Thursday 10 July 2014

Fabulous ideas: economics, innovation, #education

The past 50 minutes I have been blown out of my mind with this 74 pages slide deck "Personal learning in a Networked world" symbolizing the synopsis of a keynote Stephen Downes gave at the London School of Economics yesterday. In some cases Stephen rehashes slides from previous talks, but in this case all the slides seemed so new in their relating to one another, so connected in that they visualized an interdisciplinary, holistic picture of new learning opportunities, new data and computer ownership issues, looking at all people (not just students), and contemplating economic impact with autonomous ownership linked with cooperation. Really... from these slides I got so much information I am only capable of saying: read it!

Great points such as: "New versions of old models don't produce new results" (cfr. text to mobile book, or boring class to instructivist MOOC), or the importance of personal (not personalized), networked learning and a lot of links to new tools (indietools) and yes philosophers. So for me, there was a lot of information, reshaped in such an inspiring set of thoughts. I am going to go through it again, reflecting upon it, hopefully building upon it... Admittedly I like what Stephen does, his professionalism linked to freedom of learning relates to my thinking, but the way he is able to connect fields to create the overall, bigger picture is at times so invigorating. I really envy that - in a good way, and as such it lifts me up.

And there are similar minds that connect. One particular person Yishay Mor who immediately came to mind due to his work on Design Patterns and design Narratives which features a simple, yet often overlooked action: engender collaborative reflection among practitioners by a structure process of sharing stories and successful practice. This work and idea came up as an addition to Stephen's slide 52 on pattern recognition. Yishay organized a great workshop yesterday on MOOCs, more on that later.



Okay, back to my writing work.

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