Horizon2007:Research Question Four

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Research Question Four

What do you see as the key challenge(s) related to teaching, learning, or creative expression that learning-focused institutions will face during the next 5 years?

• Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted. No longer in their infancy, tools for working collaboratively at a distance are easier to use and more commonly available than in previous years. It is no longer unusual to attend a conference online or to contribute to a project wiki. As the tools have matured, the practice of online communication and collaboration has increased. This trend is at the heart of social computing and is driving personal broadcasting as well. [Trend carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds. The presence of small devices like cell phones or mp3 players being carried about everywhere is almost a given; delivering content to those devices simply makes sense. This trend is growing in the consumer arena and is beginning to be felt in education as well. The ubiquity of these devices has enabled personal broadcasting (podcasting and vlogging) to take off almost overnight, and that is just the first wave of broadband content that will be ported to phones in the next few years. [Trend carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning. The demand for personalized content and services, increasingly met by savvy retailers and service providers, and greatly enabled by the ability of the Internet to allow marketers to meet individualized needs will surface with increasing frequency in the world of academia. Scholarly and cultural institutions are already beginning to differentiate themselves along these dimensions and that can be expected to continue and accelerate for some time. [Trend carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope. As the ways in which researchers, students and teachers can collaborate with each other increase, knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge, a community activity. A renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is leading to an exploration of the science of gaming, context-aware environments and devices, and their application for teaching and learning. [Trend carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Show me the content - There are a plethora of tools, I want to know who is talking about preparing content. [hmw] Strongly agree here. Content creation takes immense amounts of time, drawing on skill-sets that are often barely or not available. [John Weber]

• Implementing PLEs – technical, legal, organisational and conceptual issues and change of recognising and facilitating distributed learning, work and living practices. [Josie Fraser] PLEs can be described as how the education community are currently discussing the implementation of the shifts outlined in the first four bullet points (all trends carried over). [Josie Fraser]

• Software Patents – their growing impact on education development - restricting creativity, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. [Josie Fraser]

• Moral panics being whipped up around the use of social networking , resulting in restrictive and potentially disastrous solutions such as DOPA - and how we engage in effective conversation and activity around online safety in the face of this. [Josie Fraser] Yes! [LJ]

• Open Source development and support frameworks – how do we provide the education sector with commercial level services to institutions without compromising on the benefits? Are there ways of approaching this that aren’t just dependent of luck and community commitment? [Josie Fraser]

• It's All in Beta with software that unfolds rapidly like flickr, YouTube, etc al, an endangered species is the old notion of software development a la Microsoft, taking years to develop a product, test, and sell it. Technology will be updated as it is used, rapidly, and how are we prepared for such rapid churn in the tools? Can we become more nimble with tech? How do we encourage a spirit of self retooling of skills? [AL] This is going to be very important I think [LJ]

• Where is my digital self? we have images over in flickr, videos in blip.tv, musings and articles in several blogs, perhaps projects stored elswhere, documents and spreadsheets on Google-- how do we manage our dispersed pieces of ourself? [AL]

• The Craft of Media Creation Despire newer and easier to use content creation tools, are we still enabling, teaching the art and craft of composition, storytelling, design, human interaction issues? I can buy every powertool at Home Depot, but maybe I still can only build crooked shelves ;-) [AL]

• Assessment of student work done using new technologies & techniques -- how do you grade a mixed-media remix? [RS]The subtle shift of greater shared power of assessment from faculty in courses to others on campus and automated reporting from learning object systems and informal learning. Assessment will come from more interdisciplinary, context-rich environments such as games, simulations, service learning used on the program and institutional level. Widely-enabled and automated peer assessment will be a force [BT](JPJ)

• Faculty skepticism vs student experimentation [Richard Katz][John Weber] I couldn't have said it better {RS} Figuring out how to facilitate reverse student to faculty mentoring [BT]

• middleware integration challenges [Timmo Dugdale]

• Personal / Professional identity collision Where does personal content authoring end and professional content authoring begin? Campus are growing more nervous of faculty and student blogs, due to this fuzzy line. [Timmo Dugdale] Including suitable standards being imposed by institutions (e.g. personal websites on institutional sites) [IB]

• Lifespan of Data Content never dies on the Web. Thing written in college tend to pop up an the most inappropriate and inconvenient times. [Timmo Dugdale] Yes, but the web is still new...and what about those 404 pages? I'm more worried about the increased ephemerality of the digital. [John Weber](JPJ)

• FERPA issues [Timmo Dugdale]

• Intellectual Property and Copyright Issues [JH] including 'open anything', 'ccommons' and Patent Laws [Cyprien]

• Locus of Control Implementing technologies that do not reside on our campus[Timmo Dugdale]

• Codification of what 'critical thinking' means in the digital context (authenticity, credibility, evidence, hierarchy of knowledge) [Richard Katz] [John Weber]Also information fluency verses information literacy [BT]

• Emergence of new institutions that challenge traditional institutions [Richard Katz](JPJ)

• How to connect learning interests and learning opportunities [Roy Pea]

• Paradox of Learning Objects and the tagging of learning resources. The metadata approach is off the mark, as it is based on the assumption that learning can be parsed into chunks — narrative for example cannot be split up [Roy Pea] Can you elaborate on this, Roy? [John Weber]

• Developing Digital Learning Portfolios how can we capture what one has learned in ways that it can be indexed and revisited [Roy Pea] More importantly how can we adequately demonstrate this? [IB]

• Knowing what students know… how to draw on the existing stores of knowledge that individuals have [Roy Pea] and getting over our reluctance to do so [AL] When students have greater skill and knowledge than the Professors. The 'upskilling' of staff to meet the demands. [IB](JPJ)

• Development of mentally relevant learning support [Roy Pea]

• Need to break bad habits and learn from our experiences (“stand and deliver,” lab demos, assessments that grade to a curve) [Roy Pea] I don't know if it's as much as a "bad habit" as a "workflow" habit. People (students and instructors) work the way they work. If they want to integrate a new technology or get rid of a technology into their teaching/learning, it has to be a habit change and a conscious effort to work differently {RS}

• Need to include the “real” part of humanities and scientific work — the errors, the drafts, the iterations [Roy Pea]

• Aligning faculty rewards The academy will continue to move in unequal and archaic fashion until a bold collection of institutions create incentives that directly relate to tenure and promotion supporting a hyrid product mix of traditional publishing with new modalities of expressing innovation, creativity and discovery (of course peer reviewed ;-). [Lev Gonick] Strongly agree!!! [John Weber](JPJ)

• The NSF/NEH/NEA and other agencies need to more dramatically embrace what I would call "big humanities" technology initiatives for funding so as to move the locus of debate around cyberinfrastructure for traditional science (ie. 'hard sciences' and 'engineering') as defining the 'future' of the academy. [Lev Gonick]

• Leadership The future of teaching, learning, and creative expression is too important to the academy to be left in the hands of new mediasts alone. Getting provosts and university presidents to carry the opportunity forward is, to my thinking, the biggest challenge ahead. [Lev Gonick] Strongly agree!! [John Weber]

• Technologists with Blinders Technologists need to acknowledge that content providers do not have to have the same enthusiasm for new tools as technologists. There is a place for technologists and a place for content providors (the race horses) and, god willin and the creek don't rise, a place for those of us who can facilitate communication between the two groups. Content providers do not have to become consummate tool users, it would be nice, but it is not necessary. We need to all be more tolerant of the skills of others. Respect for the skills of others is a major challenge to be faced. [hmw]

• Who is the new professional in these bleeding edge fields? What skills do they have now? What skills will they need in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? Do we have any real metrics for determining the answers to these questions? Do we have curricula (and faculty) flexible enough to adapt to the pace of change? (hmw)

• Are we becoming so specialized, particularly at larger institutions, that they are no pathways for lateral or upward mobility? How are institutions of higher education dealing with issues of sustainability? Governance? Mentorship? Who will be able to do your job tomorrow if you get hit by a bus today? (hmw)

• Learning-focused institutions will have to adapt to new realities one of which is that we are no longer in an industrial economy but rather in a growing Services Economy. Students will be working in this Services Economy and must be trained accordingly. The key word here is "interdisciplinary" and learning-focused institutions will have to destroy current disciplinary silos to change their offerings to students. Computer Science was very quick to realize this; as enrollment in CS is decreasing in most colleges, the Communications of the ACM - world's most popular journal for CS - had in the cover of its July 2006 issue the words Services Science ... (JPJ) Culture Clash I want to pick up on what Jean Paul is saying here, which has been echoed elsewhere, including the first comment above, by Richard: there is a culture-clash of unclear dimensions but clear impact between the technology worlds that students (and the youngest faculty!) live in, that of those faculty who are slow to deal with new technologies. Given the length of university careers -- it is the only job-for-life business that exists in the U.S. -- this chasm is not going away any time soon. I agree that learning-focused institutions need to adapt, but how will they? How much leadership can they/we expect from the upper levels of university administration in moving tenured faculty toward a different model of learning, one that incorporates new literacies across the curriculum (yes, it must be interdisciplinary), and takes into account how distributed, ubiquitous networks shift the movement of of images, words, sound, and ideas through the world, at all times and in all places? I particularly agree with Jean Paul's concern that the disciplinary silos of academia are one of the main barriers here, since this appears to be the problem of crafting a plan to teach students (and faculty) to create rigorous, well-new-media-argued documents: this learning domain has no "home" in our current structure of teaching. Who you gonna call? [John Weber]

• Developing Privacy Filter [Shoji Kajita] Including the exclusion of Spam and unsuitable sites/materials stifling the quest for knowledge [IB]

• Teaching and Learning Process Visualization [Shoji Kajita]

• Institutional Identity Management including Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure [Shoji Kajita]

• Academic Recommendation Engine that recommends what course, what learning object (materials, quizes, assignments,...) and how a student should learn based on his/her learning portofolio, course, curriculum and so on. Also, it can be based on research activities like technical papers and talks, journal papers, dissertations and so on. [Shoji Kajita]

• Internationalisation of learning. Westernised standards being applied in cross cultural situations. The need for localisation issues to be addressed.[IB]

• Credibility Reliance on information or knowledge by students which has not been refereed, reviewed or verified e.g Wikis/wikipedia. [IB]

• Plagiarism. [IB]

• Image Searching No good way to search images. [SEM] elaborate? What about Google images, and Google video? Flickr has a way to search on “interesting-ness” [LJ]

• New Media illiteracy [SEM]

• Rules to Remix What is an acceptable reuse, reinvention, re-vision? [Cyprien] Do we really have wide understanding of Creative Commons? My experience in workshops is "NO" [AL]

• Technology churn The plethora of 'new' (partic. web) apps every week may well cause faculty/instutions to hold back and wait - temporary paralysis [NN]

• Stakeholder conceptions of teaching and learning - Will other countries follow the UK route of mandating teaching credentials for all new (3 yeas or less) faculty? What about the widening gap between student and teacher conceptions? Employers? Parents? [NN]

• enter your response here [LJ]

etc...

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