June 2015

  • Education Moonshot Summit

    This should be fun (and interesting). I’ll be heading to Amsterdam on July 21st for Google EDU’s Moonshot Summit. This event aims to bring “together top innovators from around the globe to design moonshot projects that will be launched in the Fall”. Attendees were selected, we are told, because of our “experience and belief that education…

    The last Saturn V launch carried the Skylab space station to low Earth orbit in place of the third stage (Wikipedia/public domain)
  • Choose your own adventure

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    This is my presentation at the Online Learning Summit in London on 16 June 2015. I asked participants to choose between a set of four questions: Question #1: Why are learning, education and training so impervious to change? Number two is the Extinction Event question: It’s 2025. Your organization ceased to exist in 2020.  What happened? What…

    Wet Times Square (Kenny Louie/flickr.com)
  • Can analysis and critical thinking be taught online in the humanitarian context?

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    This is my presentation at the First International Forum on Humanitarian Online Training (IFHOLT) organized by the University of Geneva on 12 June 2015. I describe some early findings from research and practice that aim to go beyond “click-through” e-learning that stops at knowledge transmission. Such transmissive approaches replicate traditional training methods prevalent in the humanitarian context, but are…

    All the way down (Amancay Maahs/flickr.com)
  • Experience and blended learning: two heads of the humanitarian training chimera

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    Experience is the best teacher, we say. This is a testament to our lack of applicable quality standards for training and its professionalization, our inability to act on what has consequently become the fairly empty mantra of 70-20-10, and the blinders that keep the economics (low-volume, high-cost face-to-face training with no measurable outcomes pays the…

    Peter Paul Rubens. From 1577 to 1640. Antwerp. Medusa's head. KHM Vienna.
  • The Design of a Learning System to Teach Analysis and Critical Thinking for Humanitarians

    My presentation at the First International Forum on Humanitarian Online Training (IFHOLT) hosted by the University of Geneva on 12 June 2015. A more detailed version of this presentation is available here.

    Reda Sadki presents about digital humanitarian learning and leadership
  • Blame it on Plato

    Even as computer-mediated communication is now embedded into nearly every aspect of life, the sentiment persists that written and therefore distance communication is intrinsically inferior. Here is the very interesting introduction from Andrew Feenberg’s classic article – written in the late 1980s – calling into question the presumption of superiority in the face-to-face encounter: In our culture the…

    Marble statue of the ancient greek philosopher Plato (Source: alienaxioms.com)