Anniversaries and Predictions

PhilThis blog has now crossed the calendar mark and into its ninth year. In blog years, that is getting close to the senior citizen discount age. Over the years, we have looked at others predictions about learning and technology and we have made a few our own. It is interesting but I never view these predictions very seriously. We in this edtech business don't score much better than Oscar predictors or long-range weather prognosticators.

Groundhog Day is my reminder that another blog year has passed at Serendipity35. Phil, "the groundhog of record," saw his shadow and so predicts six more weeks of winter. If spring comes in four weeks, Phil doesn't get much bad press. And that's my thought on technology predictions too - we need to check back on them a year ot two out to grade them.

The predictions de la semaine are in the new “NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition,” a 52-page document that is available free from the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.

Before we get to the new report, I thought I would recap what I wrote four years ago about the 2010 Horizon Report predictions, The report always looks at the time-to-adoption for technologies or trends. Four years ago they said that the Time-to-Adoption was one year or less for "cloud computing and collaborative environments. Both of those had pretty much arrived in 2010 already, so those are your safest bets. The cloud is certainly here now. Although collaborative environments may exist, they haven't taken any greater hold now than they did a few years ago.

In 2010, game-based learning and mobile learning was seen as 3 to 4 years away. Mobile is used more than it was a few years ago, but it is hardly a major part of the learning world. Gamification is still a topic for conference presentations as "on the horizon."


The predictions that are the most difficult are the ones that wil be arrive in 4-5 years. That 2010 Horizon Report said they would be augmented reality and flexible displays - both of which are still far from being a part of the learning environment in any significant way.

So, why even look at predictions? It is a good thing to be aware of what appears to be on the horizon. I belong to several groups, such as the NJEDge Academic Technology Group, that meet and try to do the same kind of predicting on an ongoing basis. We llok at emerging technology, so things like the Horizon report are useful in setting the agenda.


The new Horizon Report looks at six technologies and the changes they’re expected to bring. Of course, you should read the full report, but here is my PowerPoint slide summary. 

Social media’s expansion into education will continue and have its maximum impact within two years. “Understanding how social media can be leveraged for social learning is a key skill for teachers, and teacher-training programs are increasingly being expected to include this skill.”



The other trend that is here and will continue to make inroads is the blending of traditional face-to-face instruction with online, hybrid, and collaborative learning. The report says it has “the potential to leverage the online skills learners have already developed independent of academia.” 



In the next 3-5 years, we should expect data-driven learning and assessment to have more of an impact on attempts to personalize learning and improve performance measurement.

Also listed as having more of an impact in three to five years is a shift toward “learning by making and creating rather than from the simple consumption of content.” That sounds like my idea that the Web 2.0 shift would cause a Learning 2.0 (AKA University or even School 2.0) to follow.



The most challenging predictions are the two trends that are long-range (5 or more years away). The Report predicts one of those to be the softer prediction that there will be a continuing evolution of online learning. That includes thinking about what effects MOOCs will finally have on academia. The second general trend is universities shifting to more agile “approaches to teaching and learning that mimic technology start-ups.

That last prediction makes me want to say that education always seems to move slower than the the corpoarte world or even the general consumer world when it comes to embracing new technology. Mobile has arrived in almost every sector except education where it is still viewed as a distraction. MOOCs will probably have a greater impact first in corporate training and for lifelong learners than it will in academia in the next few years.

But it is interesting to guess. And I think Twelve Years a Slave will win the Best PIcture Oscar. 


Standards: Common Core and Others

The majority of K-12 educators seem to dislike the Common Core Standards. But you know who likes them? The for-profit education industry. Why? Because having common standards makes it a whole lot easier to produce educational materials and sell them to a wide audience. In New Jersey was using the same standards as Texas and California, things would be great for big vendors.

Having to individualize resources costs more money. Having to customize learning in your classroom costs you more time.

A vendor can label a product as being “Aligned with the Common Core” and pick up some easy sales. If you have to apply the same standards to all your students - no special accommodations - your teaching life is easier.

If in 4 years your college freshman composition class is filled with students who went through high school with the Common Core Standards, you should be able to expect a certain homogeneity to their knowledge. Right?



Of course, the idea of having adaptive and personalized instruction was very popular the past few years. What happens to that?


I was part of an effort in 2006 to build a K-20 (AKA K-16 or P-20) program to bring colleges and secondary or lower schools together in order to better prepare the pre-college student. One of the the goals was to align K-12 education with postsecondary goals.

Now, you have elementary and secondary schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia trying to implement new standards for math and language arts in order to improve college and career readiness for every high school graduate.

An admirable goal to be sure. The first set of assessments will be in the 2014-15 academic year.

Perhaps the first department to feel the heat at a college will be the school of education. They need to prepare students now to work in a school environment that will be using the CCS as soon as they start. 


Sure, other college departments will probably sense a different kind of student (better or worse prepared, depending on your current bias). But that probably won't be really evident until students arrive who were taught with Common Core-based curriculums in elementary, middle school and high school. That will take a decade.





I like standards. Standards of weights and measurement were very important to industrial and technological progress. And while I feel that students who graduate a high school in Vermont or Alabama should be equally prepared for work or college, I also think have observed in my own classrooms for 38 years that having the same standards for every student in a class sometimes just did not make for the best learning in that room.

This is not going to be easy.




Big (for me) Data

I use SlideShare to share my slide presentations with the world. They send me weekly stats and they always surprise me.

This last week, the most viewed was one on "Moodle: a free learning management system" which has had 47,000 views. I feel a bit embarrassed by that because the presentation is kind of out of date by now. I think I should do an update. Obviously, there is interest.

The latest popular download of the week was one I did on "Student Blogs As Reflective Practice."

My SlideShare stats showed that 1,000 people have embedded one of my slide presentations on their blog or site. Some can be embedded as a slideshow but some are pdf documents and 2000 times people have downloaded the presentation. That is way more people than I will ever stand in front of live and share a presentation.

I started using Slideshare seven years ago when I posted a set of slides with quotations that I was using in a teacher workshop. I wanted to make them available to the teachers later, so I posted them and told them they could download the PowerPoint and then edit or use it in any way. It was an easy way to open source the idea. (You can add a Creative Commons license to your uploaded work. I generally use the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.)  That set of "Thirty Quotations" has had more than 18,000 views. A few people who downloaded it have even emailed me to let me know how they used them in their classes. I uploaded a "Thirty Quotations Volume 2" the following year.

The really surprising stat that Slideshare emailed me this month was this: 5 Titanics worth of people have viewed those slides. That's one way to think of big data - though I might prefer to think of my readers as being on a Caribbean cruise ship rather than a doomed ocean liner. 


Higher Ed Analytics

data



I was reading Karine Joly's post on the CollegeWebEditor blog about what the "next big thing" might be for higher education analytics. Big and small data has been a hot topic outside education for longer than it has been hot in education, so we have some catching up to do.





Karine got 11 speakers from the 2nd edition of the online Higher Ed Analytics Conference (Feb 5, 2014) who are analytics experts in higher ed to make some predictions.

Here are 6 that I think are good ideas to consider for your own institution's analytics roadmap.



Universal Analytics – Shelby Thayer from Penn State University "I’m hoping it can be to find a way to tie together the entire web presence and experience. Look for Universal Analytics to play a major role over the next year or two. I’m excited to see what the impact will be. Although, for higher education, I think the 'next big thing' is in our hands – something we can overcome ourselves with more resources and better collaboration."



Google Tag Manager – Colleen Clark from Ithaca College "I think higher ed institutions are starting to become more comfortable with the idea of integrating analytics with online marketing. As new digital campaigns are launched, multiple tags may need to be placed on the website. Tag Management solutions such as Google Tag Manager will begin to become more widespread in 2014 by replacing multiple tag requests with a single unified code on the website for all tagging needs."



Predictive Analytics – Michelle Tarby from Le Moyne College " I’d like to move into using Google Analytics to do predictive modeling. Can we use the behavior of our visitors to predict someone is more likely to apply, visit or request more information about us? What does that look like? How does the source of the visit relate to meeting a goal? Are other metrics a better predictor (number of visits, particular pages they end up on, number of pages viewed)? Once those models are built, how do we build content targeting? What increases the likelihood of conversion based on our models?"



Multi-Channel Integration – Stephanie Hatch Leishman from MIT "While this isn’t the 'next big thing' in the for-profit world, it’s something I believe we’re still aiming for in higher ed. In 2014, I see more universities focusing on analytics throughout all their communications, including email, social, web, print, etc. For many institutions, content creation still may not be fully integrated, and still in silos, so our analytics follow suit."



Real-Time Social Media Analytics – Tim Nekritz from SUNY Oswego "I expect better, more robust reporting of real-time analytics will really allow us to pivot and change content and delivery even faster. The main hitch in Google and social media analytics is the delay in receiving the most valuable quantitative and qualitative information. Once somebody figures out how to streamline that so that I quickly know, say, whether something I posted on the homepage that we think is important is or isn't getting any play, we can think about whether modifying its placement, related visual or phrasing can help it perform better."



Finally, here is one thing that doesn't require a lot of technology, but might be even harder than implementing analytics software on a campus.

Data Sharing Among Institutions – C.Daniel Chase from The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga  "The next big thing that I would like to see is, cross-institutional sharing of data. The idea being that universities could voluntarily agree to participate and compete a short form describing their institution (public/private, 2/4 year, undergraduate & graduate enrollment) and add a short piece of javascript to their pages that would submit their data to a central account—perhaps using Google Analytics—that could then be used as a resource for site comparison to your peers. With this kind of data, everyone would have a better perspective on how well they were doing individually, and they would be able to review those that were doing well for good ideas! The ‘friendly competition’ would all help us develop better websites!"