Michel Bauwens is participating in the 7th annual Designs on E-learning 2011 conference, held at Aalto University in Helsinki from 27 to 30 September 2011. The following is part of a selection of blogposts used to prepare the conference.

Since we’re on the topic of the future, and we’re discussing potential developments in the field of learning and education, I wanted to bring into the conversation some exciting work by the Institute for the Future (IFTF). The Director of the Institute, Marina Gorbis, recently gave a brilliant talk at the 2011 Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Academic Resource Conference in San Francisco, in which she addressed the idea of social production in education (you can listen to the complete talk here). Speaking of the future of learning, Ms. Gorbis identified five key themes that she envisions as vital trends in the development of education over the next decade:

• Micro-learning: The availability of knowledge accessible in the real world and at any time creates the conditions for learning that is easy, lightweight, and done in context when a person really wants or needs to learn.
• Rich ecology of content and resources: We are seeing the democratization of content, with high quality resources being produced by individuals and groups outside of any institutional framework.
• Community as a driver: Learning is (and has always been) about participating in a conversation, with people that matter to us. Increasingly, schools will need to be asking the question: how can we create social settings that encourage the right kinds of conversations?
• Teachers as social designers: With content cheap and available everywhere, the role of the teacher as the orchestrator of learning communities comes to the fore.
• Non-grade rewards: We have known for some time that grades replace intrinsic rewards with extrinsic, taking pleasure and self-direction out of learning. Ideas for different models of reward are coming from unexpected places, such as gaming, where the concept of leveling up produces a new and engaging dynamic.

I feel that these themes are in strong concordance with the emerging body of work on participatory media cultures, and with my own work in Prof. Henry Jenkins’ New Media Literacies research group. Even though we might have different terms to label these new educational trends processes, I am delighted to see a significant confluence of ideas in respect to both current and future developments.

I think that these five trends really embody some of the keywords in the field of education right now: community, learning ecology, social design, non-grade rewards… If one aspect still needs clarifying, in my opinion, it is the precise role of technology (especially media and educational technology) in the shaping of these trends. How much is micro-learning a result of the availability of (digital) resources, and how much is it a pedagogical paradigm shift? To what extent is the move towards non-grade rewards a symptom of youth involvement with videogames and informal affinity spaces, and to what extent is it a didactic improvement based on educational and psychological research? I am not discounting the possibility that it could be both – certainly, these root causes are not mutually exclusive but rather, extremely intertwined. My complaint it that I would like that relationship to be more clear; I would like the role or specific input of technology in this process to be better understood, and clarified, and discussed.

Source: http://www.designsonelearning2011.com/archives/310