Thank you all to the folks who attended the presentation. Believe me, I was overwhelmed by the response and I greatly appreciate your enthusiasm for PKM in higher education. There is a lot of exciting research in this area and I’m glad I could share with you some of what is going on.

I wanted to provide links to four of the reports I referred to during the talk. The first is the report from the Federation of American Scientists that calls for more funding of educational games. The second report is a summary of research concerning technology in schools (opens as a pdf file) while the third report deals with the critical thinking skills of the “net generation.” The fourth report is 2006 Horizion Report which lists new educational technology trends for the near future.

There is a lot of buzz on the edublogs about the latest offering from Google - Google for Educators.  I was expecting a suite of programs specifically geared toward educators but what you really get is the same general purpose applications and some text on how you could use these applications in the classroom.

Yes and your point is?

One (who lives near Google Labs) can also be a Google-certified teacher.  I really don’t see what good that would do because I don’t see anything new that Google brings to online education.  This looks more like a quick attempt by Google to cash in on the new elearning market without actually understanding the needs of this niche market.

Compare that to mynoteIT which bills itself as an online note taking tool but has a lot of great features.  This comes a lot closer to a true PKM system for college students than a group of cobbled together Google tools.  When I first started out on the subject of PKM for higher education, I realized a large barrier was putting together disparate tools to build the PKM system.  Google is taking the right step into a unified interface but I think mynoteIT is the better example of how to do it.

dgrey at Knowledge-at-Work makes a great point about how the core of PKM is the social skills and not the technology. That’s a point I also stress in the framework and with the Four C’s of turning information and data into knowledge. Data and information can come from machines but it takes a person to translate that into knowledge.

First, the data and information must be “compared” to other data and information. From this are drawn “connections” that further places the data and information into context. The third C is “consequences” in which the impact of the data and information is determined. The fourth and final C is “communication” which completes the knowledge conversion process.

This is why online collaboration is at the heart of any PKM system and is a vital part of the Framework (Peer Learning).

The first report is a meta-study of the impact of technology in schools. Commissioned by Cisco Systems, this report demonstrates that technologies such as gaming, online collabration, and calculators have had positive effects on student learning. But the real value of the report is the explanation for why these benefits are often not realized:

“The reality is that advocates have over-promised the ability of education to extract a learning return on technology investments in schools.
The research studies now suggest that their error was not in citing the potential of technology to augment learning—for research now
clearly indicates that the effective use of technology can result in higher levels of learning. This review of the past decade suggests four
miscalculations on the part of educators:
● First, in being overly confident that they could easily accomplish the depth of school change required to realize the potential
technology holds for learning—not an easy task
● Second, in their lack of effort in documenting the effect on student learning, teacher practices, and system efficiencies
● Third, in overestimating the time it would take to reach a sufficiency point for technology access
● Fourth, in underestimating the rate of change in technology, and the impact of such rapid, continuous change on staff time,
budgeting, professional development, software upgrades, and curricular and lesson redesign
As a result, the real potential of technology for improving learning remains largely untapped in schools today.”

The full report can be found here.

Another great report is the latest from EduCause which deals with increasing information literacy and information savvy among the digital generation.  As the report shows, students are adept at finding online resources but they lack the critical thinking skills to judge valid information.  This report describes this emerging problem and gives resources for professors to promote “net-savvy” among their students.  Well worth a close read.