How governments research and communicate about the future Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that they have a responsibility for structured thought and research about the future, both to shape their own initiatives, and to assist companies and institutions in the nation to survive and thrive in times of change. Examples of government futures groups include:Egypt: Center for Futures StudiesFrance: Centre d’Analyse StratégiqueIndia: Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment CouncilIndonesia: Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan NasionalMexico: 2030 VisionSingapore: Futures GroupSweden: Institute for Futures Studies Other governments, such as those of UK and USA, do extensive future studies, however these are distributed across a variety of departments and functions. Many of these operations do a good job at analysis, however usually communicate in traditional government-speak, including weighty reports written in officious language. The document below, Imagining the New Normal, is excellent. Imagining the New Normal
A Visual History Of Twitter Twitter has certainly come a long way since that day in 2006 when it opened for the public to sign up. It’s just mind boggling to see that Twitter has gone from a personal project to over 200 million users in a little over 5 years. New features are being released on a regular basis, and more users keep signing up. Even though the speed of users signing up has slowed down some, it is still one of the fastest growing social networking platforms ever made available to us. Of course, Twitter has had its problems along the way, just like any growing business. As of lately, it seems Twitter has gotten their act together, and they are actually doing quite well. The social media news site Mashable recently put together an infographic outlining the most significant milestones and records that portray the growth and importance that Twitter has been able to achieve.
The Future of Online Learning Higher education is undergoing an explosive period of transformation that embraces the digital age. From tablets to smart phones to wikis and blogs, today's digital environment makes communication, collaboration and information sharing easier than ever before. Teaching and learning now occurs on a multi-dimensional level that involves both personal instruction and cutting-edge online technologies. This paradigm shift has made advanced education considerably more accessible to current and potential students, driving increased demand for online learning opportunities. Statistics show that higher education institutions are striving to meet this demand. Along with the benefits, the phenomenal growth of online learning also presents an uncharted set of challenges for academic institutions, most of which are much more familiar with the traditional classroom setting. Accountability and Transparency Course and Content Quality But what will actually facilitate this overall improvement? Conclusion
Brainstorming 2.0: Making Ideas That Really Happen One of the most common questions we hear at 99U is: “How do I get more out of my brainstorming sessions?” While brainstorming sessions have become perhaps the most iconic act of creativity, we still struggle with how to give them real utility. The problem of course is that most brainstorming sessions conclude prematurely. We all love to dream big and come up with “blue sky” ideas. We’re less fond of diving into the nitty-gritty details of creative execution. As a result, we spend 90% of our time coming up with a bunch of great ideas, and maybe 10% (if any!) So how can we retool our approach to brainstorming to make it more effective? Disney’s rigorous creative process involves 3 distinct phases of idea development, each of which is designed to unfold in a separate room. Step 1 asks “WHAT are we going to do?” It’s all about dreaming big. Room Setup: Airy rooms with high-ceilings are the best locations for thinking big. Mentality: Any idea is fair game. Step 3 asks “WHY are we doing this?”
Top 7 Social Media Bloggers – Let’s Get Social! Social media bloggers in the social media industry know that building an online presence through different social media platforms is essential to growing a business. Also, branding is a HUGE part of showing that you are a leader in your industry and are someone that people want to associate with. These social media bloggers have provided tremendous content and that’s why I am privileged to include them on my list of top 7 social media bloggers. 1. Chris Brogan - Chris is arguably the number 1 guy in the social media industry. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Top 7 Social Media Bloggers – Conclusion These top 7 social media bloggers all have blogs that you MUST check out. Who are some of your favorite social media bloggers? Bookmark & Share
If you don’t like messy learning, don’t play in the snow « Connecting the dots Something about the word messy jumped off the page for me this morning and then I read this snipppet from Jon Dron on the use of hard and soft technologies to aggregate content in a mooc like #change11: “Because it is not easy, this will be demotivating and inefficient.” Wow, that scares me because I think he’s right! If learning (in a mooc or elsewhere) is not easy, it seems that a number of learners will lose motivation. What does that say about the willingness of an individual or group to risk, to fail, to learn from failure, to get up and try again? Does *everything* in our world have to be faster, more efficient and require less effort now? I’m starting to realize that learning is a very messy process that doesn’t fit neatly into performance indicators and investment spreadsheets. Messy learning is so obviously embodied in our seven-month old puppy, who had her first experience with snow last week.
Scenarios This scenario development process is based on the following principles: The highly prepared meeting. We interviewed a wide variety of people including all the participants in the first workshop ahead of time in order to understand the issues facing the Park and to solicit ideas about important actions, investments, changes in law and regulation, etc. that would be necessary for “good futures” to transpire. In this way, the participants were presented with a lot of ideas to work with and spent relatively little time getting started.Two-part definition of scenario. In this approach a scenario is divided into the endstate or outcome statement at the planning horizon (in this case 25 years from now) and a series of events that must occur or must not occur that lead us from the present to that outcome. Scenario: series of evens that lead to an endstate Back-casting: if your endstate has happened, what events must have happened (or not)? Like this: Like Loading...
8 Silly Holiday Apps The holiday season is in full swing, and smartphone and tablet app stores are flooded with products designed to capitalize on the winter cheer. Old standbys such as Angry Birds Seasons debut timely updates to revamp gamer interest, while apps such as Cut The Rope develop entirely new products to attract a new wave of gamers eager to celebrate their holiday feelings with Om Nom. Along with this wave of new material comes apps specifically designed to provide holiday entertainment. In the sea of talking Santas and augmented reality apps, new entertainment products spring up faster than jokey novelty stocking stuffers at the sales counter of your local toy store. Here are 8 apps that corner the market on holiday minutia. Need a way to spread holiday cheer? Is there a holiday unitasker you love (or loathe) to unleash on your peers?
Building a Learning Network for Students As Pew Research Center just published its report on new kinds of learners emerging from ubiquitous mobile connectivity on EDUCAUSE2011 recently. Now learners are self directed, less top down, more reliant on feedback and response, more inclined to collaboration, more open to cross discipline insights, more oriented towards people being their own idividual nodes of production. Because of connectivity, technologies have changed the way we live and learn in this real world. The presentation is embeded as below here. In this YouTube video “Networked Students”, which has already been watched by over one hundread thousand people, the idea of connected learners in 21st century was explained well in 2008 by Wendy Drexler (you might visit her wiki about integrating Web 2.0 technologies into teaching). Connectivism learning theory suggests that knowledge is distributed across connections. Learning ArchitectModelerNetwork SherpaChange AgentSynthesizerConnected Learning IncubatorLearning Concierge
Methods of prospective > Softwares > Morphol : La prospective Morphological analysis aims to explore possible futures Morphological Analysis Aim Morphological analysis aims to explore possible futures in a systematic way by studying all the combinations resulting from the breakdown of a system. The aim of morphological analysis is to highlight new procedures or products in both technological forecasting and scenario building. Description of the method Morphological analysis is the oldest of the techniques presented in this toolbox. In fact, it was first developed by the American researcher F. • Phase 1 : Building a morphological space In this first phase, the system or function under examination is broken down into subsystems or components. • Phase 2 : Reduction of morphological space However, certain combinations and even certain families of combinations are unfeasible, e.g., incompatibility between configurations. Usefulness and limitations The first limitation of morphological analysis stems from the choice of components. Practical conclusions
Flout Without Klout! Unless you have been living under a rock for the past month, you may have noticed that Klout has been receiving some criticism since changing their scoring algorithm. With hundreds, maybe even thousands of people a little miffed at having their precious scores lowered or slashed, the backlash has been immense. However, some people have found the entire thing hilarious and comedic. So what do you do if you scoff at Klout or find the whole scoring thing ridiculous? Flout it of course! You Scored WHAT?! Let me have the pleasure of introducing you to "Flout", the scoring system which knows you know you're special! to brag about how wonderful you are, and what better way of allowing you to that than set your own score?! Harmless Fun With so much bitterness towards Klout and even towards all scoring metrics, Flout is a little harmless fun which encourages people to poke fun at themselves as well as the metrics idea. Who Wrote This Article?
6 Ways Digital Learning is Changing Teaching Email Share December 1, 2011 - by Tom Vander Ark 0 Email Share I visited Wireless Generation , a leading education technology company, in Brooklyn this week. As someone who has, within the last decade, been a student and a teacher, as well as administrative support, I was very interested by the parts in your book when you made it clear that educational institutions are evolving. There will be a half a dozen significant changes in teaching in this decade. Model differentiation will proliferate over the next decade as school developers invent new ways to blend online and onsite experience around competency-based pathways. The second profound change underway is the shift from the individual practitioner to more collaborative and team based teaching. A third and related point is that staffing models will be more differentiated with specific roles and different levels. Four, we’re seeing a general shift from didactic instruction to more interactive learning experiences.