DIGITAL FUTURES

My article about online learning last week received great reviews and commentary from many of you; my Linked In colleagues for which I thank you all, for your sharing of your views. This next article, is my 200th, yes 200 articles. Hopefully you have read a few and they have all been fairly relevant and made some sense to you and your profession or organisational work.

I would now like to comment a little further about online learning to comment upon embracing it as an important tool in our digital futures.

In the corporate world changes to online learning tools and other new visual and audio media tools of teaching methodologies are seemingly occurring at an exponential rate. New platforms, new apps, new online tools, methods, graphics and media.

Given this revolutionary online-ness...I recognise we all need to change our thinking, maybe even our values and assumptions about what is learning, the purpose of learning, the functions of learning and other factors.

We can grasp these new artefactual tools which give some sort of connectivity; different from face to face but connections nevertheless; and we need to ensure we bring educational quality to online and the broader digital spaces in design, development, implementation and evaluation in cycles of learning and organisational and digital improvement.

Digital futures are an exciting, as well as a daunting challenge for corporations, indeed institutions of learning such as schools and universities, and learning and development managers and innovators.

There is light through the branches of the trees, like the picture above.

Digital futures strategic planning, change management and learning innovations management needs to be smartly led by those in leadership positions.

It is an exciting challenge for those of us interested in this educational journey.

The challenge is to build a culture of digital learning that meets the needs of the learners in corporations, schools, universities.

Today's digital technology can transform future organisations to thrive or fall.

Much depends on the people in charge of change, the managers of our digital futures, the decision makers as well as the IT designers and developers.

Those of us involved in decision making hold a high responsibility to make sure the digital journey in strategic and operational matters relating to digital pathways leads to individual and organisational success.

Learning, real learning; digital and other learning is learning that needs to meet social and cognitive needs of students in universities, workers in corporations, and students in schools. Learning development and implementation/delivery and evaluation needs to be smartly done. We are dealing with the human brain, one of the most complex phenomena of our lives.

Inputs, organisational activities, developmental tasks and expressive activities all need to be designed and delivered adeptly and with good foundational understandings of how people learn.

Teachers, facilitators of learning do really need to be aware of the many contemporary learning frameworks, theories of learning and the hundreds of years of background research that is a strong body of informative knowledge for digitalising our learning futures.

Then after awareness they need to upskill and learn new ways of teaching for new ways of learning. In my mind...that is an inevitable truth.

This includes the contemporary research on new sciences of chaos and complexity as well as the neurosciences for real learning and effectiveness of workplace learning and applied change in organisations.

Whilst corporations might look at efficiency, economies of time and finance; digital futures is really about the quality and effectiveness of the approach to ensuring real learning does occur, and organisational and community/societal learning, improvements and success happens.