Educause and Next Gen Learning Challenges

EDUCAUSE, has launched ‘The Next Gen Learning Challenges’ (NGLC) initiative to invite the conversation and to foster a genuine and active community dedicated to improving college readiness, encouraging college completion, and exploring the transformative effect of learning science and emerging technologies on student success.

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

We have addressed the issue of OER remix and mash ups several times during our discussions and in our research activities. Both remixing and mash-ups, which originate from music and web development respectively, have been become popular social media activities.

...said Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, in a speech that he gave together with Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO for the launch of the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Researching the Marginalized. The  report released on 19 January, argues that the crisis could create a lost generation of children whose life chances will have been irreparably damaged by a failure to protect their right to education.

I spent Monday, 9th November, at the Blended Design Workshop at Brunel University*.  The workshop introduced over 25 participants to a new methodology - learning design in a blended learning context - for learning design, which aims to provide support and guidance to lecturers in making decisions about creating blended learning modules and activities, including engagement with using and developing OERs.

Interesting interoperability of physical and digital networked spaces for capturing understanding about what Olnet is and what it can offer. 

This was produced Thursday, 01/10/09, at Design Observatory, Venables Building, OU.

I spent most of last week attending, for the first time, the annual OpenEd 2009 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Though this was not the first event combining academic grounding and practitioner insight, that I have attended, the openness of concepts and multiplicity of spaces – virtual and physical –  for expression pushed me to think of education in many new ways.  To put it briefly this event did not only provide an opportunity for reflection on the blurring of boundaries between scholarship and pedagogy, teaching/learning practices; it also provided a community space for activists and those interested in broadening the definitions of, and participation in, education and learning.

Location

This was the final - and largest - event in the ESRC Seminar Series “The educational and social impact of new technologies on young people in Britain”. Looking beyond mainstream articulations of the so-called 'digital generation', the series addressed core issues around the conceptual and methodological challenges for directing policy-relevant and stakeholder-informed empirical research on learning, digital learning and in/formal learning cultures.