objects.



A. We view the social object as being the leaning goal. That goal can be a work goal as well as a learning goal.



Q. - 16 year olds, they have no idea - we are failing them - I'm sceptical - I don't think the trend on IP is the way to be versed. Placing a very high price on sharing.



A. To have a level society we have to have a way for everybody to contribute.





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Arthur Harkins



Student futures:

- responses to global trends driving labour force need shifts

- technological drivers behind those shifts ranging from teh prosaic to the contemporary to the futuristic to the fantastical to the magical

--> we get to the point where we can no longer predict anything, we can barely forecast, we have to shift our methods of adapting to change



So, how can we create education systems that cope with the unknowable, to make uncertainty a commodity? Deliver educational services to whomever wants them and is willing to pay for them. The old vertically organized ministry of ed, inevitably it will be too small, too late, too unresponsive.



- Leaders are gradually 'norming' the knowledge age (Plaid collar workers) - they are learning to react to change by making decisions, but you need a proactive approach, making decisions ahead of the the change.

- Some in leading nations think of education as preparing students for the information age - as though it's the 1970s - white collar work. They want to plan a future - but why not an 'accidental future' where we kludge our way with social networking?



- Failures: NCLB - fact-oriented, where the facts are disassociated with one another (blue collar) - this is real and very serious, graduates of NCLB are totally incapable of coping



- A few decades ahead: wireless digital from orbit - individualized learning contracts for all students, including part-time, working and even retired; wide band wireless; reassignment of physical campuses.



- In the next 10 years, education will have shifted, Knowledge-based learning for kowledge industries (making the knowledge decision-ready).



- 20 years - connecting wirelessly to cranial implants, multi-sensory experiential learning - "the venue for all learning will be the individual's own body (and consciousness / pre-consciousness). The social and personal distinctions between work/non-work will be broken down.

   ( "I sing the body electric" )

Learning will become situation-specific. Eg. we will be able to fly an airplane even if we have never done so before. -- thereby bypassing most of the education or training periods of time.

- also: students upload their experiences, cogenerate their learning; the distinction between student and faculty begins to break down. More like apprentice and sensei.

- software will replace repetitive work whenever possible - knowledge workers & innovation workers will be at least 50% of the work force in 20 years



- 30 years - the singularity - we can't forecast very well - but...

- as the doubling time of knowledge speeds u, by the time you graduate, half what you learned is useless - you're competing with systems that run 10 times faster

- adjunct brains - the cyborgs - as these systems are developed, the costs go down

- in 30 years - the *average* person is a developer or debugger



- the purpose of education shifts to adapt to AI and other things, where the greatest goal of citizenship is to create the future - working with scenarios, images, visions, stories - to look backward from them to the present



Scenarios



1. student-centred scenarios - uniqueness development focus creates graduates capable of functioning as articulate proactive individuals



2. Think-tank scenario - adapt to the changing labour force requirement by outrunning it and creating their own businesses (people who invent all or most of their own world)



3. Free Electronic Higher Education On-Campus Development Teams Scenario - graduates who work in teams to produce patent or copyright materials while learning 'basics' through free ad-supported stuff



4. Services-based curriculum - grads work in a student culture that prepares them to work with other grads like themselves from similar programs



5. Global citizen product - holistic approach creates grads that can work in emerging global cultures - they use language translation devices and in-country experiences within global systems development models



6. Old economy personnel development scenario - look for the stars, grab them, give them money and support of all kinds, get them money and get them placed.



7. Family centred convenience product - aka Home College - where you're theoretically able to eliminate 90 percent of the cost of going to college - to without a scholarship take a Harvard-level education - eg. MIT and Stanford have developed these curricula for free



8. Experiential innovation scenario - we reward students by paying them to go to college, because they are able to do things we need to have done - experiential in advanced contexts.



Nobody knows the future, nobody can know the future, but we can create scenarios and work toward the ones we want.


Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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