"Awash in content and starved for knowledge"

Had the opportunity to listen to Marc Rosenberg at the 2015 Distance Teaching and Learning conference last week. Marc is an educational consultant and author of "Beyond E-Learning", and was the Wednesday morning keynote. He presented some very practical ideas, although some were a bit pie-in-the-sky. Some of the juicier takeaways:

• He suggests using technology tools only when they can do a better job at providing knowledge than the instructor. Seems like a "duh" but something that is easily forgotten with the ever-increasing number of academic tech tools available;
• As the title of this post suggests, Marc coined the phrase "We are awash in content and starved for knowledge." This was a nod to the voluminous amounts of content we are surrounded with every day, but without the proper filters and methods for content delivery, we never learn.
• He quotes Einstein saying "I never try to remember something I can look up." So why are we forcing the memorization of materials that can be just as easily Googled?
• He suggests a redefinition of blended learning to include knowledge bases, communities of practice, performance support, easily accessed experts and expertise, and ample coaching and mentoring. That is, make it more than content delivery focused and more learning focused.
• Rethink time. He stated that he, his parents, and his son, all went to college under the same model: credit hour, spent 3-4 per week per class in a classroom chair. The amount of time spent had nothing to do with the level of topic knowledge and learning need and everything to do with fitting into a standardized template used by higher ed for hundreds of year. Stop the madness.
• Let's integrate but not be subservient to technology. This was a point that struck home for me as I think about how we use our LMS system, and how this requires course developers to develop courses based on the capabilities of the LMS system rather than the needs of the student.
• If a faculty member comes to an instructional designer asking what they can do, does the designer have the latitude to suggest trying something different or will they go back to the ADDIE model and focus on the process? Hopefully, our IDTers understand that they have sufficient latitude to try different things (without going overboard!) on a small scale.

Marc also made mention of a white paper he co-authored titled Learning and Performance Ecosystems, a free download. Thank you, Marc, for the insights.