It’s been a trying time of the year; erratic schedules, vacations and finding time to introspect has meant I’ve not blogged over the last month or so. As I get back on track, it’s time to start blogging in earnest again. We’ve gone from attending eLearning conferences to mLearning conferences; it’s just around the corner from mLearnCon 2011. As mobile computing becomes mainstream, it is worth thinking about the nature of learning in the future. As technology permeates our daily lives and goes on to become an essential part of it, the impact promises to be far-reaching.
The news that IBM’s Watson had beaten the humans on Jeopardy didn’t really come as a really big surprise for me. It’d been coming since Kasparov left the room in tears after losing to Deep Blue.
The argument then was that chess is about finite number of possible moves. The use of intensive mathematics, brutal processing logic and speed make chess a well defined challenge – computers were appropriately designed for such a challenge. However, natural language is very different. Modeling natural language mathematically is very challenging, and at the time (of deep blue vs. Kasparov), even natural language processing researchers admitted we were many years yet before computers would understand queries and respond to them in human language. I’ve banged on about intelligent personal learning agents based on semantic technologies in the past, and Watson – a ‘natural language processing’ ‘pattern recognizing’ ‘world aware’ engine – is a huge step towards making that happen.
Earlier today, I stumbled on this bit of research on the Gartner site; while it dates back to August there’s some interesting speculation about the Future of Work.
“People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,”
“In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
- Tom Austin, Vice President and Gartner Fellow
The eLearning industry has its roots in innovation, as a disruptive technology for education and training. At Upside, we strive to innovate in our product and service range, and find it’s a bit of a hit and miss affair.
It often makes me wonder, is there a set of rules we can use to foster innovation?
John Hegel lll and John Seely Brown have written an article titled ‘Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work’ on HBR blog. The article summarizes the ideas from their new book – The Power of Pull.
Thanks to a tweet from @ChrisLAtkinson I reached this blog post and from there the 21st Century Education website. The site features 12 videos by educators explaining what works and what does not in our education system. They argue what should be done to actually deliver 21st century education. Below are a couple of those videos.
A nice talk about the need for a ‘learning revolution’. Sir Ken Robinson makes some cutting comments about education today. Poignant at times, funny at some – well worth the 17 minutes.
“…teenagers do not wear wrist watches, I don’t mean they can’t or they’re not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is you see, we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us above 25 and so for us, if you want to tell the time you have to wear something.
Just before I went on holiday recently I was asked how human learning has changed with the advent, penetration and increasing ubiquity of computing technology.
My answer was simple – it hasn’t.
Human learning hasn’t fundamentally changed over the last fifty years. Our ability to learn is something honed over several hundred millennia, it’s what set us apart from the primates in the first place.
Learning is fast turning Social, Informal, & Mobile.
That’s the message I’ve been hearing loud & clear from Learning Technologies 2010. 
While what’s being said in most of the sessions isn’t entirely new to us, it does reaffirm the direction in which things are going. The level of participation in these areas was clearly visible at the event which is a good sign. Adoption, after all, will happen only when L&D professionals start making some sense of it in first place.
Here are some highlights from the Day 1 sessions I attended:
Time and again, we have seen Flash being extended in unique ways by leveraging the power of AS3. We caught something in the feeds yesterday that truly took us by surprise – face recognition using Flash. Check out the video here.
