“Nothing “Flat” World about this Jazz: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education by Curt Bonk #heartlandconf10

These are my notes from Curtis Bonk’s opening keynote address, “Nothing ‘Flat’ World about this Jazz: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education” at the 2010 Heartland eLearning Conference hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. The Heartland eLearning conference is on Twitter, has a conference blog, and a Facebook fan page. This is the first year of what will be an annual conference, and the dates for Heartland eLearning next year will be

Curt Bonk’s homepage at Indiana University is “Curt Bonk’s e-Learning World.” His blog is TravelinEdMan (on Blogger) and his wiki project, “Wikis for Research on Intercultural Knowledge and Interactivity” is on WikiSpaces.

Opening comments from the UCO Provost, Dr. William Radke

Great challenge in eLearning is not the technology: It is “engaging” the learners who (as Don Tapscott observes) have “grown up digital”
Tips from Tapscott
1- focus on pedagogy, not technology
2- cut back on lecturing (just as inefficient online as it is in the classroom)
3- empower students to collaborate (online environments have
4- focus on lifelong learning (how to learn)
5- use available technology to get to know students in their classes, and build customized, self-paced courses
6- there should be choice, customization, transparency, collaboration, fun, speed and innovation in the learning experience
7- faculty should consider re-inventing themselves as educators within this new paradigm

These suggestions are difficult to manage in the F2F classroom, as well as online

This is why we’re here! To learn what is new in online teaching and learning
– we have the perfect person to set the tone for the day
– Curtis Bonk has had several careers in his short lifetime than most of us will have
– his enthusiasm and intolerance for the mundane must explain this (his diverse background)

Dr Bonk revealed he’s recently delivered his 1000th talk around the world on blended learning, elearning, etc.

Keynote address by Dr Bonk:
– several animated GIFs on his opening PPT slide
– he is wearning an Indiana Jones jacket

PDFs for both sessions are available on trainingshare.com

I am currently writing a free book that will have the same chapters as what I’m presenting now, because the publisher I worked with cut out half the book

I was at the Univ of Oklahoma Sunday night about pictures and stories of people who have changed the world

You have to believe in the power of sharing

Is the world flat?
– Vancouver 2005 keynote, I was really thinking about Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat”
– first third is really about education
– I wrote to Friedman and corresponded with him, he encouraged me to write the book, “The World is Open”
– we were going to write a book together, but a small publisher convinced me to write alone

Friedman has 3 C’s: collaborative technologies
– lets UCO students collaborate with students in the UK, in China, and elsewhere
– this equalized playing field can permit these kinds of collaborations

Friedman talked about the importance of these collaborations
– management processes being flattened

Citing Don Tapscott: person on the shop floor can make a suggestion for changes in personnel and it goes into a wiki or a blog, so the employees have more power
– the same thing is happening in education
– use of technologies give students more power

Tech provides the nature, pedagogy provies the nurture

When I’m in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, then the UK… these all apply

You can learn from Tom Friedman’s book, watch videos of his talks at MIT, add comments to his latest book website “Hot, Flat and Crowded”
– I listened to it a 2nd time in my car

The world is not just flat, it is open
– some say it is flat broke

Now showing slide of “The Tne Forces That Flattened the World”

Is the World Curved?

Citing Richard Florida: Is the world spikey?
– cities where people want to go

Or is the world open?
– book: Opening Up Education
– 3 years later this is available via MIT Press, download as PDF
– Yale and MIT are doing this a lot

The world is open wherever I go

We have people like Charles Wedemeyer “Learning at the Back Door” in 1981 speaks to nontraditional learning
– available via Amazon for $1

Through iTunesU and YouTubeU I can learn all kinds of things now

21 Things That Became Obsolute This Decade
– Dec 11, 2009 silicon Alley Insider

15 Gadgets that changed everything this Decade

UCLA Summer Digs Program

You can’t take pictures of critical thinking and thought, but you can take photos of kid with technology

People like you and I can go to Chili or Albania, to do archaeology digs

I was an armchair Indiana Jones / Indiana Curt: (put on a hat and got out a whip)
– I can learn things from anyone at any time

Kids from the Philippines can be teaching me something

10 different technology trends have impacted us
– Michael Parham and Zac Sunderland are trying tobe the youngest person to sail solo around the world, blog on it, use skype, youtube, take videos, post pictures
– now Abby Sunderland age 16 and Minoru Saito, age 75, oldest solo sailor

Jason Project: kids can control submarines under the ocean

David Thomas at La Trobe University in Australia, studies Afghanistan and other Middle East areas
– his wife was concerned about him going to Khanddhar
– he studied using Google Earth, finding out about military sites and archeology sites
– Discovery News found out about it

Now showing images from Indiana Jones movies, audio clip playing in the background

Are we all armchair archeologists
– “Their treasure wasn’t gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure.”

Maybe you can’t find knowledge online, but you can find bare bones information

WE-ALL-LEARN
– ten forces shaping the world

We have pipes, pages and a participatory learning culture

web 1.0 was about browsing, web 2.0 is about participating in the experience

Now throwing out give-aways and freebees

5% of books in our bookstores now are available online
– this will continue to grow

Ray Kurtzweil reinvents the book as the Blio
– a free platform, run on any device

Free Online Books
– Terry Anderson and Fathi Elloumi, “Theory and Practice of Online Learning”

Cory Doctorow giving away his eBook
– he dropped out of college 4 times, and became a fellow at USC
– finds many more people buy his book because he is giving it away

Read, Listen, etc to online books (“An International Episode” by Henry James”
– it is on the Internet Archive
– I can download it, comment on it, and listen to that book

The Internet Archive doesn’t want Google Books to win
– so Microsoft threw in the white flag

Check out The Open Content Alliance on the topic of open content

Lots of people were reluctant about online learning in China till SARS, in Louisiana till Katrina, in K-12 schools till H1N1

Shaquille O’Neal got his degree online in a blended environment from Phoenix University

Oprah has had thousands of people simultaneously downloading content, using skype, etc

Gates Foundation, Jan 10 letter: will address online learning this year

Indiana Univ High School: 4000 students and 1400 enrolled in diploma programs
– could someday be bigger than Indiana University
– my child will be enrolled this year when we take a boat through the Caribbean for two months later this year

Capella Tower was named for learning, formerly “The Halo” in Minneapolis

iSMART: Integration of Science, Matheatics and Reflective TEaching
– free Masters degree for math and science teachers

UCO: Transformative Learning initiatives
– active learning classrooms
– example at Univ of MN
– Univ of TX: starting new degree completion program for people who have SOME college credits but haven’t finished yet

Penn State has a world campus

Universities are rethinking themselves, and the idea of face to face learning and instruction
– this is a healthy thing that is happening

Sloan Foundation: online is growing by 17% per year and more in some places
– some universities
– Central Florida largest university because of online enrollment

some legislature mandates: Michigan requiring some online learning
– Florida mandating K-12 options online

These things make people take notice

Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United Sates (Jan 2010, Sloan-C report)
– if you want validation about online education, look at Stanford and USG meta-analysis

Growth is really at associates and doctoral levels

Data: Univ of Central Florida
– has over 1 million student credits analyzed
– “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies”

Central Florida has a plan, a vision, for how they will grow

Third opener: availability of open source and free

Linux, Apache, Moodle, Sakai

– Sakai is now a pretty good tool

Blackborg is now buying out everyone….

Moodle: 32+ million registered users in 2008 countries, 3+ million courses, 2/6/2010
– Martin didn’t like WebCT so he built his own version and invited others to built it with him

Opener 4: leveraged resources and OpenCourseWare (OCW)
– free courses from MIT, Utah State, CORE, OOPS
– all 1900 courses from MIT are now available free

BUT WHAT DOES “THIS COURSE IS AVAILABLE FREE” REALLY MEAN?

– audio quote from Jack Sparrow

Book “Free” by Chris Anderson
– unabridged version is available free, abridged version is paid

now we call pirating “sharing”…

Examples of profs who teach free online: George Siemens and others

Berkeley professor teaching via her YouTube channel
Stanford on iTunes

The OOPS Project: Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System
– translating MIT content in OOPS network in Chinese worldwide
– he is a celebrity in Taiwan
– he has the largest network of volunteer translators in the world

translated Lord of the Rings into Chinese and became a multi-millionaire

Sample OpenCourseWare Projects
– Tufts, Johns Hopkins
– no instructor behind this, but this is “level 1 knowledge”

Declaration of Open Education is available to sign
– Jimmy Wales one of the original signers (one of 30)

University of the People: Peer2Peer University
– Neeru Paharia is behind it
– hopes to have accreditation some day

Opener #5: open access journals
– Article on move to public access journals in Chronicle

Fora.tv is one of the sites I love for public tv access
– link television too
– TV Lesson has lessons on TONS of stuff

Tracking live internet thawing of biggest squid ever found: a colossal of an idea

Ida: a transitional species
47 million year old Darwinius Masillae Fossil the missing link?
– wowOwow May 20, 2009
– researchers found out about this the same time the public did
– this is a BIG change

Cambridge coming out with Complete Works of Charles of Darwin
– people find out about letters to his wife, works that weren’t published, he had a laptop computer [joke – grin]

The Carlyle Letters Exploring Victorian World Through Letters and the Diary of Samuel Pepys

– The Victorian Peeper: Nineteenth-century Britain through the looking glass

these portals of rich, real world content for literature classes, social studies classes, global studies classes: Fantastic

works of Captain Cook, Sir Issac Newton, many others…
– now available for the world to access and see

Sharing repositories and referatories
– Merlot.org
– Connexions
– National Repository of Online Courses, OER Commons

Six years later, lots of sharing

Opener #6: Learner participation in open communities
– we have YouTube.edu, TeacherTube
– academic earth

WikiPedia and YouTube are to thank for much of this

WikiSource has original John Dewey, more
WikiQuotes
WikiBooks: where my students write books with students around the world
– things are free, students can own and share their own knowledge

CoolCatTeacher streamed my talk last year [DIDN’T MENTION VICKI DAVIS’ NAME]

We can all create our own TV programs with Ustream
– the power to create a podcast, a blog, a video

I’m having my students do videos on YouTube

The Queen is uploading videos to “The Royal Channel” on YouTube

Individual Produced Videos: African School Dream in CurrentTV

Participatory eBooks: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
– published a few years ago
– annotations can be added

Yochai Benkler’s book “The Wealth of Networks” free as a wiki

Scribd: Documents on Web
– my qualifying exams are up there
– has free books, free papers
– communities form around documents
– old graded homework assignments are up there
– this is YouTube for text

Opener #7: Collaboration
– collaborate or die

synchronous conferencing presentations
– I gave a keynote over the Internet to China last year

I WONDER HOW MANY PEOPLE IN THIS AUDITORIUM ARE FEELING OVERWHELMED AT THIS POINT? I WONDER IF THAT IS THE POINT HE IS MAKING?

The next Generation of Videoconferencing: Chronicle of HE, 21 Oct 2009
– North Carolina working on holographic videoconferencing

Adventure Learning: GeoThentic, GoNOrth (National Geographic)
– Aaron Doering, Univ of Minnesota

[WHAT A THRILL AND PRIVILEGE IT WAS TO MEET AARON IN CHINA LAST NOVEMBER. HE REALLY IS AN AMAZING PERSON AND PROFESSOR!]

Opener #8: Alternate Reality Learning
– online massive gaming, simulations, and virtual worlds (Second Life)

Medical simulations in SL, lots possible in virtual worlds
– University of Texas

Opener #9: Real-Time Mobility and Portability
– iPhone, low cost mobile devices

4 years ago I was upset at my son for playing Halo
– now: social networking gaming: Farmville
– 90 million people raising goats and pigs, corn crops, etc.

What has happened to Grand Theft Auto, we don’t hear anything about this
– violence

maybe we’re finally at the age of edu-tainment

Now there are initiatives about ebooks every day

Announcements about mobile learning coming out every day
– $2 app lets you play your iPhone as a flute or a horn
– people becoming flutists at dinner that night after someone who heard my talk downloaded the App

Pocket School Project from Stanford
– your teacher is in your pocket
– as a migrant worker in Mexico or Honduras, you can rent to own for $1 per month

[I THINK MIGRANT WORKERS FROM THOSE NATIONS WOULD BE IN THE U.S.]

40,000 new mobile subscribers a week in Rwanda
– Africa is the continent with the fastest growth
– this is where LOTS of things are happening fast

Terabyte thumb drives and magic pens: The Pulsepen from Livescribe: $130

WikiReader, TwitterPeek: people want to use these tools

Opener #10: Personalized learning
– podcasts
– shakespearecast.com

Facebook: we should be thinking about academic uses of these social networking platforms
– Harriett Schwartz Chronicle of higher ed: Facebook: The New Classroom Commons

[IRONICALLY THAT ARTICLE IS LOCKED UP BEHIND A SUBSCRIPTION LOGIN…. SO MUCH FOR OPEN CONTENT, CHRONICLE OF HE]

At Purdue Univ: They have the “twitter hot seat”
– twitter posts in the background
– I’m not sure if I’d want this as a keynote speaker….

ChinesePod
– videos with podcasts
– sell premium content around free content

Livemocha: sign up to learn or teach a language
– founder left Blackberry to create Livemocha
– 29 languages, 160 hours of lessons….

Predictions for the future
– audio quotation from Darth Vader: “Indeed you are powerful as the emperor has foreseen.”

[THAT IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE MOVIE QUOTES!]

1- five billion “have nots” have at it!
2- emergence of lifelong super ementors/coaches
3- quarter century learning clubs
4- terabyte learning access points
5- veneration of learning
6- personalization+ portfolios
7- selection of global learning partners
8- shared learning era
9- teaching-learning perpetuities
10- teachers, teachers
11- rise of the super blends
12- more….

We’re going to have laptops that cost $10, fold out screens, lots of great stuff

everyone wants to teach someting to someone…

lots of options available, choose widely

All notes and more on:

slides: www.traininghshare.com
papers: www.publicationshare.com
book: www.worldisopen.com

Technorati Tags:
education, heartlandconf10, uco, distance, distributed

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