Learning Research: Innovations in eLearning

Personal Reflection Exercise:

What does it mean to be innovative?
How does innovation apply to education in the U.S.?
What are the attributes of innovative ideas and persons?
What elements make an innovation successful?

Here are some great examples of current and future innovations in learning and training:

Personalized textbooks with the Utah open textbooks project
The future of mobile technology: Nokia HumanForm
The future of business at Microsoft in 2019
Personal Learning Environments at Coldwell Banker University
Mechanic training using Augmented reality at BMW

Learning Research: 2011 Horizon Report

The Horizon Report is an annual publication that outlines six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use within higher education over a five year period of time.

Near-term Horizon (adoption within one year):

Electronic Books - an easy alternative to printed materials. Most allow for bookmarking, annotation, commentary, and dictionary lookup, and some allow for richly visual and interactive interfaces that include multimedia.

Mobiles - a viable alternative to laptops. Smartphones allow for web browsing, reading, watching videos, navigating, and playing games. They also provide access to the Apple or Android application markets. Mobiles can be used for anytime, anywhere and just-in-time learning.

Mid-term Horizon (adoption within two to three years):

Augmented Reality - A computer-assisted layer of information over the real world. Can be activated by visual metaphors and cues via a camera or location based cues via GPS systems. Allows learners to interact with virtual objects and view or annotate existing spaces with an overlay of information.

Game-based Learning - Can be goal-oriented, social, non-digital, or serious, ranging from paper-and-pencil games to massively, multiplayer online games. They allow for experimentation, exploration, problem-solving, and decision-making within a safe environment.

Far-term Horizon (adoption within four to five years):

Gesture-based Computing - a new era of interface design that foregoes the keyboard and mouse and opts instead for touching, tapping, swiping, and moving to engage with information. Approaches to gesture recognition can include applying pressure, motion, shaking, rotating, or tilting to manipulate interfaces and objects.

Learning Analytics - data collected from student activity in order to assess academic progress, predict future performance, and identify potential issues. Collected data includes assignments, social interactions, and discussions as a means to personalize educational opportunities for students.

Reference:
2011 Horizon Report. Retrieved from: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2011/

Learning Development: Leveraging Mobile Technology

“Personal, portable, wirelessly networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners”, (Looi, Seow, So, Chen, & Wong, 2010) and informal learning through mobile technology represents a potential fundamental shift in the way people learn. Using mobile technology, learners can actively participate in learning outside of formal learning environments.

“Use of these technologies facilitates communication, collaboration, sharing and learning in informal settings with their peers, friends, and family unbounded by time and location.” (Looi, Seow, So, Chen, & Wong, 2010) However, learners can also use mobile devices as a supplement to formal learning in the classroom by connecting the mobile device to an online learning portal created by his/her learning community. “An online portal provides a platform where students can move from the individual space on the mobile device to the public space to facilitate collaboration and sharing.” (Looi, Seow, So, Chen, & Wong, 2010)

Distributed cognition theory, proposed by Edwin Hutchins, determines that learning occurs through three processes: social group, events/experiences in time, and between the interaction of material and environmental structure. In the case of mobile technology, learning can occur by way of distributing cognition among social collaboration in public learning spaces via a platform in the “cloud”, and through experience and/or artifacts found individually via informal learning in both real and virtually augmented environments.

Some of the difficulties encountered in evaluating the potential for informal and technology-enhanced learning through mobile devices are: individual student’s access to mobile devices, compatibility and cost of software and operating system of devices, inability to evaluate all learning activities outside a controlled environment, and ethical consideration.

“The notions for place, time, and space for learning have changed” (Looi, Seow, So, Chen, & Wong, 2010). With that, we must try to harness the potential impact of informal learning experiences upon students. The cognitive distribution of learning objects across social platforms, individual experiences, real and virtual spaces, and time through mobile devices has the potential to change how we learn, and should be used to leverage both individual and formal learning opportunities.

Reference:
Looi, C.-K., Seow, P., Zhang, B., So, H.-J., Chen, W. and Wong, L.-H. (2010), Leveraging mobile technology for sustainable seamless learning: a research agenda. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41: 154–169.

Learning development: Mobile and social technology

Yes, the mobile device is projected to be the world’s primary connection tool to the internet in 2020. As a member of the learning and development field and Generation Y, I can't help but realize that the future of my field lies with these handheld devices. Let's all start jumping on the mobile learning train. While we are at it, let's keep creating ways that social technology, the premiere media of today, can be used as a learning tool.