The future of academic certification: universities, MOOCs, aggregators, and peer reputation

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This morning I gave the opening keynote at the Virtual Universities: Impact on Accounting Education Thought Leadership forum in Adelaide, organized by the Centre of Accounting, Governance and Sustainability at University of South Australia and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia. The audience was an invitation-only group of the most senior accounting academics and industry practitioners in the country.

My keynote was on the broad global context for the current changes in education. After looking at major technological, social and structural changes, the future of work, and shifts in learning, I turned to the role of certification and credentials.

The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has helped bring into focus that universities have to date always bundled together three things:
– Education;
– Certification; and
– Networking.

The rise of Open Courseware and more recently services such as Coursera, Udacity and edX has now broken out (part of) the education piece.
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Analysis: US, Australia social network usage flat, New Zealand now the world’s biggest user of social networks?

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On February 13 I will speak at Air New Zealand’s Social Media Breakfast in Auckland, together with Teddy Goff, Obama’s Digital Director, with an expected audience of close to 1,000.

Air New Zealand ran its first Social Media Breakfast in July last year with Randi Zuckerberg as key speaker, with the exceptional success of the event leading the airline to continue the series with the second breakfast next week. While Air New Zealand is the 36th largest airline in the world, it ranks 6th in its social media presence.

In preparing for the event I have been looking at data on New Zealand’s usage of social media. I was surprised to find that there is a fair chance that New Zealand has the highest rate of social network usage in the world.

Globalsocialmedia_Dec12

The chart above shows a summary of data from Nielsen on the time spent per month on social networks in a variety of countries around the world.
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How much is the right amount to tweet?

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Of the many issues when engaging on social media, one of the most central is how much to post.

If you don’t post enough, you’re barely visible. If you post too much, you annoy people who are likely to unfollow you, and you make any individual post far less likely to be seen or acted on.

Last week I was the host for #crowdchat, my first ever Twitter chat. I had avoided doing Twitter chats before, as it would deluge my followers with tweets. However I decided to do it, both to support Crowdsourcing Week, which I am on the advisory board for, and also as an experiment. No-one objected, but clearly only a small minority of my followers were engaged in the conversation.
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Strategic overview of AHT Group: sharing our ventures, projects, and enablers

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I believe that open business is an important and valuable foundation for success today. We actively share our activities and priorities on an ongoing basis, and intend to share considerably more over time.

Two years ago I shared our AHT Group Business Model Overview and a year later I published our 2012 Priorities, and found sharing these useful for ourselves and for others.

To help me and our team to strategize and act effectively in 2013 and beyond, I have created an overview that describes the activities, projects, and current priorities across AHT Group, which currently comprises Advanced Human Technologies, Future Exploration Network, and The Insight Exchange.

The document does not explain the relationship between the companies or the logic of our business models. I will extend this overview soon with an updated visualization of our business model.

Below is our group Strategic Overview as of January 2013, with a brief explanation of each of the major elements. We will provide more detail on the ventures, business models, and lessons learned during this year.

AHTGroupStrategicOverview_Jan13
Click on image to see full size pdf

Description of the elements of the Strategic Overview:
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How to prepare for the jobs of the future: Learning, Love, Collaboration, Design

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A little while back I was interviewed for a cover story on the jobs of the future for the Careers section of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Here are the sections of the article that drew on my thoughts:

According to the futurist Ross Dawson, the world of work has always required employees to be on the front foot.

“Jobs have always disappeared and others come up,” he says. “It’s just that the pace of change has become far faster than ever before.”

Dawson say there are two overarching issues to consider when predicting which jobs will survive the next change to the work world: remote work and automation.

Employees with an eye to the future should ask themselves, “Is it is possible this work could be automated?” and “Is it possible that this work could be done by somebody else somewhere else in the world?”, he says.

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The isomorphism of inside and outside – why exploring our minds and the world are the same

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On my recent holiday I was in extraordinarily beautiful surroundings, in the Jervis Bay area of Australia’s Eastern coast.

Being in that environment helped me to recall my thoughts from when I was much younger, when it struck me that the world inside us and the world outside are isomorphic: they have exactly the same shape and structure.

We can learn about our minds and the richness of who we are by studying and exploring the world around us, particularly the natural world.

Equally, we can grow to understand the external world by delving into the unlimited richness of our minds. There is as much to discover within us as there is in the entire universe around us.
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Today show: when will we entrust child care to robots?

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I was in Sydney over New Year (nowhere better to celebrate it!) before heading off for holidays, and was invited onto the Today national breakfast program to talk about some of the themes from my 2013 and Beyond Appearing and Disappearing framework.

Click on the image below to view a video of the segment.

TodayShow010113

One of the ideas they wanted to talk about was “robo-nannies”. We originally dreamed of robots that could do more than help with manufacturing and mechanical processes, and we are now on the verge of robots being engaged in what we consider very human functions. However there are a number of elements required before we entrust our children to robotic nannies.
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A change of tack for Trends in the Living Networks

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Happy New Year! I wish you a most wonderful year ahead. I for one am very, very excited about what 2013 holds.

I’m just back from close to three weeks holiday over Christmas and New Year, including some wonderful time on the beach and among the kangaroos in Jervis Bay.

As always after a holiday I have a broader perspective on where I am and what I am doing. The time was ripe for other reasons too, but I realized while I was away that it is time for me approach this blog a little differently than I have.

It is a constant struggle to keep the blog active given all my other activities and commitments, but it is still a high priority so I will do what I can to keep it alive and flourishing.

I will continue to share as I can snippets of ideas from my speaking and media appearances, as well as particularly relevant content that illuminates key trends in how the networks are coming to life.

However there are a number of other ways I will also intend to use this blog, including:
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10 most popular blog posts on the living networks of 2012

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I have just had a look at the most popular posts this year on my blog, and very interestingly almost all of the top dozen were written before this year, with perennials like the launches of our Web 2.0 Framework, Social Media Strategy Framework, Trend Map to 2050, and Newspaper Extinction Timeline still attracting consistent very healthy traffic.

Below are the most popular posts written this year on my blog. I will share the list of all-time favorites another time.

1. Which countries have the most Twitter users per capita?
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New framework: 2013 and beyond – What will appear and disappear in our lives

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As a futurist, the end of the year means it is once again time to release a structured look at the future.

As every year, at Future Exploration Network we are using a substantially different format from our most other annual frameworks, 12 Themes for 2012 and Zeitgeist 2011.

This year we are focusing on what will appear and disappear in our everyday lives next year and beyond. We are once again collaborating with Richard Watson of NowandNext.com, following the extensive work we’ve done together in the past, notably on the famous ‘London tube map’ 2007+ Trend Blend (the original trendsetter for all the other city underground trend maps over the last years), 2008+ Trend Blend, and our highly popular Extinction Timeline.

As always the framework is released on a Creative Commons license so please feel free to download and share.

2013Trends
Click on the image for the full-size framework
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