Facebook launched an Online Education Centre targeting business education. All build around pages, ads and communities. Adding features as your own apps, facebook credits, social media marketing integrated. Sounds quite impressive. Also most focused contents are stories (http://www.facebook.com/business/sponsoredstories/) where different types of stories are presented.
I wonder how this will influence online learning communities.
There is a whole movement of using sensor data for self tracking and self analysis.
The Quantified Self Group has lots of examples in their blog about using sensor information from different tools, apps, and gadgets importing them into visualisation tools, sharing them in social communities, and monitoring your activities. There is a even a best practice guide and active discussion forum about what tools, apps and gadgets best to use for self tracking.
A nice overview of activities in that area are in a recent article from technology review with the title “The Measured Life“.
Applied to learning support and the TEL community I see some relations to user modeling, adaptive systems, personalisation, and recently learning analytics. The tricky thing is that in a lot of the examples from self-tracking you can easily track your steps per day, or the number of calories consumed, the types of aphyisical movements you made, or the type of sleep you had or not, but its pretty hard to track relevant things for learning. (quantify learning? probably.) In relation to personalisation and personalized learning the questions is how far the system are just used for tracking and mirroring and if they get used for coaching, tutoring, mentoring, or even control. The vision then would then become a kind of sensor enabled cyborg with feedback loops to control every aspect of life.
Nevertheless more and more sensors can be used for measuring and quantifying more complex phenomena like stress, attention, collaboration. In most cases the combination of several sensors as also personal data given by users brings the results needed. It is a bit comparable to context-aware systems and context modelling: The more sensor data and sources you have the more precise you can get on the results.
In contrast to the approach about collecting more and more data I also see another path to go comparable to the discussions in user modeling, adaptive systems, and nowadays learning analytics and reflection supporting via mirroring.
So as a first point to make here: Lots of methods for tracking and self-monitoring are already available and more will follow soon, the main question is how to use them in ways that make curious, motivate, stimulate collaboration, and social interchange and gives control to the learner.
Wenn Du ein Schiff bauen willst, dann trommle nicht Männer zusammen, um Holz zu beschaffen, Aufgaben zu verteilen, sondern lehre die Männer die Sehnsucht nach dem weiten, endlosen Meer.
Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint Exuperie
Recently lots of activities are coming up around mobile, contextual, and new one-to-one learning models. This is a small collection of upcoming events with which we are involved in organization or as PC member:
– International Workshop on "Technology-Transformed Learning: Going Beyond the One-to-One Model?" Organizers: Lung-Hsiang Wong & Hiroaki Ogata, https://sites.google.com/site/icce1to1/
– Context and Technology Enhanced Learning (ConTEL):Theory, methodology and design Workshop at EC-TEL 2011, 21 September, Palermo, Italy. Conference runs 20-23 September, Organisers and Co-Chairs:Prof. Andrew Ravenscroft, Prof. Mike Sharples.http://www.ec-tel.eu/files/ConTEL_DEs_CFP3.pdf
– Enhancing Learning with Ambient Displays and Visualization Techniques (ADVTEL’2011), Joris Klerkx,Erik Duval,Eelco Herder, Ralf Klamma, Fridolin Wild, Till Nagel, Marcus Specht, Marco Kalz, Dirk Börner, https://sites.google.com/site/advtel2011/organisers
– Learning activities across physical and virtual spaces (AcrossSpaces), Davinia Hernández-Leo, Carlos Delgado-Kloos, Juan I. Asensio-Pérez, http://www.ec-tel.eu/programme/workshops-ectel2011/acrossspaces
Please consider submitting to those with your high quality contributions.