i.shui.tech

In January, the New Media Consortium published its annual report on key emerging learning technologies, The Horizon Report. I’m a bit late reading it and it is by no means new news, but for those educators looking for summer reads, this should be at the top of the list.

A distillation of trends, the report list two major themes each for three time frames: one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. Some of my thoughts on each:

1. One year or less: Grassroots Video. Basically, anyone can make and share videos today, with or without a computer. The barriers are dropping faster than they did for digital photographs. So the next step for the rest of us? Contribute. You and your students have no excuse not to be contributing to the emergence of video information. Every community should be creating video clips to document history and place. You may think no one is interested in your little corner of the world, but with the right tags, someone will find it and use it.
2. One year or less: Collaborative Webs. You have no reason not to use the web to collaborate (with the possible exception of a paranoid IT staff).  Start document collaboration in Google Docs. If you need the final version in Word, then one person can export it when all is done. Worried about losing your docs when they are kept online? Believe me, the hard disk on your computer will crash first.
3. Two to three years: Mobile Broadband. Yes, the iPhone as a trend setter is cliche’. But it’s true. The bottleneck in everyone moving to mobile broadband is not devices, but rather cell phone companies. As long as we pay for the added service, fewer people will see any real reason to use mobile applications. But when mobile broadband comes automatically with your service, the devices will change and the way we use, and our students use, the web will change. Don’t forget the mantra: bring learning to where your students are. And no, I don’t own an iPhone. Yet.
4. Two to three years: Data mashups. Data mashups are the combination of digital data into a unified tool. Much of what we’ve seen so far are Google Map mashups, combining geo data with other data, such as locations of people or census data. It used to take lots of programming to make this happen. This is changing rapidly, which web tools coming quickly on board to allow less-technically inclined people to view where data intersect. The educational impact of this is enormous.  I highly recommend encouraging tech-savvy students to explore this immediately.
5. Four to five years: Collective Intelligence. The billions of web pages, blog posts, tags, and other minutia of information of the web is about to find it’s way into coherent building blocks of information. Projects are busy working at ways to tag information that came before personal tags. Bots are tagging other objects with information. And the software is evolving to help us make sense of it all. Google and Amazon to this already to suggest products and ads for you. What if, as a high school teacher, you could take every assignment a student has completed in their school history and create a development portfolio of as they begin a new academic year. Sort of like going back in time to talk to every teacher a student has ever had. Wishful thinking? Start digitizing student portfolios now. Your students will never forgive you in five years if you don’t.
6. Four to five years: Social Operating Systems. Your desktop (the physical one) is like your desktop (the virtual one). It’s a private space you keep your stuff. But you also work in your virtual one, unlike most of your physical work. We come to schools and offices primarily because we need to work together: collaboration and relationship building. But what happens when your virtual workspace becomes as collaborative and an open venue for relationship building as your physical one? What happens when your virtual space becomes infused with all of the data we usually receive from others because we are actively collaborating with them? This is not about replacing our physical relationships, but rather intelligently enhancing our current work in the virtual world. It will literally be a bug in your ear that tells you what you need to know when you need it. Imagine an assistant Googling for you while you work and handing you tidbits of information relevant to what you are working on. And because of collective intelligence, we are closer to this than you may realize. It’s been the stuff of science fiction.

~ by Quyen on June 13, 2008. Tagged: education, future, horizon report, web2.0