Art, Technology, Networks, and the Future of Higher Education

George Siemens, PhDJuly 29, 2013

ATHE Leadership Summit

Digital spaces for learning/teaching art, theatre, music

Equivalency of space

Online and F2F as equal spaces, but with unique attributes

Rhetoric of the electrical sublime

long-standing, naive, and utopian expectations

Carey & Quirk

Gibson’s Affordances

Action potentialPreconditions for activityAgent, object, interactionAffordance is a property of this interaction

Where is the art? theatre? music? in all this digital learning

Yes, we explore technology as a medium of art

Yes, we explore technology as a medium for art

Less prominent is as a medium to teach theatre/art

Immersive experiences hit/miss

(i.e. SecondLife)

Tom Woodward

Networks

Maria Popova

in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.

Wellman (2002)

http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing/snapp/index.html

the world will fragment, with some parts moving towards the brighter side of networked individualism and other parts moving towards gated communities and more tightly controlled information flows.

Freedom and control

When systems are distributed, alternative modes of integration are needed

Stasser-Titus (1985)

Challenge then is to create a new integrated whole

Challenge then is to create a new integrated system

Technology and online learning

The first use of the internet was communication and duplication

Creation is a more recent focus

Interaction equivalency theorem

“if any one of student-student, student-teacher or student-content interaction is of a high quality, the other two can be reduced or even eliminated without impairing the learning experience”

Anderson, 2003

Garrison, Anderson, Archer 1999

@audreywatters

Blending media spaces

One as lead to other: Pulling online into F2F (particularly through tools like twitter)TV programsCommercials

“In recent experimental and quasi-experimental studies contrasting blends of online and face-to-face instruction with conventional face-to-face classes, blended instruction has been more effective, providing a rationale for the effort required to design and implement blended approaches.”

US Department of Education, 2010

Technical vs. social/creative tension

“An Ecuadorian strawberry dessert algorithmically maximized for pleasantness”

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672444/try-a-recipe-devised-by-ibms-supercomputer-chef

Eventedness

White, 2009See also Cormier 2009

The value of place and space

What does the online space do better than F2F?

Future of higher education

Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own. 

Increasing diversity of student profiles

The U.S. is now in a position when less than half of students could be

considered fulltime students. In other words, students who can attend campus five days a week nine-to-five,

are now a minority.(Bates, 2013)

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2013

“Both student and teacher are unhappy when chained to curricula and syllabi, to tests and mediocre standards. An atmosphere of uninspired and uninspiring common sense may well produce satisfactory mastery of technical “know how” and testable factual information. Such an atmosphere, however, stifles genuine understanding and the spirit of adventure in research.”

Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University 1959

What we are seeing is the complexification of higher education

Learning needs are complex, ongoing

Simple singular narrative won’t suffice going forward

The idea of the university is expanding and diversifying

The development of a shadow education system.

Prominent trends shaping the future of higher education

1. Openness2. Digital learning3. Granularized learning4. Data & analytics5. For-profit/startups (expanding ecosystem)6. Personalization/adaptivity7. Wearable/contextual computing8. Unbundling of organizational roles9. Blurring distinctive learning roles (lifelong)10.Degrees and alternative recognition models

Twitter/Gmail: gsiemens