We are sorry to hear that professor Ola Erstad has had to pull out of the program, due to unforeseen commitments as department head at the University of Oslo – we know he has tried to combine. We are also extremely pleased to note that Anjum Malik is taking on the role as commentator and Q&A host for Cathy Casserly´s keynote — the role planned for professor Erstad. Anjum Malik has an impressive international project history and will contextualize the Q&A within that global framework. She will bring in several international observers via Skype, to take part in the Q&A. Based on last year´s experience, you are all in for a treat.
Dag Morten Dalen to World Learning Summit
Vice rector for education affairs at BI Norwegian Business School is confirmed for our panel discussions, June 14th and June 15th: Dag Morten Dalen has been at BI since 1998. He has a background from working at the Frisch Center, and also the Parliament – Stortinget. He will add and important dimension – so we´re excited about that. An economist with a PhD from the University of Oslo, Dag Morten will help us shed light on the economic and institutional aspects of education´s digital future. We tend to pay a lot of attention to uses of digital media, classroom studies and didactical issues. But what about the economic? Clearly, the ascent of effective and interactive technologies will also have a huge and building impact on education economies. BI in Oslo is perhaps the one institution in Norway that has had the most systematic focus on organisational change when it comes to integration of new learning technologies — through their efforts at BI Learning Lab. We will hear more during the summit.
A teacher, a learner; do you have a story to tell?
Here is a blogpost from Future Learning Lab´s home website: The collaboration below will be presented at the World Learning Summit, in Kristiansand June 14th-16th.
- Future Learning Lab in partnership with EdCast to launch Global Educator Teach‐A‐Thon
- Competition to award grand prize of $100,000 to inspire educators to share their knowledge in 10 min.
SAN DIEGO, April 19, 2016 – Future Learning Lab has partnered with EdCast to announce the launch of the Global Educator Teach‐A‐Thon, a new annual competition for educators to showcase the impact and power of social learning technology.
Designed to challenge professional and independent educators to embrace the sharing economy, The Global Educator Teach‐A‐Thon is the first ever open‐knowledge viral challenge to help students and adults worldwide to learn from free open content. Educators and those with a passion for a specific subject or discipline are invited to demonstrate their teaching acumen by recording and uploading short video lessons from their smartphone. The educator(s) who garner the highest user engagement will win the grand prize of $100,000. Additional partners include: Arizona State University, The KIPP Foundation, Reach Newschools Capital, Pencils of Promise, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Teach For All, Teach For America, and Tata Trusts.
“We’re thrilled to team up with EdCast on the Global Educator Teach‐A‐Thon,” says Oddgeir Tveiten, Founder of Future Learning Lab. “The competition gives educators a fantastic venue to share their knowledge and have an impact on lifelong learners all over the world.”
“We’re challenging the status quo when it comes to the way we share and retain knowledge,” says Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast. “This global competition is about pushing the boundaries of social innovation, and encouraging people from around the world to use their creativity to make learning the ultimate shared experience.”
How it works
Participation is free, and all interested applicants can visit www.edcast.com/corp/GET for more information. All interested educators will be contacted regarding their selection to participate.
About EdCast
EdCast is a social knowledge network built to enhance the human ability to learn and get smarter. EdCast Knowledge NetworksTM power social, mobile and cloud‐based learning for world‐class institutions, enterprises, governments and nonprofits and enables millions of lifelong learners to gain knowledge every day. The EdCast executive team has a track record of building large‐scale transformational technology; all are passionate about the global impact of mobile and online learning. EdCast is a Stanford StartX company backed by tier one VC firms. The Company is based in Mountain View CA, with offices worldwide.
Two views on education
The following is an excerpt from the New York Times (August 16th, 2014) that we think deserves attention in the build-up to World Learning Summit 216. Read the rest on this link.
TODAY’S education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.
Neither strategy has lived up to its hype, and with good reason. It’s impossible to improve education by doing an end run around inherently complicated and messy human relationships. All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to make it in school. They need a champion, someone who believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the picture. The most effective approaches foster bonds of caring between teachers and their students.
Marketplace mantras dominate policy discussions. High-stakes reading and math tests are treated as the single metric of success, the counterpart to the business bottom line. Teachers whose students do poorly on those tests get pink slips, while those whose students excel receive merit pay, much as businesses pay bonuses to their star performers and fire the laggards. Just as companies shut stores that aren’t meeting their sales quotas, opening new ones in more promising territory, failing schools are closed and so-called turnaround model schools, with new teachers and administrators, take their place.
Notes on the challenge of future learning
As we are nearing the World Learning Summit June 14th – 16th; a few thoughts on how technology impacts on education and learning. We are all familiar with the debate on Massive Open Online Courses, and the history of MOOCs ascending, subsequent worries, commercialisation issues and more. We are familiar with the accelerating research and exploration on “flipped classroom”, and much more.
But it still seems as if the way educational institutions and education research approaches the spectre of new learning forms, lacks a certain scope: What C.Wright Mills once dubbed “the sociological imagination”? Education´s digital future concerns much more than the emergence of scaling technologies, and much more than pedagogical adaptation to media ubiquity. 1) Students learn differently these days, as media habits and access to information alters the very notion of “studying”. 2) Relations to educators are changing. 3) Educators face new uncertainties. 4) Institutions are adapting, and new institutions emerge. 5) Social media are becoming integral parts of how education institutions present themselves – the very fact that Facebook is becoming a “must have” tool simply because your employer uses it for informational purposes, seems more than a little odd.
The list continues: 6) What we need to know is another question, equally important to “how we need to know”. 7) As educators, we may be seeking support systems and not finding them. 7) Around the world, the majority of students are far from well equipped to master the cultures of technology. Broadband is neither a fact of life, nor a human right, as much as it is a scarcity. 8) Transnational corporations are embedding themselves in educational life much like transnational broadcasting once became integrated in family life, with radio shows and TV shows for every taste and societal segment.
So what are the big issues? The future of learning and education is certainly not a question of effective pedagogy, or understanding how learning collaboration occurs in a classroom. It is that, too. But at the heart of the matter, one might argue that we still find the questions once raised by Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis: Technologies are extensions of ourselves, altering individual being in the world and institutional organisation of society.
So let us not forget the deeper issues of cultural transformation.