edu-ID Mobile App for Smart Environments

This presentation provides a brief community update on the status of the Swiss edu-ID Mobile App project at the 2017 SWITCH edu-ID information workshop on 29. June 2017 at University of Berne.

It presents the use cases directly covered by the project as well as the reference architecture. It provides a bunch of links to the different resources related to the project.

Is Blended Learning Outdated?

Last weekend, I came across a tweet from Marco Kalz. It criticises blended learning as a framework.
I found it interesting that he coined blended learning as an outdated framework. Later into the conversation, Marco hinted his preference towards "ecology of resources". I am unsure, whether this does a better job than blended learning, but it shares elements that Marion and I have discussed recently in the context of "mobile blended learning".
This post includes a few thoughts on the different interpretations of blended learning, that Marion and I initially included in a chapter on Mobile Blended Learning to an upcoming book by Claudia de Witt and Christina Gloerfeld. Our work yielded many interesting thoughts and conceptualisations on operationalising blended learning for learning designs that did not make it into the final manuscript.

Micro Learning in the Workplace and How to Avoid Getting Fooled by Micro Instructionists

2017 is the year of micro learning. It took 14 years since our initial work in 2003 until the concept hit mainstream. During the first half of this year, I have read several blog posts and tweets since the start of this your and one thing struck me: The focus on learning resources and chunking them into digestible sizes. It appears that video is the big thing in micro learning these days, while it is not.
This post is a response to Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner's post that comes with a lot of references but leaves out the most important aspects of micro learning and argues that micro learning is a meaningless concept. One thing that the authors got wrong is the honorary reference to micro instruction from the 70's. Back then it was called micro teaching and not micro learning for a reason. Mainly, micro teaching is about presenting the teachers ideas and concepts and not about the student's learning and performance. More importantly, micro learning is not content-centric just-in-time learning, as the article (like many others) puts it.