Preliminary Personal Responses to the 2014 Higher Education Edition Horizon Report Revisited

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A “Revisited” blog post indicates that I reread the original and used AI-assisted tools (e.g., Grammarly) to improve grammar and word choice.

First published April 20. 2014.

Though I won’t have time until this summer to deeply explore the 2014 Horizon Report, which I alluded to in an earlier post, I wanted to share some initial reactions here:

I concur with the Report’s assertion of the growing ubiquity of social media. The challenge for me is to find the right balance between the kinds of deep thinking I believe “more traditional teaching methods” correctly implemented can foster and an ability to capitalize on the enabling capabilities of social media for producing, communicating, creating, and collaborating. I don’t find that my institution has the appropriate classroom infrastructure for leveraging these social media tools within the physical classroom and traditional classroom meeting time.
I agree with the Report’s suggestion that higher education must inevitably allow and facilitate online, hybrid, and collaborative learning integration.
Though I have always been interested in “adaptive” learning and personalizing the learning environment, I find the promises of “an emerging science of learning analytics” overblown, premature, and creepy in terms of degrees of invasion of privacy.
I applaud and embrace the identified trend of students as creators rather than merely consumers though I would urge that one not lose sight of the importance of quality control of their products.
I concur that the time is ripe for university programs to support aggressively “agile, lean startup models” that promote a culture of innovation in a more widespread, cost-effective way as long as there are built-in assessment procedures that validly document the weaknesses and strengths of these (maybe) new approaches. Too often, I have seen institutions chase after the latest educational fad and fail to benefit from the organizational memory of prior, similar failed ventures.
For me, online learning is a valuable complement rather than a viable alternative to most forms of face-to-face learning. As I’ve written earlier, I regularly and increasingly use “nontraditional” learning tools to supplement my personal and professional development and digital literacy. However, I am still sorting out how to embed and assess that literacy among my students. What venues should I foster those skills and intrude them into top learning tools? I am increasingly wary of a “digital divide” that ironically exists between K-12 and higher education instructors, with the latter—and their students—being the more deficient!