By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Education is an economic, political and social development and this idea and the problems this results in is tackled by research from Shahrzad Ardavani. 25% university students leave Iran: lack of jobs, superior research options, avoiding military service, candidates for suitable jobs in governments have to meet many non-professional related factors. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. When the BBC reported on the French/US college named '42', which is build around the idea of peer learning, without the interference of teachers. This new educational initiative (and yes, I do choose 'educational' to be in the description) was once again propagated as a unique solution to education. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Fabulous critical talk on MOOCs by Janesh Sanzgiri. In 2013 MOOCs were suggested as the silicon valley salvation of education, including the developing world. But the reality is that most MOOC participants are not the  underprivileged class, not really open anymore (movement to pay for assessment and so on). More importantly the current research is heavily skewed to Northern regions. The voice of the global south is being missed in research. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme shared thoughts about informal mobile learning in cities, embedding her talk in the contemporary fabric of society with all it’s changes. A really refreshing talk with lots of knowledge and useful tech aspects. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Mike Sharples gives a follow-up talk on educational technology, now with a strong focus on contemporary options. The previous talk covered EdTech from 1950-2010 and this talk looks at contemporary technology and pedagogy related to edTech. A link to the full slide deck can be found at the end of this blogpost. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. How has the movement of cMOOC/xMOOCs impacted informal learning. This talk is on the emergence of MOOCs and their dominant forms, as well as suggest some new paradigms for MOOC learning (not new theories, but important movements and things that are happening and influence how we understand learning in the MOOC domain). Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. PRiME on posthumanism and the ethics of resilience by David Roden. The talk has two aims: views on posthumanism (situating his own position), and explore concepts on where resilience fits in with posthumanism. Wrote a book on posthuman life published in 2014. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Today I have the pleasure of attending the Posthuman Resilience in Major Emergencies (PRiME) networking event organised by the OU, UK. This is definitely a timely event as it launches a constructive idea exchange with regard to what we need to think about to enable societies to be resilient in case of major emergencies. Read more...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. A nice overview of early educational technology presented by Mike Sharples, the pedagogical lead of FutureLearn and longtime EdTech researcher. The focus of this talk is first on technology for education, followed by zooming in on the learning bit of the EdTech, and at the end a brief look at evaluating learning. Read more...