Following are some thoughts based on cognitive processing theories:

My thoughts on ‘Thought Leadership’, especially in the context of education.

Leadership is about influencing others and in the case of Thought Leadership in Education, I believe, it is about influencing others with your ideas of constitutes good education.

This thinking has direct bearing on me because I am keen on influencing others about how the information technology revolution has placed us in the midst of a paradigm shift, just like advent of language, writing and printing-press had earlier done, that requires us to reconsider what is relevant education and how it should be imparted and learnt.

Thought leadership in education need not be coercive leadership or a leadership that influences others through economic inducement rather, in my view, thought leadership has much to borrow from ‘soft power’.

The NextGen Learning Platforms should facilitate – Curation, Contextualization, Collective Wisdom, Conversations and Personalization.

Ideally the platform should have these features built-in, but there are always new third-party tools coming up that perform these functions better. Hence, either the platform should have the capability to integrate new third-party tools.

Even without a learning platform that provides these features, learner can use use tools like Diigo and features like ‘hashtag’ collation and sharing to bring coherence in a learning experience. For example, I could use the StickyNote or Annotation feature of Diigo, add a hashtag to my note/annotation, and then share the Diigo link with my fellow learners.

I am not sure if Diigo StickyNotes are crawled by Google, if they are then curation for a particular course could be based simply on hashtags.

Economics is better defined as a study of incentives that guide or determine human behaviour. Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, laid down the foundation of behavioural economics. Elinor Ostrom work on Social Commons got her a Nobel. Behavioural Economics and Social Commons view is the new direction economics is taking and both these trends can also be extrapolated to the field of education. Social Commons in the field of education include Wiki, MIT-OCW and initiatives like Academic Earth.