Present Shock!

The End Of The Future And The Rise Of The Present

Present Shock author Douglas Rushkoff talks about how the digital revolution can change our concept of time and reinvent how we live and work--if we embrace it correctly.

Douglas Rushkoff isn’t a futurist, he’s a "presentist." In the video above, he explains that that means that he no longer is concerned with the future, because the future is merely a construct of a certain, linear way of viewing time. That model, he argues in his book Present Shock, is no longer operable in a digital age when everything--emails, tweets, TV shows, finance--happens instantly.

That change can be shocking and overwhelming: the feeling that we’re all overloaded by alerts from our phones and the infinity of choice of movies on Netflix. Rushkoff says that’s a real concern, but that--if you can overcome the always-on mentality--an embrace of the present can drastically change everything from global financial markets to how you interact with your boss.

Watch the whole video above and stay tuned for more talks with futurists in the coming weeks.

Why Right Now Is Just The Beginning For Education Technology

Added by Katie Lepi on 2013-05-24

It’s good to be me. I really love what I do. Truly! Yes, I love teaching my college & university students every semester. But it’s my work with technology that really gets my juices flowing.

Everyone knows that technology is playing an increasingly important role in the way students want to learn. With more than six million students now taking at least one online course and at least triple that in a blended environment, the technology enabled classroom is here to stay.

As a seasoned educator and academic consultant in the field of higher education, I have seen the tremendous impact of technology on instruction and learning. Some examples include the ability to redesign entire courses with digitally embedded multimedia resources, provide a more efficient way by which to manage digital learning assets across the institution, and assess and remediate developmental skills. And that stuff is truly just the tip of the iceberg.

Did you know that we can meaningfully, correctly, and efficiently calculate things like final grade, course completion, student engagement? Oh, did I mention we can do this all with tremendous accuracy in the first 8 days of a semester? I’ve seen schools blowing out the (ridiculous, century old) Carnegie Unit for a competency based model of learning. I know of schools that are working on program gamification, meaningful collaboration for both instructors and students across disciplines and programs, and administrators who might truly break the $10,000 baccalaureate degree mark. It seems that the stars are finally aligning as capabilities, processes, policies, and need are starting to come together.

The Start of Our Technological Journey

As this transformation begins (…and yes, we’re actually at the start, despite my wish that we were in the middle of it), what gets me up in the morning is that technology is finally starting to live up to its promise. I recently participated as a conference panelist on data and analytics. It was disheartening at first to hear so many other panelists talking about tired models of teaching, learning, data collection, and assessing that we have tried to replicate with technology for years.

So, it was also exciting to share with audience members that legitimate tools for changing paradigms around meaningful education data, personalized learning environments, and social interfaces for meaningful learning are out there! See, what motivates me is that we are finally starting to use technology based education in ways other than simply translating old, tired, and ineffective practices from on-ground to online. Now, we are working to actually use the technology in new and meaningful ways, making the most of how technology helps us scale, extend, and differentiate like never before. For example, for years faculty and instructional designers spent years creating and curating appropriate content for their courses and programs.

However, that content would usually be available only to individual users or, at most, on a departmental basis. As a result, the time spent doubling (or tripling) efforts to gather content for a course would minimize the ability of faculty to create the best course possible for their students. And forget the option of sharing these best practice modules or assets with other academics around the globe! But now that is really starting to change. Serious repositories of content are easier to search and use than ever before. Commercial assets are being disaggregated by the hundreds of thousands making for more personalized, meaningful (and cheaper) content that is still excellent and rich. Academic discussions are evolving (or devolving?) to be more social, more focused, more outcomes based, and more effective than ever. Even books are getting more social, more interactive, and easier to manipulate than ever before. And of course, all of this technology means clicks, recorded time, and behavioral patterns…in other words it means data.

Technology As An Enabler

As college enrollments surge to record levels and the average age of a college student goes up and up, millions of students are finding they lack skills, competencies, and even the confidence needed to do college-level work. Many of these students are displaced workers seeking refuge from a tight jobs market, necessitating enrollment in remedial programs that cost both time and money for a population that can least afford it. But as the President challenges education to rethink the paradigm from “who do we keep out” to “how do we let everyone in and help them succeed,” technology is poised and ready to lead the charge. More effective tools and programs than ever before promise to help improve every student’s basic proficiencies, general skills, assessment / demonstration capabilities, and critical thinking abilities.

This may seem too good to be true, but I have seen it all with my own eyes. The right people are talking with the right policy makers, decision enablers, and resource stakeholders at every level. They are finding, creating, and using data driven, technology based models to revamp, rethink, and remix. Groups who traditionally have not worked together are making inroads toward successful implementations and partnerships that are changing education. Educators are seeing that commercial groups can truly have academically aligned goals. K-12 and higher education administrators are beginning to have meaningful conversations about lifelong learning. Techno-phobes and technologists are coming together to create helpful and real-world tools that benefit everyone, from student to teacher to administrator. Bookstores, libraries, departments, companies, regulatory agencies, and many more are starting to work together and technology is often the instigator, the “grease” in the machine, and the accountability tool.

THAT is why it’s good to be me. That is why I get up every day. Are we there yet? No, we’re not even close. But boy is it good to see the fruits of our labor for the past two decades be worth it. Technology has driven change in almost every industry known to man and it is wonderful to see it finally starting to transform education. So let’s get moving. While it’s nice to reflect just a bit…we have work to do.

Good luck and good teaching.

Dr. Jeff Borden

Integrate iPads Into Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy With This ‘Padagogy Wheel’

Added by Jeff Dunn on 2013-05-23

You’re going to want to turn on your printer and fire up a PDF viewer. This is just that good. It’s called the Padagogy Wheel and it offers a fantastically useful perspecitve on how to figure out which iPad apps work with Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Created by Allan Carrington, this thing is a monster and deserves some focused attention. So I’d make a personal plea to save the hi-res image (below) or print out the PDF (available here) and then spend your long weekend closely examining this thing.

The Padagogy Wheel takes an expanded approach Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and offers 62 iPad apps that fit into the organized chaos that is Bloom’s. On Allan’s blog (check it out, it’s great!) he explains that not every app is perfect and that there’s always room to improve. So I’d recommend you check out his blog and offer up your comments, questions, etc. as he ha spent a pantload of time on this thing and I just know you’d enjoy learning about this if you haven’t already.

See Also: 35 Digital Tools That Work With Bloom’s Taxonomy

What do you think of some of the apps and where they’re placed on the wheel? Are there some missing? Personally, I think a lot of the apps could live in multiple parts of the wheel (like Twitter, for example, could live in ‘Analyse’ as well as ‘Apply’) and that this thing could be even bigger than the 62 apps you see below. Another interesting note is that ‘Remember’ and ‘Understand’ are combined. In any case, this wheel is flat-out awesome and I don’t usually get this excited about visual guides. This one is just different and my digital hat goes off to Allan for his hard work. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

The Padagogy Wheel:

The Padagogy Wheel by Allan Carrington is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.  Based on a work at http://tinyurl.com/bloomsblog.