Beth Davis and I were pleased to spend time with the academic leadership team at the American Public University System a couple of weeks ago.This is a proprietary university system with a mission of supporting the post-secondary educational needs of GIs whose educational plans programs get disrupted when they find themselves being deployed around the world. It was a great day with people who are very good at what they do, and are looking for ways to leverage new ideas and new media to get even better.
We spent several hours reviewing current and evolving views about learning technologies and pedagogy (and yes, we also talked about differences between andragogy and pedagogy.) But the discussions were primarily focused on getting a better sense of what is actually going on in the world of innovative technologies likely to affect teaching and learning. Our intention was to give APUS some ideas about sustaining learning innovation while simultaneously supporting enterprise adoption of technologies that enable engaging experiences and support at every point in the learning value chain.
While it's clear that most of us are drawn to the bright and shininess of new ideas, the fact is that the validation of those new ideas are tested through the adoption of those new ideas in practice. Some of the best discussion we had while in Charles Town, WV focused on the challenges we practitioners face as we leap across the chasms between and among innovation, early adoption and majority adoption.
Why is it that some great ideas fail to make the transition and others survive? Not surprisingly, we had a few ideas about that......
I've posted a PDF version of the slides we used in our discussions here .
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