Sep

Six ways that education will be revamped by the Internet

Being an “old pol” who served long ago on two national staffs of Presidential campaigns and six statewide election efforts, I am having trouble staying away from spending just about all of my time reading the political blogs. The US Presidential election is fascinating, and the bloggers are delivering information in entirely new ways through their posts.

The GoldenSwamp.com blog is about the learning stuff (gold) in the swamp (the internet). What I am writing here picks up a format that has been popping up in the political blogs. The format could be called the “n things list”: n things that are happening, n reasons why, n things to look for. In that format, here are:

6 ways that education will be revamped by the internet in coming months:

1. The shift of primary creative development will be from tech to content. The progression of the most interesting challenges has been from creating the computers, to conceiving applications, to establishing networks — and now to manipulating the data and its meaning that lives in the new environment created by it all. The wildly popular new Apple App Store does not sell devices or connections, it sells content to be played with, used for information, and learned.

2. The understanding of the internet is deepening to studying the relationships [think hyperlinks] of its smallest pieces. The open connectivity of the pieces of cognitive gold within the internet swamp is the way that knowledge will emerge for students, mirroring the connectivity of their learning minds.

3. The cloud cometh – but SaaS (Software as a Service) is only the technical platform for the content the cloud contains and interfaces. When we are interacting with content in the cloud, our cognitive connectivity becomes global.

4. Learning content will be SEOed (optimized for search engines), revolutionizing its use as has happened already in e-commerce and the media.

5. Social networks — increasingly replacing textbooks — will become significant delivery mechanisms for connection to the knowledge students learn.

6. As mobiles increasingly deliver the Internet there will be no separate m-learning to create. Soon most digital learning content interaction will be mobile as these devices individually owned by students deliver the Internet. One Web will rule.

Filed under Golden Age of Learning on September 3, 2008 - 5 Comments

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Charles A. Findley Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Learning by aggregation–if one where to carefully select the “news feeds” or subscribe to the microblogs of persons from whom we feel we can learning and if those individuals do commit to share important insights as the thoughts come to mind, I think we create a system whereby we can learning through the aggregated micro-chunkletts of our great thinkers
Judy Breck Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Learning by aggregation – yes! Point 2 above will be an umbrella principles for this and other powerful ways for patterns of ideas to assemble in the open network of online knowledge.
Sam Says:
September 28th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
The problem with aggregation of content is that there is simply TOO MUCH of unsorted, unverified information on the internet. There will always be a requirement for human validated information, since otherwise there would be no way for the learner to know if it it true, false or irrelevant. In fact the demand for “human validated” or “human/expert recommended” information would be much more in the internet age.
Judy Breck Says:
September 28th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
There has always been too much unverified information in every venue — and a lot of unsavory information too. Printed information does not have an inherent validation aspect, but open networked material does. The migration of information to the internet places it into a network ecology where new kinds of mechanisms (network laws) emerge the best of information in context. Google was the first to harness these mechanisms — with search weighted by human verification (how many and who linked to a webpage). You are right, Sam, that human validation and expert recommendation are essential. Open networking empowers human validated aggregation. When an expert links to a webpage she admires, she “gives it juice,” as the SEO (search engine optimizers) say. Educators should be working to use the network mechanisms, not to hold back from the new connected knowledge ecology.

Sam, thanks for your input! Judy
Charles A. Findley Says:
September 30th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Luigi Canali De Rossi also known as Robin Good on his web analysis of tools of collaboration in the new media recently explained the emerging role of newsmastering using newsradar tools. According to Good, Newsmastering
is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences, perhaps learners. Maybe the learning facilitator ( teacher)
starts looking a little like Robin Good’s news master.

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