skills – techKNOWtools

This morning I will be joining the Mountain MoodleMoot at Carroll College in Helena, MT to share some thoughts and ideas around engaged digital pedagogy. Our learners are connected; however I think more educators and instructional designers need to support our students in developing effective learning skills to navigate this new culture of learning. For those of you interested in following along, be sure to tweet with hashtag #mtmoot, check out my slides (below), and feel free to scope out the digital handout http://bit.ly/mtmoot12 I compiled for this session.

Today’s learners operate in a world that is informal, networked, and filled with technology. Connectivity and digital access is an increasing need for our students and a vital requirement to excel beyond structured learning environments. Our learners are now able to interact with information, learning materials, and peers from around the globe. There is an increasing need to expand and enhance our learners’ involvement in learning technology to support engagement in online learning environments.

With the emergence of collaborative, online tools, educators can take advantage of multidimensional and engaged participation to reach their learning outcomes. Social media creates a space where “everybody and anybody can share anything anywhere anytime” (Joosten, 2012, p.6). Educational paradigms are shifting to include new modes of online and collaborative learning and student-centered, active learning to challenge our students to connect curriculum with real life issues (Johnson, Adams & Cummins, 2012). As a new generation of learners begin to create and share content, educators need to understand how to effectively utilize social web resources to impact in instructional practice create a culture of online participatory learning.

Emerging technology platforms and devices are beginning to disrupt education as we know it. To coevolve and positively impact learner success, it is critical that instructors and instructional designers consider how digital pedagogy can support learning outcomes. This keynote plenary will share ideas and suggested practices to develop a richer learning experience and thrive in the changing digital learning frontier.

References

Johnson, L., Adams, S. & Cummins, M. (2012). The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium.

Joosten, T. (2012). Social Media for Educators. San Francisco, CA: Wiley/Jossey-Bass.

Image c/o <http://www.intechprinting.com/PHOTOS/innovation.jpg>

The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, identifies key behaviors to find innovative solutions to impact organizations, products, and services. Christensen and Gregersen (2011) share five skills that leaders need to innovate their way out of problems and into opportunities:

Question – ask challenging questions that take on common wisdom to create new directions
Observe – watch the behavior of customers, suppliers and competitors the way an anthropologist would identify new ways of doing things
Network – talk to people with different life experiences and perspectives to spark new ideas
Experiment – construct interactive experiences and build prototypes to provide unorthodox responses and gain new insights
Associate – draw unexpected connections between questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields

In education, both K-12 and higher ed, we need to spend a more time mastering these disruptive skills and improving our productivity. By adding these tools, educators will be able to consider different possibilities to support our learners and find new solutions to educational issues. This new approach to education requires innovation, organizational collaboration, and teamwork on the fly. It’s great to see that there are innovative ideas brewing, such as #change11, BigIdeas and #EmergentEDU.

How are YOU using these 5 disruptive skills for education?

Tag: skills

#mtmoot Opening Keynote: Digital Pedagogy to Engage

The Productive & Disruptive Innovation of EDU