Digital learning futures

Digital Learning Futures

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler

As I write this blog post, the above slideshow has received almost 18,000 views in just 48 hours since it was posted up onto Slideshare. These slides accompanied my presentation during the Learning Technologies conference and exhibition held at London's Olympia on 25-26 January. I was pleasantly surprised by the huge turnout to hear me speak, and grateful to Don Taylor and his team for inviting me to speak at this excellent event.

During my talk, I discussed a number of possible scenarios that might result when wholesale adoption of digital technologies occurs in education and training. I touched on personal learning networks, mobile technologies, games and gamification, the use of social media in learning, the role of user generated content, the phenomenon of ubiquitous connection, and technological convergence. The latter in particular is a trend that is allowing us to use web-enabled television, dual view screens, and in the near future will enable a merging between e-mail and social media. I also discussed pedagogical issues such as deep and surface learning, creative thinking and the transformation of knowledge consumption. As a nod to the possible futures we might see, I discussed the development of semantic web technologies (Web 3.0 and Web x.0), touch screen tablets, non-touch technologies and smart objects, as well as the potential of Open Educational Resources, open learning and open scholarship to support a global democratisation of learning.

I'm immensely gratified to think that so many more people outside the auditorium at Learning Technologies are now downloading and viewing these ideas. My audience has been extended beyond the walls of the event to a global classroom through the amazing power of social media. Here's to all the possible futures of learning!


Digital learning futures by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.