Tag Archives: Minneapolis
Community and Collaborative Learning

Community and Collaborative Learning

by on June 27, 2011 in Accelerated Learning, social learning

I was talking last week with a young woman from Kenya who does accounting for a local financial services company.  She started discussing the differences between our culture and the one she came from.

In Kenya, she said, everyone is very community-focused; but here in the United States we function as completely separate individuals.

She described how she and her Kenyan friends get together frequently for an entire day to cook, talk, braid each other’s hair, and learn things from each other. She said that in the United States, people place more importance on individual activities, with families rarely even having meals together.

Learning has also become less community-based in the United States.  More and more, learning has focused on web-based training and distance learning.  And yet, according to research, people learn best by interacting with others in a real world context.

Dave Meier, proponent of collaborative learning, …

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Can Bill Gates Lead the Informal Learning Revolution?

Can Bill Gates Lead the Informal Learning Revolution?

by on June 1, 2011 in blended learning, Classroom Learning, Gaming Theory, Informal Learning, social learning

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to hear Julie Dirksen, an instructional designer from Minneapolis, give a presentation on the use of games in learning.  She described games’ effective use of rewards (points, money, etc.), leveling (the strategic increase in difficulty over a period of time) and other psychological techniques and I left wanting to learn more.  I have seen a few uses of gaming in adult education, but nothing overwhelming.  In addition, I’m a novice gamer myself, growing up alongside Nintendo and Sega Genesis, so I sat down at the computer and used some personal directed learning time to explore the prevalence of gaming in education.

I stumbled upon an article about an effort by the Gates Foundation to swing the direction of education standards with a mega-investment in digital learning.  It turns out Gates has invested millions in educational video games, funded the game-centered Quest2Learn…

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Who’s Building the Social Learning Roads?

Who’s Building the Social Learning Roads?

by on April 20, 2011 in Classroom Learning, Informal Learning, social learning

Over the last few months I’ve discussed with my brother, a professor at Bethel University here in Minneapolis, how to incorporate social media into his classes.  Without throwing him completely under the bus, I’ll describe him as being late to the social media party but definitely ahead of the curve when it comes to openness to using informal learning elements like social media in his undergraduate courses.

Most of the time we end up brainstorming ways to incorporate tools like Twitter or Facebook into his lessons, because even though I may have more experience using social media, the tools are so new that no one really knows the best way to utilize them, for anything really.  Companies like Hubspot (love them, by the way) that market themselves as “social media” or “inbound marketing” experts do have some great ideas on how to leverage social tools to increase traffic, sales leads, …

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