Learning Beyond the Classroom

Invited presentation to Media140 DigitalFamily, Perth, April 2012

The growth of digital technologies is creating more freedom and opportunity in education for students, young and old, to learn wherever they are, not just in the classroom. Through networked digital media we now have opportunities for learning that is more social, more authentic, and more distributed. But the technology does not make this happen all by itself? What do students need to do to take advantage of this new world? How can parents keep up with the changes? Why are new approaches needed for our next generation of savvy digital employees?

My presentation was designed to promote understanding of the changes that digital media technologies and social uses of them may bring, highlighting our different understandings of ‘the classroom’, but reminding us that many of the innovations in learning we think are ’caused’ by technology are in fact quite well established. It is simply now that a new kind of collaborative and informal learning can emerge, where the classroom is but one of many learning spaces.

The presentation, converrted to document form showing both the slides and the notes is below. The original presentations can be downloaded from http://slideshare.net/netcrit:

Learning Beyond the Classroom Part 1
Learning Beyond the Classroom Part 2