Reflections on the Bosch Connected World IoT conference #BCW & #BXC in Tweetpics

As a professional adult educationalist with focus on “IoT in education”, I was fascinated to support the kids’ hackathon at the 2day Bosch IoT conference #BCX. I was highly impressed by the children cleverness, especially about their passion and their active participation towards programming. They loved to work with the calliope, a programmable board like a Raspberry Pi, but especially made for children.

The kids were immediately posing out questions and proposed their own ideas. My heart was full of “little hacking power” and I truly hope, to work more often with kids in the future. So, I´m absolutely curious being part of the Girls’ Day Team in April. Invited by an IT-company near Frankfurt, I am talking about my work and discussing some IoT-stuff with the young girls.

After the #BCX I started thinking about the differences in learning with kids and learning with adults. In my daily workshops with professionals, I experienced a different mindset. Professionals are usually used to gain knowledge by listening rather than actively tinkering or learning while doing modus, as the most dominant modus in our education system.

However, of course it is important to listen to great ideas or content of a specialist to get inspired, but it limits the capability to learn to one version. Modern learning approaches focus on human-centered, constructive and self-regulated learning formats. To clarify, these approaches put the learner and his individual learning experience at the center. Based on the individual needs, the content could be perceived while listening, looking, smelling, acting or touching and dominated by changes instead of just listening to talks. To put it in a nutshell: it´s about DOING and CREATING something new and to SHARE and COMBINE different perspectives in a completely new way. This forced a new attitude of learning which aims to share knowledge, co-create experiences and design ideas in interdisciplinary teams to solve human needs. We just discussed those inspiring ideas of “open learning” at the Open Science BarCamp last Monday at Wikimedia Deutschland.

But to do so, we really need to change our “learning-mindsets” to strengthen capacity building on collaboration, as also highlighted by Mr. Raschke, where he is talking about that important organizational changes:

Yes, I agree, we need a change:

“Clearly, transformation is needed. But unfortunately, there are no blueprints for us to follow. We will have to find our own way, sometimes by trial and error.“

Have a look at the whole story at this Bosch blogpost: http://blog.bosch-si.com/categories/internetofthings/2017/03/large-organizations-adapt-changing-world/

This transformation affects furthermore the learning and working environments of our future. IoT, Big Data, machine learning and data analytics are the drivers for new learning solutions. I´m researching about how it is influencing the way of learning. Just have a look at a new model of smart learning environment: https://sirkkafreigang.com/2016/10/08/iot-in-education-by-designing-smart-learning-environments/ 

Learning is changing. More than ever, life-long learning at the mobile workplace is becoming important. This affects the way of professional further education. Trainings and workshops aren´t sustainable, if the theories behind didn´t come into practice. And of course, in my opinion, every working environment should be designed for learning too.

I really LOVED this Hackathon atmosphere, especially the self-made graphics, lots of creative stuff like knead, Lego and many more things to tinker future IoT solutions.

Therefore, the most challenging thing in adult education is combining formal and informal learnings at the workplace to create an innovative learning space, which is facilitating learning FLOWs like smart learning environments.

Finally, here are my TweetPic-Highlights of the Bosch IoT Conference: https://twitter.com/i/moments/842485743847182336

It was a great conference with a bunch of valuable experiences in the way of IoT is becoming real in our everyday lives. Looking forward to join the next hackathon in 2018 as well.