Serendipity35

There have been at least two decades of people meeting online. Face to face meeting went the way of face to face classes - moving online. Then there was a reaction to too many online meetings. People wanted to be with people again. 

Enter Meetup, whose purpose is to connect people to one another in the real world around interests (learning Spanish, writing poetry, political activism etc.) Meetup has 35 million members and now it will merge with its new owner WeWork. 

WeWork is a global network of workspaces. They offer people spaces for creativity, focus, connection. Spaces to work. WeWork is now valued at close to $20 billion - that's the tech startup land of Uber and Airbnb.

This merger news got me thinking again about learning spaces. The WeWork/Meetup models are not irrelevant to the ideas of face to face, online and especially hybrid learning models - and the spaces that work best for those modes of learning.

Think about how much talk there is about the importance of informal learning. That is a kind of learning that is not best suited for a classroom with rows of desks facing an instructor up front. Online learning is effective when learners have a sense of a space, virtual though it ma be, and a sense of community online. Hybrid or blended learning need to use the best of both those worlds.

It might be fruitful for educators to study what Meetup and WeWork do well and see if it can be applied to educational settings.

This post first appeared on Linkedin.com/pulse/

Immersive learning spaces will make use of augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) but most attention on those technologies are around consumer use, especially gaming. What will be the other markets? Is education one of those markets?

Microsoft has been pushing its HoloLens AR headset as an enterprise product, but only in industrial applications. Ford, for example, is using HoloLens headsets to improve its design process, allowing modifications of both its clay models and real cars to be viewed and modified on the fly, without having to re-sculpt or rebuild anything. ThyssenKrupp has been equipping service technicians with HoloLens headsets that show the faults they're trying to diagnose. Engineers remotely can can annotate the physical infrastructure technicians are seeing and guide maintenance and repairs.

A recent EDUCAUSE article predicts that in another decade, "immersive technology will become nearly ubiquitous and virtually unnoticeable, embodied in our eyeglasses and other wearable devices. But before we get there, we have the exciting opportunity to build our understanding of pedagogical frameworks, design new physical and virtual learning spaces, and create transformative learning experiences with immersive technologies."       

VR and AR are found in some makerspaces in libraries and media centers, but thinking more creatively about their use in the design of learning spaces is still at an early stage.

Innovative spaces include both formal and informal opportunities for learning. Some of this requires physical spaces, but it also includes simple design choices such as offering a swivel chair for 360 degree viewing. 

For education, pricing is an important factor for adoption and VR headset pricing is slowly but surely approaching costs that will make them more attractive for schools.

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FURTHER READING
VR and AR: Transforming Learning and Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Virtual Reality Devices – Where They Are Now and Where They’re Going

VR and AR: Driving a Revolution in Medical Education & Patient Care

AR and VR in STEM: The New Frontiers in Science

An article I read suggests that systems thinking could become a new liberal art and prepare students for a world where they will need to compete with AI, robots and machine thinking. What is it that humans can do that the machines can't do?

Systems thinking grew out of system dynamics which was a new thing in the 1960s. Invented by an MIT management professor, Jay Wright Forrester,  it took in the parallels between engineering, information systems and social systems.

Relationships in dynamic systems can both amplify or balance other effects. I always found examples of this too technical and complex for my purposes in the humanities, but the basic ideas seemed to make sense.

One example from environmentalists seems like a clearer one. Most of us can see that there are connections between human systems and ecological systems. Certainly, discussions about climate change have used versions of this kind of thinking to make the point that human systems are having a negative effect on ecological systems. And you can look at how those changed ecological systems are then having effect on economic and industrial systems.

Some people view systems thinking as something we can do better, at lest currently, than machines. That means it is a skill that makes a person more marketable. Philip D. Gardner believes that systems thinking is a key attribute of the "T-shaped professional." This person is deep as well as broad, with not only a depth of knowledge in an area of expertise, but also able to work and communicate across disciplines.  

Joseph E. Aoun believes that systems thinking will be a "higher-order mental skill" that gives humans an edge over machines. 

But isn't it likely that machines that learn will also be programmed one day to think across systems? Probably, but Aoun says that currently "the big creative leaps that occur when humans engage in it are as yet unreachable by machines." 

When my oldest son was exploring colleges more than a decade ago, systems engineering was a major that I thought looked interesting. It is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management. It focuses on how to design and manage complex systems over their life cycles.

If systems thinking grows in popularity, it may well be adopted into existing disciplines as a way to connect fields that are usually in silos and don't interact. Would behavioral economics qualify as systems thinking? Is this a way to make STEAM or STEM actually a single thing?

 

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David Peter Stroh, Systems Thinking for Social Change

Joseph E. Aoun, Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

I can remember lots of people talking back in the end of the 20th century talking about people - especially students - becoming digital citizens. You may have read that recently Saudi Arabia gave a robot citizenship. It was mostly a PR stunt to promote that country's tech summit, but some commenters are speculating on what it means to have a citizen that you can buy.

This human-like robot (Are we not using the term "android" any more for humanoid robots?) is named Sophia and has been making appearances. In early October she was at the United Nations to tell them “I am here to help humanity create the future.” And, as the Arab News headlined it, “Sophia the robot becomes first humanoid Saudi citizen.”

We will see more robots like Sophia. Her maker, Hanson Robotics, expects to expand its operations, and China is aiming to triple their annual production of robots to 100,000 by 2020.

Besides the uncanny valley effect of Sophia's humanness, there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable with not only these robots but artificial intelligence in general. Though AI scares Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, Musk's and Gates' companies are pursuing research into it and using it in their products and services. The idea of a robot developing self-consciousness is a step too far for many people though. 

Is AI in a robot a serious threat to the existence of humanity?