Miguel Brechner. I spoke to Miguel Brechner after his well received keynote speech at ALT-C in Leeds this year. He requested a meeting with me after reading my blog reportage of his speech. He wanted to clarify a few points, including a response to the critique of the One Laptop Per Child projects. OLPC is premised on the basis of one child interacting with one free laptop, in many ways a counter to social forms of learning witnessed in communal contexts such as Mitra's Hole in the Wall project. Brechner is one of the few who have actually made OLPC a success, exactly where it should be achieved, in a very needy, poverty ridden region of Uruguay. He is an unassuming and self-effacing man, but Brechner is also passionate about what he has achieved in Uruguay. He has shown that providing disadvantaged young people with the appropriate tools for learning will transform them into eager and receptive learners. The laptop itself is not the inspiration, but it is certainly the gateway into inspirational experiences that lead to deep learning, and a growing awareness in the individual that they can achieve so much more as their knowledge of the world around them grows. Brechner is not ignorant of the fact that broadband provision is a necessity for such projects to succeed, indeed he even declared that 'broadband is a human right'. He is also aware that wireless provision and the availability of mobile technologies are increasingly important for learning in remote and underprivileged areas of the world. We can expect to see more projects of a similar nature taking hold in 2012.
Wayne Mackintosh. Many will be aware of Wayne Mackintosh through his work as the founder of WikiEducator - an online community and repository of free user generated content for educators worldwide. As a prime mover in the Open Educational Resources movement, Wayne Mackintosh must feel a heavy responsibility on his shoulders. Mackintosh is a firm believer in social innovation and sees it as the only answer for sustainable education in this century. He has a vision for free and open forms of education and sees them as the only way forward for us all. He is one of a growing band of educators who spend the majority of their time campaigning to bring this radical educational change about. To help achieve this vision, Mackintosh is setting up the OER University and is evangelistic in his elucidation of this concept. This passion and the reasoning behind OERU has already convinced over a dozen institutions worldwide to commit to the delivery of cost-free accredited degree level programmes online. I spent time with Wayne in Portugal during the EFQUEL Innovation Forum, and listened to him as he expanded on his ideas for a new, democratic form of global education for all. Mackintosh believes that 'no learner should be denied access to an education because learning material is locked away behind copyright or because people may not have the resources to pay for licensed software'. There is growing presence and force behind this vision, and as the OER movement gains traction and impetus, we should expect to see some changes in the way universities offer their programmes of study.
Conrad Wolfram. The Wolfram Alpha answer engine is a distinct departure from search engines such as Google or Bing. As explained by Conrad Wolfram, the service operates on an intelligent algorithm, interrogation of the question string, and production of multiple responses via a structured database of constantly updated content. Speaking with Wolfram after the LearnTEC event near Frankfurt, Germany earlier in the year, I asked him about his vision for the future of knowledge and learning. Like many true visionaries, Wolfram comes across as humble and decent, but also extremely self-assured in his belief and mission. He makes some stark, incisive remarks about education: 'Stop teaching calculating, and start teaching maths'. He argues that the value chain of knowledge is changing, meaning that knowledge brokering is no longer the domain of the experts. This echoes sentiments of the wisdom of crowds and the power of tribes, and his argument that repositories of knowledge can become even more powerful if they are searched intelligently and using visualisation computation resonates. And as each new node and connection is created by individuals, a new democratisation of knowledge emerges says Wolfram. 'If you drive yourself, you learn more about the route than you would if you are a passenger.' This suggests that most search engines make the enquirer a mere passenger in the journey to knowledge, whilst Alpha puts the enquirer firmly in the driving seat.The tools are already available for students to do calculation, what they now need, he states, is the ability to test things and verify results. The knowledge balance in schools, said Wolfram, is all wrong at present. There is too much knowledge giving and not enough opportunity for students to test things, experiment and discover for themselves.
Douglas Thomas. I met Doug when we were both invited to keynote a conference in Barcelona this year. Together with John Seely-Brown, Doug Thomas has authored a ground breaking book entitled A New Learning Culture. In it they map out many of the profound changes that are taking place in learning places through the introduction of new technology. Doug has some marked ideas about learning in the 21st Century. He sees the transition from more or less stable and predictable contexts to a more fluid and unpredictable world as an opportunity rather than as a threat. The emergence of massively networked communication and the subsequent collaborative possibilities excite him, as do the capabilities of new social media to enable sharing and rapid amplification of ideas across the globe. His emphasis is more on learning than on teaching, a thought that is amplified in the phrase 'blogs are a medium for learning, but they do not teach'. Although this could be challenged, it is never the less a sign of things to come, where formal education is supplemented and enriched by technology mediated informal learning. Thomas also sees the importance of play in future learning scenarios, viewing it as possibly 'the single most important skill to develop for the twebty-first century.' Gamification is inevitable, and massively online social games such as World of Warcraft 'allow us to highlight the connections between knowing, making and playing'. Thomas and Seely-Brown see a new culture emerging around these ideas, and we are already seeing evidence of this culture in our schools, colleges and universities.
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Four game changers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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