Social Software and more…

On 3 April 2007, we had a workshop on the Net Generation with Dianna Oblinger (Vice-President of Educause) in St. Gallen / Switzerland (for more information see this flyer). Dianna covered the following topics:

- Educating the Net Generation - Listening to What We Are Seeing?

- Learning Spaces: what will our universities look like in the future?

More information on these topics can be found at Educause’s website. Educause published a couple of e-books dedicated to the above mentioned topics: Educating the Net Generation, Learning Spaces.

Mandy Schiefner also wrote a comprehensive report on the workshop which can be found here. 

I’m at the conference in Leicester and it has been great so far. There are about 150 delegates, mainly from the UK. We had five keynotes and three discussion sessions and it was a very fast-paced day. The keynotes were by

• Gilly Salmon who also organized the conference together with her team of the Beyond Distance Research Alliance
• Bob Fryer, National Director of Widening Participation, Department of Health on "How to reconcile Max Weber and Pablo Picasso - competency, creativity and technology in the 21st"
• by Dr. Robin Goodfellow (Institute of Educational Technology, Open University) on "The relation of emerging Web 2.0 internet practices on future developments in teaching and learning
• and by two students of the University of Leicester looking at their fellow students’ views on e-learning

Lately, Norm Friesen tried to elicit a number of E-Learning Myths on his blog Ipseity. Norm is involved in the Canadian project Learning Spaces which aims at a "Phenomenological Comparison of Simulated and Mediated Computer Worlds" as it says on their website. His first two posts on E-Learning Myths were about the net generation and about the connection between technology and educational change. His last piece has just been published and deals with the knowledge economy and the myth of the knowledge worker and how this could change society. It is very well written and I’m glad that Friesen brings up the digital divide again which might even widen due to technology. I don’t quite agree with his position on Scardamalia and Bereiter’s Knowledge Building because I think that their theory might actually help to close the digital divide.

"Assuming that educators are to play a progressive role, their task would be best captured in terms of a game of catch-up in the knowledge age, but in an expression like "stepping into the breach" –to address the widening discrepancy or gap between the "knowledge class" and other classes. This can be done by providing skills and abilities apposite to knowledge work in those cases where it is possible, but not capitulate to and certainly not celebrate an order which has no place for others."

Source (and direct link to the complete article)

A former colleague of mine just sent me the link to the results of a study on Work-Life-Balance and its effects on the economy. The study aims at showing the positive effects of work-life-balance on companies, employees and the society as shown in the following graphic:

Source: Prognos-Study 2006, p.7 

It provides some thought-provoking results and also some very practical recommendations on what to do to retain employees with a  detailed analysis of the supportive and hindering factors.

Why do I blog this in a blog on social software? Because I think that work-life-balance will become increasingly important, especially for the net generation … but not only for them as a current article in the German magazine Zeit "Der Fluch der Unterbrechung" (via Mandy Schiefner) shows where the author Jürgen von Rutenberg describes in very neat writing how often we get disrupted by telephone, e-mail and, I guess, also by social software. So, the philosophical question remains: Is progress curse or blessing?

Hello to the world

After pondering the question whether to blog or not to blog for quite some time, I finally decided to do so. I just got back from the Eden Research Conference where I met some fantastic new people - most of them blogging, of course - and since they all encouraged me to blog I will at least give it a try. So, here’s some blog coverage about the Eden Research Conference

Stephen Downes who was there as a fantastic keynote speaker - thanks again!

Tom Wambeke who only blogs in Dutch but this might be readable for some of you

I haven’t found anything else up to now but would be interested in comments if there’s anything out there. The conference was very interesting - my conclusion is that it is definitely time for the digital natives to wake up and raise their voice. Martin Weller did a wonderful keynote on how learning management system will change and become personal learning environments embedding web2.0 but seemed to have forgotten that there were at least some people in the audience who could be called digital natives in the sense of Diana Oblingers "Educating the Net Generation"

Well, let’s see what we - the ones who think they are net gen - make of this. Thus, this blog is the start to reflect on social software from the net gen’s perspective…

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