EdTech – Page 3

About the EdTech workshop

April 13, 2016 By Oddgeir Tveiten Leave a Comment

It gives us great pleasure to announce the headpilot for the EdTech workshop at the June summit. Like in 2013, the workshop will be coached by Eilif Trondsen. Eilif has been with us for our conferences and workshops since 2010. Few in the Nordic region knows Silicon Valley and the international scene for the EdTech industry better than he does. For about 40 years he´s been living and working there, with a particular eye on the “Nordics”. Because of this, Eilif adds a dimension to our workshops that few if anyone else could.

In recent months Eilif has been working with us on a project to map the Nordic EdTech industry, a study based on our pilot project from 2012 and 2013. This time, people have been engaged in the mapping in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. A collaboration with the EdTech community in Oslo, we can look forward to some interesting findings from that study – and hopefully a few of the participans also finding their way to our June summit?

Ola Erstad – professor, UiO joins our speaking team

February 23, 2016 By wlsteam Leave a Comment

Check out our panels program:

…and especially a discussion we will be mounting on the coming challenges of scale in Nordic higher education. Ola Erstad is a familiar name to most Norwegian academics in the area of digital learning technologies. We’re happy to announce Ola’s participation at our June summit. Currently the department head at the UiO department of pedagogy, Ola has a long history of project making crossing back and forth between pedagogy and media studies. Here is a small list of his projects – later we will come back with a more detailed blog post:

2005-2009 Head of Steering committee for the national development project ‘Networks for Learning’ (‘Lærende nettverk’), involving almost 600 schools and teacher training colleges during this time period.

2000-2003 National Research Coordinator for Norway on the international study ’Second Information Technology in Education Study – Module 2’ (SITES M2), organized by Stanford Research International (USA), Twente University (the Netherlands) and University of Toronto (Canada).

1999-2003 Head of research for the National PILOT project, (120 schools in 9 regions of Norway, involving 16 researchers from different University Colleges in Norway doing action research in a sample of schools).

Part of project ‘Mediatized stories’, project leader Knut Lundby. Sub-project in lower secondary on ‘Digital storytelling’.

Oslo EdTech joins in for WLS 2016

February 2, 2016 By wlsteam Leave a Comment

Some months back, we began discussing the coming World Learning Summit with quite few different stakeholders in the Oslo region, one of them being the newly formed Oslo EdTech cluster. We’re happy to see a collaboration forming now, centering on issues and challenges facing the EdTech communites accross the Nordic countries.

Managing Director Hege Tollerud met with us in several meetings heldt at the Norwegian Trade Association’s HQ, and we are very fortunate to have them join the effort to create an annual, Nordic meeting space for “future learners” of all denominations – academics, politicians, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs.

Oslo EdTech is located together with Oslo StartUp Lab in the Oslo Science park at the University of Oslo. In later post we will be featuring Oslo ERdTech, but for now: Welcome. And here is a link to one of the their posts – unfortunately, in Norwegian. But a good one.

Another post, that we will recommend reading is this one – a story about a very unlikely group of young innovators, who in the future will be a lot more likely; in fact a part of the future of learning and education. They spoke in Oslo and then they spoke in London at the recently held BETT conference. Read their story here.

Notes on Adaptive/Personalized Learning

January 18, 2016 By wlsteam Leave a Comment

Blogpost by Eilif Trondsen. Originally posted here.

We have all heard it stated many times, I am sure, that learning is a very personal and social process, where “individual context” is key to how effective someone’s learning will be—in part because that context will drive the learner’s engagement in the learning materials. We all have very different needs, backgrounds, and experiences and most of us learn in different ways and at different speeds, and these things also affect, or are affected by, how engaged we are in the learning process.

And this situation makes it very clear what challenges are faced by teachers and professors in the classroom, especially when they present the same lecture to all the students in the class, regardless of their contextual differences. It is not surprising, therefore, that many educators and edupreneurs have felt that this is an area where technology could make a big difference, by adjusting the learning process and materials presented (i.e. both content, in terms of degree of difficulty, for instance, as well as the speed in which it is delivered), to the specific learner’s context. [Read more…]

Nordic EdTech Network

January 18, 2016 By wlsteam Leave a Comment

Building a vibrant community

By Eilif Trondsen: Curator of the WLS 2016 Entrepreneurship Workshop

We hope to have strong Nordic EdTech representation at WLS2016 in Kristiansand, so we can continue the Nordic EdTech Network (http://net.futurelearninglab.org/) dialog and exploration of Nordic Edtech issues face-to-face (F2F) with anyone who is either part of the Nordic EdTech ecosystem, or interested in these types of issues and developments.

As you will see when you visit our project website, the project—funded by Nordic Innovation (http://www.nordicinnovation.org/)—is a continuation and expansion of our Nordic Edupreneuring project from 2012/2013. That project found lots of interesting things happening on the Nordic EdTech scene, but also found everyone to be very keen on connecting with others EdTech colleagues in other Nordic countries, so they could share experiences and discuss various issues, trends and challenges ahead.

Very briefly, this is some of what we are planning for the project:

Profiling the existing Nordic EdTech landscape. For this, we need details on the players in each of the Nordic countries. We are just now launching this work, but we are happy to share some of the data we currently have—http://net.futurelearninglab.org/nordic-edtech-companies-work-in-progress/—so you can see what we have and (hopefully) let us know what corrections/deletions/additions we need to make. We look forward to hearing from you.
Examining Nordic Industry Dynamics. This kind of analysis will, of course, require much more data and information about the Nordic EdTech companies, so we can not only understand their evolution so far, but also start exploring what may lie ahead.
Provide EdTech Insights. We will do this in many ways, including via our blog, our podcasts (with interviews of prominent EdTech entrepreneurs from the Nordics and Silicon Valley, as well as other EdTech ecosystem players, such as insightful analysts). We will also have webinars with the same kind of players, and these webinars will give attendees a chance to interact with the speakers.
Encouraging and Enabling Nordic EdTech Interaction. Some of this will happen via our website, but we will also hopefully also have a number of (physical) F2F events, including at upcoming conferences in the Nordics, including WLS2016, of course.
Use Our Project to Create a Sustainable Nordic EdTech Community. Although our project lasts only through the year, we are confident that one or more of a number of highly qualified organizations—including, of course, the Future Learning Lab—will be able to take over leadership and guidance of the network at the conclusion of our project.

We look greatly forward to the year ahead and the work we will be involved in and the many insights we will hopefully generate as our data and understanding of the Nordic EdTech industry improves. And it will be interesting to look back and compare this year’s findings to what we learned in the Nordic Edupreneuring project. Just briefly, here are some of the conclusions from that project, which I presented at the Future Learning Lab conference in 2013 at University of Agder (UiA) in 2013:

Almost 60% or the companies that participated in our survey characterized themselves as focusing on game-based learning, followed by mobile learning and online learning tools
Most companies targeted multiple market segments—including K12, HE, Kindergarten, corporate and public sector—but such multi-sector targeting is usually highly problematic
Similarly, most companies also targeted countries in Europe, North America and Asia—another VERY challenging strategy (that risks running out of funds very rapidly)

While the project team is very knowledgeable about EdTech and the Nordic region, the project analysis and insights we generate during the year will be very much stronger if we gain strong participation from all of you, many of whom are on the front lines of the Nordic EdTech industry–nationally, regionally and globally. Hearing about your experiences and having others pitch in and comment on what you experience, see and hear will help grow the collective strength of the Nordic EdTech community as well as the strength of individual players. We look forward to hearing from you and interacting with you in various ways in 2016 and beyond.