What’s the reality of digital learning transformation today? | Strategy - TrainingZone

Digital transformation is coming to learning, whether you’re ready or not. A massive 71% of organisations are currently in progress with their transformation journey. Based on new research conducted in partnership with Learning Technologies, director of research at Fosway Group, David Perring, explores the reality of what that means for LD in the first of a new three-part series. 

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Photo: David Perring

With over 70% of organisations already transforming learning, L&D are slightly behind where they see the progress of their wider organisation, but ahead of HR, summarizes David Perring. 

Photo: phototechno/iStock

However, with only 5% saying they have completed digital transformation of learning, it does beg a few questions: 

• What is driving this transformation?
• What makes the digital transformation of learning different from simply adopting learning technology and delivering more e-learning?
• And are those on their transformational journey even heading in the right direction?

What is driving digital learning transformation?

Investment in digital learning continues to grow across the board. In 2018 we are seeing increases in budget for external or digital outsourcing, digital learning services, internal teams, content and platforms (although the levels of spend are still relatively small compared to wider HR and business investment in digital).

But what is driving this investment and the associated transformation? The following words are typical of what the 1500+ survey respondents say in the 2018 Digital Learning Realities research. They seem to capture the current drivers perfectly:

…The aspiration is to be "more digital" as a business, together with budget pressures and the opportunities for increased flexibility in delivery...

…Reduced headcount / agility/ speed of change / personalisation / contextualisation of our content offering / learning on the go...

These comments get straight to the core of why many are looking to digitally revolutionise their learning operations. And they fall neatly into the consistent business drivers that have underpinned the evolution of L&D over the past 10 years in particular – which is about so much more than reducing cost.

They are part of the business mindset of what makes HR and L&D fit for the future. Agile thinking that energises your workforce, with a real relationship focus with learners that is intelligent and data driven, creates an UBER-esque experience.

It revolutionises the experience so that it is completely geared around serving the customer (learner), while providing radical cost efficiency and, most importantly, delivering exceptional value.
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Additional resources 
Download the latest results from the 2018 Digital Learning Realities Research  http://www.fosway.com/research/next-gen-learning/digital-learning-realities-2018/.

Source: TrainingZone 

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Let Students Lead the Class with Active Learning | Faculty Focus

Photo: Sarah McLean

Sarah McLean, assistant professor in the departments of anatomy & cell biology, and physiology & pharmacology at Western University, Ontario, Canada argues, "Occasionally, I will have a teaching idea that both furthers students’ learning AND saves me time. Here is one such idea: let students take the reins and lead the class."

Photo: Faculty Focus

To put this into context, I have been teaching a blended and flipped fourth-year undergraduate course for a few years now. Students complete online learning modules (OLMs) before class, then we spend class time working through case studies, discussing, and synthesizing information.

In previous years, I would begin each class by summarizing the important content from the OLM (in approximately 5 minutes), as well as take time to answer students’ questions they had posted in advance of meeting. To be quite honest, I found the process rather tedious and not the most engaging way to begin class. I could tell students were not always paying attention during these summaries, but I struggled with how to ensure that everyone got the information they needed to move forward. During the rest of the class I felt that my teaching was more dynamic and allowed for a great amount of peer interaction. How could I pull this into the beginning of the class?

The idea came about rather serendipitously—I ended up changing around some of the assessments in the course and dropped a mini oral presentation requirement. Yet students still had a summative group oral presentation at the end of the term (worth 10% of their mark), and I wanted to give them an opportunity to practice their presentation skills and receive feedback before this end-of-term assessment. Inspiration struck, and I thought, “Why not let the students lead the summaries?”...

Overall, letting my students take ownership of their learning by leading their classmates has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. The OLM summaries have also helped to promote a cooperative and collegial classroom environment, and I don’t have to spend time preparing (what I felt) were monotonous summaries.  
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Source: Faculty Focus

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Gameful Design: A Potential Game Changer | EDUCAUSE Review

Gameful design embraces incremental implementations of proven intrinsic motivators while it acknowledges, accentuates, and builds on the work that good instructors do as second nature.

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"Gamification (both the term and the concept) has become a double-edged sword. The notion of making a game out of an educational experience, lesson, content, or activity is one that has been chased for centuries." says Kevin Bell, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Digital Futures, at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Game On! Gamification, Gameful Design, and the Rise of the Gamer Educator (2017). 

But the idea of turning a learning activity into a game that will rival those from game companies such as Electronic Arts (EA), Rovio, and Nintendo is something that is simply not going to happen. As a result, a number of educational technology (edtech) companies either are leaning away from the gamification term entirely or are switching to other modalities that are more like adaptive scenarios than full games. Games (or even more basic simulations) are very difficult to get right and are extremely expensive to build. Even in the professional game-development world, for every successful World of Warcraft (WoW), Halo, or Angry Birds, there are tens of thousands of failed attempts. The complex mix of narrative (neither too cheesy nor too complex), appropriate challenge (neither too easy nor too hard), motivating rewards (both meaningful and intrinsic), and feedback loops is incredibly troublesome and costly to package into a whole experience. 

Trying to align learning outcomes with a narrative runs the very real risk of producing what has been termed "chocolate-covered broccoli." There are, of course, educational games that have stood the test of time. The Oregon Trail was designed to teach about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers, in 1848, from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley in a covered wagon. Created in 1971, it is one shining example — from forty-seven years ago. Making learning into a game is difficult.

Instead, I prefer (and teach) the concept of gameful design. The distinction is subtle but important. Whereas gamification equates to making a game of an activity, gameful design looks at the various aspects and intrinsic motivators that are embedded in successful games (and in other nongame events) and asks whether those elements can be replicated and woven into classroom and online activities. The goal is to move toward flow — to the point where engagement becomes seamless and (even) compulsive, rather than dreaded and/or labored. Gameful design thus looks at the elements that make games, or other forms of engagement, intriguing and then applies those principles to educational experiences. In this way, and by defining intrinsic motivation or motivators in terms that many educators recognize and already try to incorporate, gameful design reflects and builds on things that good instructors do as second nature. In good learning experiences (as in good sports or good hobbies), participants are challenged, are provided with prompt and supportive feedback, are supported to reduce their fear of failure, and are encouraged through cooperation and/or teamwork. These are all gameful design principles.

In a semiregular online class, I teach these principles to academics, practitioners, and "pracademics" (the combination term for career academics who are also active practitioners in their subject). My class is aimed at people who have picked up the role of supporting their colleagues in basic edtech logistics and who, in the continual quest to find new ideas and means of motivating and engaging students, want to hear more about and experiment with gamification. During the course, we typically end up spending a lot of time on definitions. Some class participants want to make real games, whereas others "get it" when I try to gently redirect their attention to gameful design — which, in my mind, has a better chance of actually influencing teaching and learning. The conversation in class frequently reminds me of the dialogue in Monty Python's Life of Brian: "Judean People's Front? Nah. People's Front of Judea!" But the distinctions here do merit attention. They represent the difference between the unachievable and the potentially significant applications of current and emerging technologies. 
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Source: EDUCAUSE Review   

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Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard – review | Books - The Guardian

"The last volume of the Norwegian author’s Seasons quartet will keep his fans occupied, if not entirely satisfied" notes Andrew Anthony, writing for the Observer and for the Guardian.
 

Unearthing the mysteries of the commonplace: Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Photo: Richard Saker for the Observer

It’s a slightly confusing situation for Karl Ove Knausgaard fans that while the sixth and final part of the My Struggle series has still to be published in English (due later this year), a whole different cycle – the Seasons quartet – has filled the intervening lull.

The fourth book of that quartet is Summer, which again mixes diary entries and a selection of personal encyclopaedia entries ostensibly addressed to his youngest daughter, along with a piece of fiction set during the second world war and based on a story his grandfather told him, which he drops tantalisingly into his writing almost like an actor suddenly changing character.

It’s been an uneven series, by turns showing Knausgaard at his finest, as a writer grappling to see the world with utterly fresh eyes, and his most banal, trotting out his familiar tropes of domestic duties and bucolic descriptions.

For those of us who entered a kind of deep narcotic state before the mesmerising sensory overload of My Struggle, the Seasons quartet has been a bit like a methadone programme: keeping withdrawal at bay without ever quite hitting the spot.

The last book, Spring, was the most revealingly autobiographical, and thus most Knausgaardian as we’ve come to think of it. It touched on the strains within his marriage, in particular with regard to his wife Linda’s bipolar depression, and Knausgaard once more subjected his own behaviour to candid and often unflattering analysis.

Despite the uplifting note on which Spring concluded, the marriage that filled hundreds of pages of My Struggle and produced four children has since ended. Though there is no sense of its impending demise in Summer, Linda has scarcely more than a walk-on part, a silent presence in the margins, referred to mostly only by her absence.

Summer begins with Knausgaard continuing his encyclopaedic summaries of things and concepts. Having in the previous books written mini-essays on such diverse subjects as thermos flasks, pain, jelly fish, sexual desire and manholes, he turns his singular attention to slugs, bats, fainting and electric hand mixers, which, he notes, unlike almost everything else human-made, resemble nothing else in nature.
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Source: The Guardian

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This is not your typical summer beach reads list | CNN

"In a world filled with never-ending conflict and bad news, it's no surprise that many people want to stick their heads in the sand this summer" says Katia Hetter, Writer/Producer, CNN Digital.

 CNN asked the Amazon Books editors about their favorite new books that inspire, build bridges, cross borders and bring joy. Here are their 10 picks for the summer of 2018 and the reasons why they chose these books.
 Photo: CNN

But I can't stop thinking about the injustices that have been dominating the news cycle.

That's why I'm reading Bryan Stevenson's argument connecting the US history of slavery through segregation to mass incarceration, "Just Mercy." He lays out his case about the reasons to confront this brutal history. Denying it, he argues, hurts everyone, no matter your color or race or nationality.

I'm also brought back to Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton," the biography of the Founding Father that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda -- who was reading it on a beach vacation -- to write his award-winning musical.

"A civic lesson from a slaver," says Miranda's Hamilton, calling out Thomas Jefferson in the musical. "Hey neighbor, your debts are paid cuz you don't pay for labor."

"The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family" by Annette Gordon-Reed is also on my stack of summer books, as I attempt to work through the contradictions of the man who wrote "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" while enslaving people.

Is that too heavy for summer?

Rather than ignore the unrelenting and brutal news of the day, here's another idea for your summer reading list.

Focus on books that explore other people and cultures, teach kindness and bring hope. Address the issues that trouble your mind and heart, whether they're ripped from the headlines or part of your everyday world.

"I think truly that every good book helps us to see, to imagine our way into someone else's heart, and to see our own heart more clearly," says Newbery Award-winning children's author Kate DiCamillo, whose children's books include "Because of Winn-Dixie," "Raymie Nightingale" and "Mercy Watson to the Rescue."

With those themes in mind, here are recommendations -- new works and classics alike -- to give hope, build bridges, cross borders and inspire. 
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Source: CNN

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9 New Books We Recommend This Week | Book Review - New York Times

Follow on Twitter as @GregoryCowles

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times by Gregory Cowles, Senior Editor, Books. 

Science and literature are too often viewed as separate and even opposing spheres. That’s a discredit to all of the great science writers with a talent for translating the world of the lab and field, illuminating complex ideas and personalities and moral implications — in short, all the stuff of literature, and life.

Five of our recommended titles this week take science as a starting point, whether it’s the hard science of genetics and heredity (“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh,” by the Times reporter Carl Zimmer) or the quest for mechanical precision (“The Perfectionists,” Simon Winchester’s book about engineering) or the medical and psychological aspects of gender identity (Arlene Stein’s “Unbound”). There are also a couple of deeply researched narratives with a scientific hook: Eliza Griswold’s “Amity and Prosperity,” about the consequences of natural gas fracking on one Pennsylvania town, and John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood,” which starts out as a story of scientific and medical promise and turns into a true-life business thriller about arrogance and fraud.

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Source: New York Times 

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Additional literacy and numeracy education a continuing success | Community - Manning River Times

The second round of Bulahdelah additional literacy and numeracy customised education (BALANCE) commenced on the first day of term two, with a new cohort of Year 7, 8 and 9 students exploring making connections in literacy and fractions in numeracy, as Manning River Times reports.  

Year 8 students getting involved in the "balance" program.
Photo: Manning River Times

Program co-ordinator, Kim Rigley said students are encouraged to use their existing knowledge and experiences, prior learning and creative thinking in literacy to help them recognise the links to and between different texts, themselves and the world. 

“Students participate in group discussions following on from the short text read in class,” she said.

“Prompts are used to encourage students to follow their pathway of thinking and share it with the group...

As for numeracy, students have commenced their exploration of fractions and the general concepts of math as they are practiced in everyday life.

“Students have discovered fractions can be related to time, money, measurement, probability, and in the preparation of food, the latter being the most important, according to many students,” Kim explained.

“By relating these real-life everyday actions to math, it is the intention of BALANCE to make math relevant, meaningful and practical in answer to the age old question, “When am I going to use this in life?”
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Source: Manning River Times

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Hands-on learning is a necessary part of college, but here’s what it doesn’t teach students | Grade Point - Washington Post

Jeffrey J. Selingo, regular contributor to Grade Point and professor of practice at Arizona State University says, "What employers look for when hiring graduates." 

 

Xavier University student Triton Brown studies in a common area on campus before going to one of his part-time jobs in New Orleans.
Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

As college students nationwide work in part-time jobs or internships this summer, it’s unlikely many will think about how they’re using their undergraduate courses on the job or how they might apply what they’re learning at work when they get back to campus.

For students, college is a series of disconnected experiences — the classroom, the dorm, the athletic field, the internship. Yet what employers tell me gets college students hired is the ability to translate what they learned in one place (the classroom, for instance) to another that is far different from where they originally learned a concept (a project on an internship).

Educators call this “transfer learning” — the ability to generalize core principles and apply them in many different places, which becomes more important as the skills needed to keep up in any job and occupation continue to shift in the future.

The concept sounds simple enough. But today’s students, facing the constant pressure to prepare for standardized tests, rarely have the chance to learn through problem solving or to be involved in projects that reinforce skills that can be used in multiple settings. Our ability to drive almost any car on the market without reading its manual is an example of knowledge transfer, as is our ability to solve math equations involving any number once we learn the formula...

Arizona State University, where I’m a professor of practice, is testing a curriculum across a dozen majors in which students learn nearly half of the subject matter through group projects instead of a specified schedule of classes. Engineering students might build a robot and learn the key principles of mechanics and electronics from faculty members during the project. The hope is that students will be more engaged if theories from the classroom are immediately applied in the outside world instead of years after students graduate.

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Source: Washington Post

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The End Of The Internet As We Know It…Could It Happen? | Information & Communication - Evolving Science

Photo: Deirdre O’Donnell

By now, many of us are aware that the Legal Affairs Committee (or JURI) of the EU Parliament has voted in favor of controversial proposed changes to copyright legislation in the region.

New proposals for articles to be included in the EU law may change the way news is viewed or shared online.
Photo: By Sollok29 - Own work @ Wikimedia Commons

These measures are related to the reproduction and distribution of some content types on the internet and are widely viewed as detrimental to the freedom involved in doing the same.
The main clauses associated with this change in how copyright is enforced on the internet are articles 11 and 13 of the proposed directive 2016/0280 (COD).

Many groups, lawmakers, and interested parties claim that the adoption of these articles will lead to vastly increased censorship online. As of 20th June 2018, the JURI votes on this subject were narrowly in favor of both proposed articles.

So, will this be the end of the ability to share links and images online?

The Potential Effects of Articles 11 and 13 
Article 11 of the proposal would require anyone who wants to share a link, even containing a short line from a news story or headline, from a publisher who provides such content, will need a specific license from the said publisher before doing so.

This means that the sharing of news may end up much more tightly regulated and monitored than ever before.

Some of the publishers hailed this proposal as a positive move in their favor. They have reasoned that this regulation will put more of the revenue garnered from news-link sharing in their hands, whereas under current circumstances, search engine leaders (i.e., Google, Facebook, etc.) see the bulk of this in the form of users searching and finding links.

However, the same publishers appear to have overlooked the fact that they are the ones who will have to pay for these licenses under article 11. This could be widely viewed as a negative step towards increasing bias, as well as a lack of access to news content online. 

The rationale behind this perspective is that those publishers who are in a position to pay licenses will be the ones releasing the stories, and thus, they are those who are in control of public perception. 

In addition, these guidelines may dissuade or entirely remove smaller publishing bodies from the market. This, in turn, can take a toll on the freedom of speech and expression online, over time. 

Article 13 was proposed by the committee to enforce the terms of article 11 since it provides for the monitoring of online content so that all links are licensed. 

Article 13 also appears to exist to legalize content-scanning for copyright infringement, in general. This can be facilitated by companies whose services are tailor-made for large-scale surveillance such as these. In addition, these agencies may be located outside of the EU, most likely in the United States. 

This cannot be good news for those who prefer to be in control of their data and activities online as much as possible. 

Also, article 13 is potentially incompatible with some other EU and human rights laws.
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Source: Evolving Science

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Adobe is using machine learning to make it easier to spot Photoshopped images | Artificial Intelligence - The Verge

Photo: James Vincent

"New research uses AI to automate traditional digital forensics" according to James Vincent, cover machines with brains for The Verge, despite being a human without one.
 

A famous edited image of a missile launch released by the Iranian government in 2008. (This image was not used in the training or testing of Adobe’s research project.)
Photo: The Verge

Experts around the world are getting increasingly worried about new AI tools that make it easier than ever to edit images and videos — especially with social media’s power to share shocking content quickly and without fact-checking. Some of those tools are being developed by Adobe, but the company is also working on an antidote of sorts by researching how machine learning can be used to automatically spot edited pictures.

The company’s latest work, showcased this month at the CVPR computer vision conference, demonstrates how digital forensics done by humans can be automated by machines in much less time.

The research paper does not represent a breakthrough in the field, and it’s not yet available as a commercial product, but it’s interesting to see Adobe — a name synonymous with image editing — take an interest in this line of work.

Speaking to The Verge, a spokesperson for the company said that this was an “early-stage research project,” but in the future, the company wants to play a role in “developing technology that helps monitor and verify authenticity of digital media.” Exactly what this might mean isn’t clear, since Adobe has never before released software designed to spot fake images. But, the company points to its work with law enforcement (using digital forensics to help find missing children, for example) as evidence of its responsible attitude toward its technology. 

The new research paper shows how machine learning can be used to identify three common types of image manipulation: splicing, where two parts of different images are combined; cloning, where objects within an image are copy and pasted; and removal, when an object is edited out altogether.

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Source: The Verge 

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