Technology trends opening access to education worldwide: Now, we all can learn!
Speaker: Curt Bonk, PhD, Indiana University
According to Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat, worldwide economic trends are flattening. In education, however, opportunities for learning are actually expanding through a myriad of emerging distance technologies. From online content in the form of e-books, podcasts, streamed videos, and satellite maps to participatory environments such as social networking, wikis, and alternate reality worlds, technology-based learning continues to open new learning pathways. At the same time, more instructors are sharing their course materials and teaching ideas globally, thereby expanding learning opportunities and resources. And the software used to deliver such online learning contents and experiences is increasingly available as open source.
Naturally, many questions surround such systems, sites, and resources. For example, how can instructors and learners in developed and developing countries take advantage of these trends? For what purpose will people share? How can these trends converge to address individual learner's needs worldwide?
Curt Bonk will address these issues while enticing participants to think of implications for their organizations, countries, and regions of the world as well as for themselves as leaders and learners.
Biographical Information
Curtis Bonk is a former CPA and corporate controller, who, after becoming sufficiently bored with that, completed his master's and Ph.D. degrees in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Curt is now Professor of Instructional Systems Technology and Adjunct in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. Curt also became a Senior Research Fellow with the Army Research Institute and later with the Advanced Distributed Learning Lab within the Department of Defense.
Among his recent awards, Curt has received the Most Outstanding Achievement by an Individual in Higher Education award from the U.S. Distance Learning Association, an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the CyberStar Award from the Indiana Information Technology Association, and a State of Indiana Award for Innovative Teaching in a Distance Education Program.
In recent years, Curt has presented more than 350 talks in many countries around the globe. He has more than 200 publications on topics such as online learning motivation and collaboration, blended learning, massive multiplayer gaming, virtual teaming, open source software, Wikibooks, blogging, and synchronous and asynchronous computer conferencing. His most recent book is entitled Empowering Online Learning. He has another in process entitled WE-ALL-LEARN: An Open Education Extension of the World is Flat. He is President of CourseShare and SurveyShare and can be contacted at his homepage: http://mypage.iu.edu/~cjbonk/
