Thoughts of Richard C. Close

After over 10 years of research the Global Learning Framework™ is being launched as a six part course outside of the authority of academia. Back in 1998 when I was launching eLearning companies, ghost writing analysts papers on LMSs and running NYC technology center I had serious doubts about the theories and methods of Adult Learning and corporate learning technologies and methods. It was a time of the birth of network technology. Learning was no longer to be the trickle-down forced-indexed based drill-and-kill we were taught.   The human race had finally invented a way to for globally collaboration (learning) to take place in a way that completely bypassed corporate, academic and authoritarian structures. As jumpstart speaker in the 1998 international eLearning conference I coined the phrase “Search Learning” that pointed out that the Web is not indexed like text a book and that both curriculum design and learning technology will have to change into a way humans n...

By Richard C. Close BOX. Imagine a champion football team that is highly trained and ready. The coach gets them psyched up in the locker room. As they run out onto the field, they hear 50,000 people cheering. However, when they arrive on the field, there are no goals. Unthinkable in sports and yet we build many social change programs and country education systems like this all the time. Academia claims it wants to transform poverty; however it must transform core principles in how it views experiential learning and evaluates what success means to the student. What must really change? Negative culture values as well as bad corporate ethics run deep into individual characters and institutions. In addition, hate, abuse and institutional racism or classism sometimes infects us in subtler forms such as: favoritism, better grades or exclusive opportunities. A tall good looking white female or very handsome African will have an easier time opening doors for sales or climbing ...

by Richard C. Close It has been a work in progress since 2010 however the foundational structure for the Global Learning Framework is about complete. It became aparent that current Adult Learning theory is so vague and dated that I needed to identify how learn collaboratively and how that impacts our development of the Internets Global Learning Narrative. We also need education theory and methods to be the same things. Something an educator or volunteer can keep in the back of their mind while tutoring or during curriculum design, I am modeling the course for the Global Learning Framework to be in five lessons. These have been posted on Slide share as works in progress and by summer's end will be an eLearning course and workbook. In addition I will do a series of recorded webinars within the Global Education Conference environment. Please feel free to share this material with collegues with the understadning it is copyrighted. Global Learning Framework is the copyright and...

Edmodo - Africa Aqua Farming Project Based Learning The following YouTube is a walkthrough of course that is sort of like gaming. Unlike typical eLearning courses were all content and rules are self-contain in the lesson. This course uses my methods of the Global Learning Framework to turn making a business plan for a fish farm into a Internet search for local resources in order to build a real Fish Farm business plan. This is model and not the finished course. My gratitude to the South African NGO www.sarinessa.org for permission to use their images and content. Below is the draft of the concept course.

While doing analysis for Full Sail University graduate course it made me reflect on the 20 year in the learning business and in particular all the flaws of LMS strategies we often talked about in the back rooms. It is amazing that 15 years later how we are still living with authoritarian pedagogy of the LMS and yet there is some light in the dark tunnel with Social Learning Systems. LMSs are very basic to understand when we know were they came from and why pedagogy is something educator applies to them but they were not designed to do. Only with new LMSs like Edmodo (that in many way I would not classify as LMS.) A Ning, Mightlybell, Twitter and Tumblr are systems that manage how we learn. Facebook is a Learning System. So lets call the new bread Social Learning Systems, a place were distributive intelligence and out of the box global collaborative lives. Our first hint is that is that Social Learning Systems the learner is in control through their Personal Learning Network. They...