Serendipity35

A post on the Co.Exist’s Futurist Forum (articles by futurists) starts out with the scenario of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact and settling it with a quick Internet search. Not so trivial, perhaps. Maybe better thought of as a learning moment or, as the post says, a microlearning moment.

So, what might we call this transformation. They call it (a bit awkwardly) socialstructed learning which can be defined as "an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards.

I would put it into the box - or outside the box - with the MOOC and other disruptions that occur outside of traditional classroom spaces.

The post also points to a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities that describes itself as "a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces."  Using Google Maps and Google Earth, HyperCities lets users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces.

Where do you use that tool? Anywhere. Anytime. Classroom or not.

Using mobile apps makes this typ eo learning much more likely to occur outside of classrooms and by people who probably would not describe themselves as students. They might agree to the label of "learner."  A good example of that is Smithsonian’s free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap. Take a photo of a tree leaf and it will search its library of leaf images from the the Smithsonian Institution and display a likely species name and information (photographs, information on the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark).

What about those MOOCs? Marina Gorbis says that they are today's equivalents of early TV when that medium resembled radio - with pictures.  We shouldn't be thinking about them as an extension of traditional lectures or online courses. Think bigger. Think about all of this moving us away from a model where learning is centered around hierarchical institutions like schools. She says that, "Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people."