Your Personal Learning Playlist
We all know that media habits have changed radically over the past few years:
Print- Blogging is hot. Newspapers are not.
Radio- Podcasting is in. AM/FM is out.
Television- YouTube yes. Networks no.
3 significant trends have emerged:
1. Media consumers are now also media producers: YouTube is a great example of this. You can upload videos you have created for all to watch, and you can watch videos created by others.
2. Media consumption is personalized: Think iPod personal playlist. You don’t have to buy the whole album any more. You just buy the songs you want, and you organize them in a way that makes sense to you.
3. Media consumers/producers form communities: Like minded people have always enjoyed hanging out with each other. There is nothing more fun than spending a lot of time with people who are seriously into the same things you are into. My Space, Facebook, Twitter et al are all about the formation of communities of common interest.
Those of us in the business of learning design need to explore these trends, and figure out how to work with them. Some thoughts:
1. Learners become learning producers: Learning content will be increasingly produced by the learners themselves and not by learning designers. Think corporate wiki. Finding ways for people to share what they know in both formal and informal ways will become the task of learning designers. We will become facilitators of knowledge transfer as opposed to developers of content.
2. Learning is personalized: “Just What I Want” learning is in. Learners do not want to sit through an entire course or complete an entire online module, if only parts of it are relevent to their own needs. Rather, learners are increasingly demanding that learning content be available in a self service fashion, and they desire tools that help them to organize learning content into a personal learning playlist. The task for learning designers is to develop the infrastructure and implementation strategies that promote personalized learning.
3. Learning is a community activity: People learn best when they learn from each other. Learner designers need to explore the social nature of learning, and examine how Web 2.0 technologies can help us to provide our learners with access to authentic communities of learning. The key is to create opportunities for members of the community to share what they know through an interaction framework where everyone contributes.
I will revisit this theme in future posts. Your thoughts…….
All these trends seem to be developing outside of formal institutions of learning (like schools and universities. Do you think that will be a stable structural feature of the learning landscape or will the “dinosaurs” find their own uses for all these new tools?
I think what’s hot and what’s not really depends on your learning audience. I still see many people learning from TV, especially in the 200+ channel universe, simply because a personal video play list on on their phone or computer isn’t an option. While new technologies are developing, they often aren’t cheap for the people who need them most. Don’t completely discount old media; take the extra step and ensure that new media is backward compatible with it. Maybe AM/FM radio should be playing podcasts; or newspapers should be produced from respected blogs?
Christian
I think schools and universities will find uses for these tools. For example, some universities (Duke for one) are using podcasts to deliver lectures.
However, I think formal modalities (courses, textbooks) will continue to be the preferred way to deliver learning for some time to come. Personalized learning is very individual; everyone learns only what they want to learn. Degree granting bodies, on the other hand, need to make sure that everyone learns approximately the same thing. So formal structures seem to make sense for now. It will be interesting to watch, though, to see how universities and schools respond to this new generation of learners that bring with them their savvy use of social networking and web 2.0 tools.
Sean
Great observation. We do need to consider the issue of accessibility to learning. And we need to make sure that we do not alienate learners that are more comfortable with traditional forms of learning media. One thing for you to keep in mind, however, is that web 2.0 tools are actually making learning both more affordable and more accessible. A good example of this is the online encyclopedia. Wiki is way cheaper than Encyclopaedia Britannica, and more people have access to the information.