Hans de Zwart: Technology as a Solution…

The Dutch Moodle users group (Ned-Moove) organised the fifth Dutch language Moodlemoot in Amsterdam last Wednesday. It was a successful event with nearly a hundred people attending and two excellent keynote speakers: Helen Foster and Martín Langhoff. Helen is Moodle’s community manager and Martín is an important core Moodle developer and currently architect of the school server in the OLPC project.

The programme of speakers was better than in any earlier Dutch moot, with tracks about education, business, digital pedagogy and sysadmin/development tracks. Nowadays events like this leave digital tracks and can be relived in a way through the Twitter messages, blog posts and shared slides. My ex-colleague and friend Marcel de Leeuwe wrote an interesting (Dutch) blog post about his experiences at the moot that includes his slides and my co-Ned-moove-board-member and friend Arjen Vrielink did a conceptual talk about Moodle networking. Many of the other speakers have put their slides online at the Moodlemoot 2009 website.

Moodle in the Netherlands finally seems to be taking of outside of secondary education. About half of the visitors did not come from the educational sector:

Sectors/Visitors at the Dutch Moodlemoot

My own presentation was less about Moodle and more about learning this time. I talked about instructional principles that can be used to make sure you deliver top quality blended learning. The slides and audio are in Dutch and can be viewed here:

All in all a great event. I am looking forward to next year, it will most probably be in Belgium.

Wilfred Rubens recently wrote a (Dutch) post asking whether the current cloud computing trend will influence how we learn. I posted a reaction in the comments linking to a couple of Kevin Kelly’s posts on the Technium (if you haven’t subscribed to the Technium, you should right now).

Wilfred’s reply to my comment made me think about one my favourite quotes about how technology can change society. It is from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom:

Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice. Some things become easier and cheaper, others become harder and more expensive to do or prevent  under different technological conditions. The interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the social responses to these changes -both in terms of institutional changes, like law and regulation, and in terms of changing social practices- define the qualities of a period.

So, I know for a fact that cloud computing technology will create new feasibility spaces for social practice and I am sure that this will include learning. The question is not whether cloud computing will change the way we learn, the question should be how will it change the way we learn. In that regard, I think George Siemens has started asking the right questions.

Edge World Question Center

Every year the literary agent and publisher John Brockman asks a group of thinkers an important question. Their answers are published on the (horribly designed) Edge.org website. This year’s question is: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

More than 140 well known authors have answered the question and it provides for fascinating reading. What struck me was how many of the writers see some technological development as game changing.

Keith Devlin for example writes:

The mobile phone. Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own one. (Neither the pen nor the typewriter came even close to that level of adoption, nor did the automobile.) That puts global connectivity, immense computational power, and access to all the world’s knowledge amassed over many centuries, in everyone’s hands.

Many match a development in technology, to a change in how we educate and improve our knowledge (usually to then make this world a much better place; most of these writers are very optimistic).

Chris Anderson (curator of the fabulous TED) has a very rosy-eyed view on how the low physical cost of digital distribution will transform global education through the dissemination of knowledge and inspiration:

Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students.

Haim Harari is more realistic. He writes:

Of the six billion people on our planet, at least four billions are not participating in the knowledge revolution. Hundreds of millions are born to illiterate mothers, never drink clean water, have no medical care and never use a phone. [...] The “buzz words” of distant learning, individualized learning, and all other technology-driven changes in education, remain largely on paper, far from becoming a daily reality in the majority of the world’s schools.

He then asks a very interesting question:

How come the richest person on the globe is not someone who had a brilliant idea about using technology for bringing education to the billions of school children of the world?

Next he posits that the time does seem ripe for this to change:

• Globalisation forces us to see the enormous knowledge gaps in the world.
• Technology advances make designing tailor-made solutions for schools and education worth considering.
• The generation that grew up with computers is know turning up to teach in the classroom.
• Children participate in web-based social networks forcing education to radically adapt.
• A connected child cannot be taught the same way people were taught decades ago.

Do you think Harari is right? Will we live to see a game changing development in education through the use of technology?

I am a strong believer in theories that see a large role for the environment in shaping in our behaviour and our well-being. I think that the easiest way to change somebody’s behaviour is to change their environment. Let me give you a simple example: if you want people to drive slower, then you should make the road narrower.

So I was delighted to find these Reversible Destiny Lofts through Boing Boing:

These houses keep you young and healthy by providing you with perpetual challenges:

Designed to stimulate the senses and force inhabitants to use balance, physical strength and imagination, the lofts feature uneven floors, oddly positioned power switches and outlets, walls and surfaces painted a dizzying array of colors, a tiny exit to the balcony, a transparent shower room, irregularly shaped curtainless windows, and more.

Since I have changed jobs about one and a half years ago, I have gained 10 kgs just from living in a different environment (walking to my car, instead of to the metro and sitting behind my laptop instead of standing in a classroom). I believe that living in a reversible destiny loft could really keep you physically in great shape. I don’t think I would be able to manage it mentally though: climb a wall every time you want to turn on the light?

Learning is could be (narrowly) defined as overcoming challenges. It would be interesting to try and create a learning environment that keeps challenging as many senses as possible, keeps changing/adapting and keeps your brain working at all times.

Does anybody know any?