I spent a couple of fantastic days last week at the EduTECH 2015 Conference in Brisbane.  I got to meet some Twitter friends in real-life, some new people from around the world and around the corner (who I’m also now connected with on Twitter), and was fully inspired by lots of great sessions in the Workplace Learning and K-12 Education Leaders streams.

Like so many others, I’m a big fan of Twitter for professional development, and I also use it during conferences to capture the best bits  to share with others who can’t be there, and to nugget-ise my own learning and create a trail of digital breadcrumbs for further reflection and action.  Here is the ‘nugget view’ of EduTECH from my perspective, via Eventifier.

There were so many great ideas being shared that I could write a post that goes forever. Ain’t no one got time for that, so here are  my personal learning moments.

 

A new culture of learning for the #FutureOfWork

In his opening keynote to the Workplace Learning stream, Harold Jarche talked about (among other things) how robots were coming for anyone in a job that can be captured in a flowchart. We all know that robots have been slowly taking over the world for a while now, but this really got me thinking more about the #FutureOfWork and what this means for people, schools, organisations and society. Then I learned a completely new thing about a way to crunchily examine and display the societal effects of the adoption of a new way of doing things, and how it will impact via enhancement, retrieval, obsolescence and reversal. First developed by Marshall McLuhan, here is Harold’s take on the impact of digital networks on learning:

I love new ways of looking at big ideas, so I’m definitely going to think more on tetrads…

In the ‘Power and promise of social networks for vocational and workplace learning’ session, Alec Couros furthered my thinking on our increasingly participatory culture, and what this means for learning at all levels.

I was also reacquainted with a couple of favourite and often referenced authors from my time as a Master of Ed student (Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown) and their work on a New Culture of Learning

Michelle Ockers presented an excellent case study on the use of social learning strategies to support technical capability building at Coca Cola Amatil. Technical capability, for many large, complex and asset intensive organisations, is generally the province of more traditional approaches to training/learning, so it was great to hear about the a program that sets people free from the ‘training cage’ and the mindset of learned helplessness.  It can be done!

And in an earlier panel discussion, a statement by Shannon Tipton really stood out for me with how to successfully engage social learners – so much so, that I captured it in a picture!

Over in the K12 Education Leaders stream, Ted McCain from Maple Ridge Secondary School gave a fantastic presentation on ‘Teaching for Tomorrow: teaching as facilitating, learning as discovering’. I was particularly interested in the “9 i’s of modern learning”, which I frantically transcribed in long hand below:

What I love about this is how it breaks down the digital-age skills needed to successfully engage with content, for learners of any age from Pre-K to adult. You can access Ted’s full presentation here.

This also connected with a point in the closing keynote by Harold Jarche on the new literacy for the digital age – Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) and Intelligent Communication:

In the Workplace Learning congress, Amy Rouse from AT&T University shared the fantastic success they’ve had implementing MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) across their workforce.

Amazingly, they have successfully ‘MOOC-ified’ a Masters of Computer Science, so the sky really is the limit when it comes to the complexity of content and learning that can be accessed in an open model.

In the spirit of openness and working+learning out loud, we also had a session with Joyce Seitzinger on Social Curation, with some fantastic tips on being more mindful and deliberate in how we go about collecting and sharing ideas. As an old corporate L&D leader/new freelance blogger/consultant, this resonated loudly with me, now I’m out in the big bad world and don’t have a captive audience… I particularly loved the suggestions below:

 

Want to engage learners? Make it #DifferentAndBetter

Marigo Raftopoulos eloquently shared her perspective on the importance of tapping into human desires when designing learning.  I particularly loved the notion of placing the learner as the hero at the centre of their own personal learning journey…

Over in the K12 Education Leaders stream, there were some great sessions focused on immersive learning.

Matt Richards from the Mind Lab spoke about the success they’ve been having in creating and supportive collaborative learning and computational thinking in schools, via Learning Commons spaces,  virtual reality technology, student-led Maker Spaces and shared Minecraft worlds, where learners create challenges for each other.

A panel session on BYOD in schools with Georgina Allardice, Head of eLearning Jindalee State School, Ben Wells, IT Coordinator Sanctuary Point Public School, and Derek Wenmonth, Director eLearning CORE Education, was full of practical tips for schools looking to move towards a 1:1 device program for their students.  Here again, the big takeaway was that engagement – with learners, teachers and parents – was key to implementing a sustainable program. Derek described his view of BYOD, which I loved, and captured below:

Georgina also stressed the importance of continually asking learners for their feedback throughout the BYOD experience,  which resonated with advice from an earlier session with Amy Rouse in the Workplace Learning stream…

Jennie Magiera gave an inspirational and passionate presentation on the work she and her colleagues have been doing at their schools in South Chicago. Here students face significant challenges  just getting to and from school safely each day, so a Student Innovation Team of 4th-7th graders came up with an app proposal. You can read more about this #ProblemBasedLearning challenge here.

 

 

Disintermediation – cutting out the learning middleman

Leadership for an open world – the topic of the session by David Price – focused on the ubiquity of social, democratised and  open learning, and built upon the themes of previous sessions.  And it got me thinking again about the shift that all learning practitioners need to be making to just keep up, let alone add value and stand out, in an increasingly self-learning enabled world…

The rise of social learning and the growing acceptance of badges as evidence of own-time/off-site gained proficiency, mean that  learners are no longer captive to organisational/institutional content. I even found myself in a meta-example of David’s excellent ‘Six Motivation of Social Learning’  during the presentation…

A later session from Ian Jukes at the end of the conference reinforced this ‘Learners as Customers’ theme. It struck me that the fenced-in world of corporate learning, where most organisations have no clue about the hidden talents of their employees, and the monetised world of higher ed and learning services, are in for a paradigm shift whether we like it or not.

Chief Learning Rebel Shannon Tipton, summed up my personal learning from EduTECH nicely, with her thoughts on what’s killing Learning Organisations right now…

…and what we, as Workplace Learning leaders need to do about it: