On May 13th, 2009, Wharton Computing sponsored the inaugural Evolution of Learning Symposium. I’m proud to have served on the planning committee for this successful event that featured a keynote by Daniel Pink and a panel discussion by some great educators:
Chris Lehmann, founding principal of Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy
Doug Lynch, Vice Dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education
Karl T. Ulrich, professor of Entrepreneurship and e-Commerce at the Wharton School
It was pretty amazing to sit in a room and listen to these brains hash out some of the issues facing higher ed (and by extension, K-12) right now. A complete recap, including speaker videos, photos, and a copy of the obligatory live Tweets* are available here.
About a year ago, my husband came home from work, started gushing about a school he had visited that day, and continued to talk for hours about how inspired he was by its students and faculty. That was my introduction to Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, a Philadelphia public high school that opened in 2006.
Here are high school students inventing an efficient flow process for creating biodiesel fuel–how cool is that? And it’s happening in a Philadelphia public school!
Fast forward to the second Ignite Philly, when Chris Lehmann, principal of SLA, gave his presentation on the schools we need. Take five minutes to see a compelling speaker and learn about something wonderful in our city.
Over the summer, a few colleagues and I had the opportunity to present at the 2008 Higher Education Web Symposium, held at the University of Pennsylvania. Our topic was How to Engage Today’s Students: Portals, Instructional Technology & Learning Simulations.
My portion of the presentation was an overview of what we called the New Learner (not the best term, but we liked it better than Digital Native, Millennial, and especially Learner 2.0). Lou Metzger, Jason Lehman, and Erin Wyher followed up with specific examples of how we’re trying to engage this demographic throughout their activities at the school.
Overall, the presentation went well, though we ran long and didn’t have a lot of time to hear ideas from other schools. We also got some feedback that the examples were too Wharton-centric. It’s true that much of the content was Wharton and/or Penn-related, but I hope that didn’t obscure our underlying points:
Making small changes or adding modules can promote engagement—you don’t have to AJAX-ify or re-write your existing web applications.
Integrate existing information and present it in the context of a task at hand.
Animations, avatars, bells, and whistles don’t always translate into a better student experience.
Last week, Erin Murphy and I attended Brandon Hall’s Innovations in Learning conference, which also included the Excellence in Learning Awards. One of the award winners, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, had a great spin on corporate training.
PWC created a video series called “The Firm,” which follows several characters—the Sr. Associate who parties too much, the New Hire, the Partner, the Baby Boomer executive assistant, the Generation Y fashionista Associate—through their everyday lives as PWC employees and illustrates the finer points of employee coaching.
They released a new episode of The Firm every two weeks, got thousands of internal views, and made the episodes available on YouTube and pwc.tv to as part of their recruiting strategy.
I love this approach because it’s a story.The people are real employees with real quirks—they shave in the bathroom after partying all night and complain about the way their co-workers dress.The second season of the show was even accompanied by a fictitious blog*.
The cases used in business education already incorporate the element of story, so why not take those stories to the next level (someone out there already is, no doubt)? For starters, what about the Learning Lab’s Raise game, in which students allocate salary increases by reading employee profiles? It be so fun to give those characters a voice.
*Writing a fake blog as part of your job? Sign me up!
In September of 2007, the Learning Lab rolled out Backtester,a Flex-based backtesting tool for use in investment classes. I learned a lot about Flex and ActionScript while working on Backtester and am particularly proud of application’s wizard component, which allows users to design an investment strategy in 3 easy steps and test it against historical data.
We made a short screencast* for last spring’s faculty meeting and have been using it to test video tagging toys such as Viddler and Veotag. This post is just a test of Viddler’s new customizable player.