Learning with passion for personalised learning

Will Richardson made a very interesting comment  during at the Online Connectivism Conference. He said that learning today can be “passion-based and deeply personalized.”

Some rights reserved CC Attribution Share Alike by Seth W

I do, of course, agree with him. Especially since I in several years have argued the importance of learning as a passion passionated learning and personalization in my daily missions and tasks here at my work and in my local, regional, national and international networks and missions for several years and it goes along with personalized or individualized learning. Several others as Chavous in Huffingtonpost argues also about the needs of Passionate Curiosity for Learning and he says:

It's widely agreed that a quality education is the foundation of one's success in life. 

Angelamaiers also argues and use to blog about passion driven learning, but also passion driven leadership.  The 25th of January 2012 she wrote about the 5C´s of Passion driven Leadership. The 5 C´s are Comfort, Clarity, Capacity, Credibility and Courage.

“Passion is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without passion.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Will Richardson argues further Since we  have rejected traditional classrooms where students are treated as empty vessels and embraced learning that is learner-centred, passion needs to acquire an important status in education. However, still colleagues seems to be concerned with outcomes and expectations, and so are evaluation and quality assurance methods and systems as well.  So, how can educators help young people and student  (or anyone, for that matter) find and pursue their passion?

To facilitate and to be engaged in genuine passion we need to give our students the freedom to learn and engage with ideas that they find relevant and important. Especially we as educators need to  step out of what is referred to as the Comfort Zone of Content. As educators, we need to step outside our comfort zone of content  and to stop feeding our students with content, but instead create passionating learning environments  and  to create interesting and passioning  context.

In educational settings we will learn from and with each other. Caring is Sharing, Sharing is Caring.

Hur får jag använda digitalt material i min undervisning?

Tid: 28 november 2012, 14.00-15.00
Plats: Virtuellt mötesrum i Adobe Connect. Läs merhttp://oersverige.se/webbinarium3/
Kostnadsfritt. Föranmälan krävs!
Just nu 146 anmälda.

Under 2011 och våren 2012 har förhandlingar förts om ett nytt kopieringsavtal för högskolesektorn som även omfattar digital kopiering, lagring och tillhandahållande. Det gamla avtalet var avsett för papperskopiering. Det var tänkt att det nya avtalet för högskolesektorn skulle träda i kraft under sommaren 2012. Den principiella överenskommelsen var klar sedan tidigare. Seminariet kommer att ta upp vad tankarna bakom det nya kopieringsavtal var – och varför det aldrig beslutades någonting.

Vi kommer att höra:

• Chatarina Larson, Universitetsjurist vid Umeå universitet och ledamot i SUHFs förhandlingsgrupp.

Viktiga frågeställningar rör:

• Vad kommer att hända nu?
• Vad är det som hakat sig i förhandlingarna?
• Kommer det nya avtalet att kunna träda i kraft först när den nya upphovsrättslagstiftningen träder i kraft?
• Blir det ett avtal?
• Vad gäller för tillfället?
• Hur ser det ut i andra länder med digital kopiering?
• Öppnare egenproduktion på våra lärosäten (OER, e-böcker etc).

Promoting OERs>>> Rethinking Education strategy

The Commission presents new Rethinking Education strategy for Europe


http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1233_en.htm

From the Press-release it says:
To ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. The use of ICT and open educational resources (OER) should be scaled-up in all learning contexts. 
--From Europa Press Releases RAPID

Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, said: "Rethinking education is not just of question of money: whilst it is true that we need to invest more in education and training, it is clear that education systems also need to modernise and be more flexible in how they operate to respond to the real needs of today's society. Europe will only resume sustained growth by producing highly skilled and versatile people who can contribute to innovation and entrepreneurship. Efficient and well-targeted investment is fundamental to this, but we will not achieve our objectives by reducing education budgets."

Rethinking Education calls for a fundamental shift in education, with more focus on 'learning outcomes' - the knowledge, skills and competences that students acquire. Merely having spent time in education is no longer sufficient. In addition, basic literacy and numeracy still needs to be significantly improved, and entrepreneurial skills and a sense of initiative need to be developed or strengthened (see IP/12/1224 on call for stronger focus on new skills in schools).

To ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. The use of ICT and open educational resources (OER) should be scaled-up in all learning contexts. Teachers need to update their own skills through regular training. The strategy also calls on Member States to strengthen links between education and employers, to bring enterprise into the classroom and to give young people a taste of employment through increased work-based learning. EU Education Ministers are also encouraged to step-up their cooperation on work-based learning at national and European level.

Other proposed measures include a new benchmark on language learning, guidelines on the assessment and development of entrepreneurship education, and an EU-level impact analysis on the use of ICT and OER in education to pave the way for a new initiative in 2013 on Opening-up Education, aiming to maximise the potential of ICT for learning.

This is a very welcomed message. Hoperfully the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practice (OEP) rapidly will develop in Europe as in most other continents already. It was 10 years since UNESCO launched the OER concept and this summer in June 2012 the Paris declaration was taken to force  and encourabe member countries to rapidly implement the use and the development of OER.

Yesterday I wrote about the Towards a Nordic Alliance for Open Educational Resources
The OER and OEP will be implemented in Europe and in the Nordic countries as well,

Time is changing. Now  the rethinking finally will start.

Towards a Nordic Alliance for Open Educational Resources

Yesterday the 25th of November 2012 I wrote a blog post on Disruptive Innovation. I claimed  that Open Educational Resources, OER unfortunately are not very high ranked and on the agenda in the Nordic countries, whereas OER are discussed widely on a global, European and sometimes even  on  a Nordic level. For example the OER Paris declaration is almost unknown, sorry to say. This is very strange in countries where education always have been part of democratic processes and  where education in different settings always have been valued very high, for example so called "folkbildning".  Many countries around the world have even had the Nordic countries educational system ranked very high and as good examples. For example Finland are ranked year after year as number one in PISA studies. At the same time in all the Nordic countries Internet is available and accessible everywhere for everyone.

The OER Paris declaration shows the importance of Open Educational Resources and gives recommendations to governments and institutions around the globe. The European Union has just launched a large-scale initiative on “Opening Up Education” and the Cyprus EU Presidency in cooperation with the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research organises a Ministerial Conference on “Opening up education through technologies” in Oslo in beginning of December 2012. The Nordic countries need to consolidate and to act!  

Towards a Nordic Alliance for Open Educational Resources

These developments have been the starting point for a Nordic initiative on promoting and utilizing Open Education in the Nordic countries with a focus on creating a strong base for OER and Open Educational Practices (OEP) amongst the Nordic countries and in the Nordic region, but also with a global outreach in mind. The Nordic countries have the potential to become a forerunner in OEP and the use of OER activities in Europe:

The Nordic countries share many values related to education and technology development and use; the political and governmental institutions are quite similar; and there is a tradition for cooperation, exchange of knowledge and solutions between the countries. To focus on a relatively homogeneous region which shares many basic values allows us to build knowledge and come up with specific recommendations that can be useful for policy makers at different levels, be implemented in policies and practice, and used to form new co-operations (from the Nordic Alliance for OER policy paper, November 2012)

Contacts persons in this initial phase are Jan M. Pawlowski (jan.pawlowski@jyu.fi) and Tore Hoel (tore.hoel@hioa.no). 

Questions and comments can also be sent to Ebba Ossiannilson (ebba.ossiannilsson@ced.lu.se)

Disruptive innovations

2012 is the year of the Tsunami in higher education, the flipped system or disruptive innovations. With disruptive innovation is understood an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network, displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. This was exacty what happend with the music industry and when we got Spotify. 

 Photo by: Shalom Jacobovitz. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 
The open educational paradigm is strong around the globe and implemented on a broad front, in many continents. There are so many open initiatives aleady availabel out there. The  MOOCs (Massive Open Olnline Cources) by for example  Coursera (Stanford som drivkraft), edX (MIT, Harvard, Berkeley), Udacity och World Education University (WEU), P2P University, University of the People and the OERu just to mention some initiatives. During the recent years it has accumualted and the open edcuational map look almost new every single day. Open, accessible, personalised learning and education gives possibilities for global learning for all at home. Globally UNESCO, Commonwealth of  Learning, OECD and the European Commission force issues on the Rethinking education strategy. 

Flipped Classroom have aslo become a concept really challenging traditional educational settings. There are movements such as flipping the entire educational system, and to turn everything upside down, thus not just to flip the classroom, but everything around educational settings and traditions.  The ideas behind the flipped classroom it is that  it requires educators to reconstruct traditional classrooms to a large extent.  Students work at their own pace, receiving lectures at home via online video or podcasts and then devoting class time to more in-depth discussion and traditional “homework.” This is in alignement with personalised and flexible learning. Yesterday 24th Novemer there was an interesting  post in Ecudemic  by Katie Lepi  on 16 Flipped Classrooms around the World.  

In the Nordic countries, however open education, OER and the Parisdeclaration on OER, MOOCs etc and  the entire tsunami is a so called NO question and not at all on the political agenda at Universities, Governments  and Educational organisations. 

Research shows that countries who have political national visions and strategies and Universities who have strong management and again visions and strategies have have achieved stronger and more sustainablle open education for all, not just for the own national students, but for all students around the globe.

It is urgent to act!

The urgent question for 2013 is how the Nordic Countries, its governements, authorities and Universities will act  and be part of  personalised global open learning and rethinking education.