what trends are on the horizon?

In the spirit of the coming new year, here’s an interesting report from the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.

The 32-page report is the result of having “reviewed key trends in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity, and ranked those it considered most important for campuses to watch” (3). Here are the six trends that rose to the top:

1. The environment of higher education is changing rapidly.
2. Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
3. Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
4. Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
5. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
6. Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty. (3-4)

I think you’ll find the explanations of these trends right on, and they are followed by a list of six critical challenges. The sections on “Technologies to Watch” gets the most attention and are discussed in great detail, including predictions of how long it will take for higher education to adopt them. The longest for some is 4-5 years–the shortest, one year or less for “User-Created Content.”

We should read up and get busy!

Filed under: Web 2.0, education, immersive worlds, literacy, teaching, technology

virtual conference

I’ll be attending some conference sessions at the Second Life Best Practices in Education Conference 2007 today from the comfort of my office–or I could be at home in my pajamas (you don’t know). Follow the link to read about it and consider joining Second Life to experience an immersive world as an educational space. I’ll report back later today with more on the conference.

Here’s a slideshow of my visit to the conference poster session and two lecture sessions. They were terrific educationally and in the cool sense.

The first session on “Asynchronous Student Orientation,” by Catherine Soderstrom (SL) of Texas Woman’s University, described how an instructor organized orientation documents for new students. What a great and necessary idea. Part of the orientation was a scavenger hunt that helped students hone in-world skills, like customizing their avatars, meeting and communicating with other people in-world, doing a little building, and visiting a library and checking out a book. Students had positive responses, I’m sure because they were having fun as they were learning about this immersive world.

This session was conducted via written chat, as most conversations occur in SL, and it was interesting to see how well you could make a 15 minute presentation. There was at least 30 minutes of Q & A following, with lots of good questions.

The second session was a Keynote Presentation by Kenny Hubble (SL) of Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario. The keynote featured live audio, making it very much like real life, except that I couldn’t tell if my seat was uncomfortable ;)

Hubble covered a broad spectrum of topics associated with Loyalist’s beginnings in SL. Perhaps the most significant point was how a rural college could offer its students interaction with the world–literally–through SL projects. There was too much to cover here, but Hubble described a class, “Topics in Journalism,” that conducted discussion sessions in SL, instead of in a typical discussion board. One student even garnered an internship with the Second Life News Network (SLNN) through his experience.

Well, I’ve had some other things to do in the afternoon, but the conference goes on until midnight (pacific time), so I’m heading back to see what else is going on.

Cool, very cool.

Filed under: SLBPE2007, education, immersive worlds, second life, slbestpractices07