As usual, there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on at this year’s Learning Technologies event. Too much, in fact, for one blog post – but a discussion about the future of technology and learning really caught my eye (and ear).
On day 2, Gerd Leonhard delivered the ‘disruption’ keynote: ‘Work Redefined – Learning Redefined’. I’m not going to try and repeat everything that was covered, but he presented a few interesting stats that illustrate just how quickly our space is changing:
- 70% of Apple’s revenues come from products that couldn’t even be delivered only a few years ago
- With content, even though the analogue to digital value reduction may be 50-90%, the number of potential new users is 50-100 times greater (and with lower cost of sale and distribution)
- The gamification market will be worth $1.6bn by 2015
What does that mean for us? What are the big themes that we need to respond to as an industry-led research centre?
- To stay relevant, we must embrace and design for social, local and mobile (SoLoMo)
- Multi-platform, multi-channel is the new default – all content will be in the cloud anyway
- In a world where abundance of information is inevitable, we need to find better ways to avoid ‘filter failure’ (ref Clay Shirky http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI): curation, context and interface will become more crucial
- We must build interfaces and technologies that enable us to become more human – it’s as much about ‘humarithms’ as algorithms
- There is a danger of IP assumptions holding us hostage – why do we assume that protection of IP will yield something more valuable than open innovation?
- The learning sector will become an ecosystem where centralised, decentralised and distributed models will co-exist – you can be a wheel in the ecosystem, but you can’t be the wheel
You can follow Gerd @gleonhard or access his material here http://www.slideshare.net/gleonhard
