Moving Onward and Upward...A New Tool for a New Time

First, I would like to thank all of my readers out there who have indulged in this blog the past several years and endured my somewhat peculiar and often poor writing as I covered all things related (and sometimes unrelated) to teaching and learning in the digital age. It has been my pleasure to offer my thoughts and analysis on these very important topics and I hope that my readers learned as much about the topics I wrote about as I did while researching them. That said, I thought the end of the traditional school year, as we students and teachers transition from one grade or class to the next,  would be a great time for me to transition from one insight sharing tool to the next. With that, I am officially shutting down my greggfesta.com blog and moving my news, tool, and resource sharing and commentary to my already very active curation site located at http://www.scoop.it/t/greggfesta (see image above). This tool has evolved since I first started using it two years ago and now allows me to not only post live from any device I am using, but also provides me and my followers opportunity to comment and discuss the news, tools and resources I share in a more user friendly format that resembles a magazine. In addition, I am looking forward to consolidating all of my insight into one tool so that I have more time to reflect on what I am sharing and do so more frequently. Please join me by visiting and/or following the Gregg Festa: News, Tools and Resources for Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age.

Looking forward, Gregg

From Click to Touch to Gesture to Thought... The Evolution of Digital Interaction in Education

There has been a huge leap (no pun intended) in what is being called gesture-based control of digital devices as of late. HP recently demonstrated a new laptop that users can interact with via hand gestures and google recently released this video of a user using their Leap Motion technology to interact with Google Street.  While this all very cool, it is not a new phenomenon. Video gaming consoles such as the Nintendo's Wii (wireless gesture based controller) and Microsoft's Kinect System (hand based controller) for the xBox pioneered this new way of interacting about five years ago.  The difference now is that gesture computing  is better, more precise and beginning to permeate all aspects of educational computing interaction. Like the mouse and the touchscreen's before them, the gesture systems will have a dramatic impact on the users experience while also driving the development of new and innovative educational applications that can take advantage of this unique way of interacting. Of course, like it's predecessors, gesture-based computing's life will be fleeting as it will be ultimately be replaced by thought -based interaction with digital content. We can only wonder what kind of educational apps will result from that technological development.

MOOC's have dismal completion rates. Does that even matter?

Recent studies suggest that most massively open online courses who have hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in them produce very few (less than 10%) course completers. Traditional education is using this data to sound the educational alarms! MOOC's are a failure now that let's get back to the way we used to educate people. I say, not so fast. I agree that we need to offer learners the traditional path through education, especially if the learner is moving toward a degree. But we also need to offer alternatives to this path and the MOOC is a great model of how to learn what you need when you need it and from some pretty experienced people.  They also offer a way to network with other people who have similar interests and objectives. Those are great things to be able to do and only a MOOC can do that. That said, the question remains, "Is it critical  for students to COMPLETE a MOOC in order for MOOC's or the students who participate in them to be successful?" Having participated in but not completed a MOOC last fall (yes, I am one of those 90% who "failed") I can honestly answer no. I learned what I needed to learn and then checked out to go and do what I learned. From my perspective the MOOC met my learning objective so it was an educational success.  Perhaps, MOOC's are transitional and will naturally evolve into something structured less like a traditional college or high school course with starting and ending points and deadlines in between, and instead become more of "learning as I need it"  model promised but not yet delivered by online education in the future. I am not sure, but I can see a strong and important place for MOOC's moving forward if we can get away from judging them on "completion rates". Your thoughts?