Note: This post is the sixth in the nine-part series Teacherpreneurs Mentor Edupunks: Convergence Reshapes Teacher Preparation for Today and the Future and written in the vein of peering into Teaching 2030. Click here to read the previous post on Surgical Learning Analytics and Learning Playlist.

Teacher preparation will expand beyond what we know today. Learning ecosystems will become more sophisticated, tying into geographic and interest-imprint dashboards, where the data “will track and manage diverse data streams from multiple agencies and institutions, offering visualizations of a region’s “educational ecosystem.” Today’s Hive Learning Network, “a community of civic and cultural institutions dedicated to transforming the learning landscape, and creating opportunities for youth to explore their interests in virtual and physical spaces,” may provide a glimpse into how teacher candidates are prepared in 2030 by weaving place-based and networked learning together. Community Connectors, another role teacherpreneurs adopt in the future, play a pivotal part in connecting students with educational opportunities in a Hive Learning Network. And, Learning Brokers, teacherpreneurs who assist families and students in investing their Educational Debit Card expenditure, which amasses federal, state, and local monies, will be the equivalent of today’s guidance counselors on cyber-connected steroids.

Already, we see districts banning together, dissolving borders, to offer blended and online learning to lower costs, including the purchase of eBooks, as well as the use of free textbooks. Overtime, there will be geographic pockets that no longer recognize city, county, or state lines as they pool their resources to bring economic stability predicated on learning opportunities for their children and future generations. However, especially in rural areas, the rise in CyberConnected earning merged with CyberConnected economic opportunity (jobs) – or localnomics – will be on the rise in 2030.

Richard Florida, senior editor at The Atlantic and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, wrote in 1995 about the rise of the knowledge-economy and learning regions in Futures Towards the Learning Region:

The new age of capitalism holds even greater challenges for regions. The very fabric of regional organization will change, as regions gradually adopt the principles of knowledge creation and learning. Learning regions will be called on to supply the requisite human, manufacturing and technological infrastructures required to support knowledge-intensive forms of innovation and production. Rather than ushering in the ‘end of geography,’ globalization is likely to occur increasingly through complex systems of regional interdependence and integration. And, as the nation-state is squeezed between the poles of accelerating globalization and rising regional economic organization, regions will become focal points for economic, technological, political and social organization . (pp 534 – 535)

TIME magazine acknowledged the rise of localnomics in its August 20, 2012, issue, drawing attention to Florida’s prescient observation. Perhaps the geographic regions where Learning Regions and localnomics will take hold most quickly will be those areas that are “spiky,” according to Florida, where the merger of “talent, tolerance, and technology” is nurtured. Teacherpreneurs flourish in these regions for their expertise in orchestrating learning is vital to the success of the community and region.

Steve Haragon wrote the following in his post A Tail of Two Ed Tech Agendas in regards to explaining the difference between the traditional economic model, the head, and the Long Tail model, where selling less is more, popularized by Chris Anderson:

The head is very vertical, as volume is the key. The head is about scaling and scope, and success is more of the same. The tail is very horizontal, as it is about as breadth and depth, and success in the tail is differentiation, diversity, and choice. The head requires hierarchy, corporate decision-making, and control. The tail requires networking, an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and freedom. The head is about money, by which approval is conferred. The tail is about passion, and approval is less about the financial and often more about relationships and fulfillment. The head and the tail are actually very different economic models, and it turns out they may also be a powerful way to differentiate two different ed tech reform models. 

In 2030, teacher edupunks seek out local needs and participate in the future’s learning regions and Hive Learning Networks, while also learning with others globally. Early examples of “hive” or “hub” learning networks exist across the globe. Skillshare also serves as an early example for they “began as a way for communities to share local knowledge by teaching and taking classes on everything from programming to entrepreneurship to cooking.” Teacherpreneurs thrive in dissolved-border, CyberConnected communities, which grow along the lines of a Long Tail approach and push the creation of even more differentiated professional pathways and careers for teachers we have yet to imagine.

Spearheaded by teacherpreneurs and fueled by the Long Tail economic model, teacher preparation is not about scope-and-sequence curricula or higher ed hierarchal systems but is based on passion, freedom, networking, relationships, and the crowdsourcing of learning.

What are your thoughts? Will Learning Regions and Hive Learning Networks be the future’s hotbeds of innovation redefining the role of teacher?

 Note: This post is the fourth in the nine-part series Teacherpreneurs Mentor Edupunks: Convergence Reshapes Teacher Preparation for Today and the Future and written in the vein of peering into Teaching 2030. Click here to read the previous post on the Gamification of Education.

As technology grows more sophisticated, so will the capacity for harnessing data with the targeted importance of surgical learning analytics, as Open Colleges’ Learning Analytics Infographic outlines. And, interest in learning analytics is increasing as evidenced by the doubling of registrations for the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference between 2011 and 2012 and increased research efforts in how teachers use data to inform instruction.

However, the data gathered is only as good as the assessment. Teacher candidates must master designing appropriate and effective measures of student learning, as well as interpreting the results. Moreover, surgical learning analytics will prove even more crucial when designing customized, personalized learning experiences, let’s call them learning playlists, which tap into student interests and passions, while leveraging the best digital tools available to get the job done.

The School of One is an example of applying the backend use of surgical learning analytics – algorithms – to inform practice and teacher know-how on assessing student success, making customized, differentiated learning more engaging and relevant. Therefore, teacher candidates must have intimate knowledge of assessment, the best tools for gathering learning data, and putting the results to work.

Look for an extension on the Learning Management System design in becoming a Next Generation Learning Platform, which merges student data and teacher professional development needs, housed in the cloud, creating more relevant, personalized learning for students and teachers. The development of a Next Generation Learning Platform would be especially timely considering the projected December release of the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) and its encouraged development by the Chief State School Officers; the SLC will house student data in the cloud, making the need for understanding surgical learning analytics even more of a turnkey in teacher preparation.

Further, surgical learning analytics will expand with students using mobile devices in a variety of settings. In the Harvard Graduate School of Education course Learning Goes Lifewide: Using New Media to Connect In and Outside of School, among many topics, participants discuss how “children and young people are turning playgrounds, camps, museums, shopping malls and vacations into learning environments,” blurring lines between formal and informal learning and how “educators can conduct assessments continuously and incorporate useful feedback immediately.” Leafsnap, which “uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves,” is one example of growing experiential, place-based mobile learning beyond traditional classroom walls.

By 2030, today’s crowdsourced learning playlists, which are designed around passion and interest, such as those found at Skillshare, Mentormob, OpenStudy, and Mightybell, will become more sophisticated. And, advances in neuroscience prompt the invention of new cognitive tools that “allow educators to identify distinct cognitive pathways for individual learners, supporting increasingly customized learning experiences.”

2030 teacher edupunks, as self-directed learners, will have grown-up with the early rendition of learning playlists and have first-hand knowledge of beneficial designs, positioning them as teacherpreneurs to work in concert with for-profits or begin their own business ventures. Further, surgical learning analytics will become more sophisticated as learning ecosystems track a learner’s digital footprints, creating an information-rich, connected web of experience, skills, and learning (not education) attainment.

What are your thoughts? How will teacher preparation programs include learning playlists and learning analytics?

Note: This post is the second in the nine-part series Teacherpreneurs Mentor Edupunks: Convergence Reshapes Teacher Preparation for Today and the Future and written in the vein of peering into Teaching 2030. Click here to read the previous post.

Connectivism: The Imperative of Personal/Professional Learning Networks + Personal Learning Environments

Online communities and learning networks are pivotal to a teacher candidate’s experience and learning. By creating and engaging in Personal or Professional Learning Networks (PLN), teacher candidates lay the foundation for understanding connectivism by undertaking it themselves, participating, by becoming a Networked Teacher. Teacher candidates must learn, as do their students, of how to connect, share, and collaborate with others worldwide to enlarge their canvass of learning. In The Networked Teacher, Dr. Kira J. Baker-Doyle, assistant professor of education at Penn State-Berks, outlines her research and theory on the importance of connectivism, networking by following “the stories of four first-year teachers, illustrating the significant impact that social support networks can have on teachers lives and challenging common misconceptions of professional support.”  Understanding the value of professional networking, the U. S. Department of Education has launched a new initiative naming August 2012 as the Connected Educator Month.

Today’s teacher candidates must learn how to locate relevant and quality resources as they grow their PLNs using various digital tools, such as Twitter and Diigo, and focus attention and time to those professional learning elements that will be useful to them. The Connected Educator, by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, is must read in creating an effective PLN. Also, the Educator’s PLN community website supports educators in creating and expanding their PLNs by providing connections, resources, and discussions. And other communities abound: Teacher Leaders Network; Middleweb; The English Companion Ning; Classroom 2.0; and The Future of Education. As professional development becomes more job-embedded via PLNs, more focused on competency rather than “seat time,” learning badges, similar to a Scout earning a badge showing proficiency in a particular skill, will become a standard as “learning” has been redefined and new assessment frameworks acknowledge informal, passion-based learning.

Today’s teachers are leveraging connected learning through web curation by using web spaces as Learnist, Pinterest, and ScoopIt. Teacher candidates in 2030 will have already curated a sophisticated personal learning network through seamless connections in and out of cyberspace. Using PLNs, teacher candidates have designed their own Personal Learning Environments (PLE), a “personal collection of tools and resources a person assembles to support their own learning – both formal and informal..to support one’s ongoing social, professional, learning, and other activities…While the concept of PLEs is fairly fluid, it is clear that a PLE is not simply a technology but an approach or process that is individualized by design, and thus different from person to person,” according to the New Media Consortium Horizon Report 2012 K-12 Edition.

In 2030, it will be commonplace for teacher candidates to share with and learn from their PLE as they hack their education. If teacher preparation as we know it today still exists in institutions of higher education in 2030, its basic premise will be founded on connectivism via a PLE, where teacher candidates learn of the world’s best teachers, those who are teacherpreneurs, and beat a cyber path to their portals, putting the new virtual apprenticeship into action.

What are your thoughts on the importance of connectivism in teacher preparation?

Note: This post is the first in the nine-part series Teacherpreneurs Mentor Edupunks: Convergence Reshapes Teacher Preparation for Today and the Future and written in the vein of peering into Teaching 2030.

The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

–Alvin Toffler, American writer and futurist

         David Wiley, professor of psychology and instructional technology at Brigham Young University, chief openness officer of Flat World Knowledge, and founder of the Open High School of Utah, wrote the following in his blog post University Presidents on “Irrelevance”:

For years I’ve been saying that our nation’s universities must evolve to reflect basic changes in their broader societal contexts or riskbecoming completely irrelevant.

         As part of our nation’s higher education institutions, teacher preparation programs must also evolve as a convergence of today’s trends and happenings point. As edupunks hack their own education, teacher preparation as we know it will change dramatically in content, context, and delivery by 2030, if it is to continue to exist at all. Along the way, we’ll see that Alvin Toffler’s words ring true in teacher candidates being prepared to learn, unlearn, and relearn, as must teacher educators and veteran teachers. And, it will be teacherpreneurs who navigate us to the future.

In a series of blog posts, let’s examine a few of the converging trends shaping teacher preparation today and where they may possibly lead in 2030:

• Connectivism
• The Growth of Digital Literacies
• The Gamification of Education, App Development, and the Emergence of Mobile Learning
• Surgical Learning Analytics and Learning Playlists
• Learning Ecosystems, Geographic Imprints, and Localnomics
• OER, Open Teacher, and the Learning Architect
• Open Education, Equity, and the College Debt Bubble
• Looking to 2030: What’s at the End of the Telescope?