Bryan Alexander's: Emerging technologies for teaching and learning: a tour of the 2010 horizon

Emerging technologies

for teaching and

learning: touring the

2010 horizon

SUNY Learning Network - February 2010

One problem: How does academia tend to apprehend emerging technologies?

• Panic/siege mode

• Vendors

• Futurism methods

• Networks, online and off-

• Informal curricula

How does academia tend to apprehend emerging technologies?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

Five responses

• Take advantage of preexisting projects and services

• DIY

• Literacy: new media

• Scan influence

• Curriculum(pagedooley, Flickr)

One theoretical question

What about technological determinism?

“In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology.”

-Nardi and O’Day, 1998, 1999

Alternatively:

“Out of the dialectical exchange between the media-technological ‘base’ and the discursive ‘superstructure’ arise conflicts and tensions that sooner or late result in transformations at the level of media…”

-Friedrich Kittler, 1999

How do information technologies change?

Janet Murray’s two-step argument1.Theater->film2.Printed page->Web

(Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT, 1997.)

The perception of user degradation:

“[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. …”

How do information technologies change?

“…The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth…”

“… they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

-Plato, Phaedrus (370 or so BCE)Jowett translation

We see information overload:

“We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire…”

How do information technologies change?

“…Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not.”

-Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des sçavans sur les principaux ouvrages des

auteurs (Paris, 1685)

Change the format: the humble marginal annotation

• Glossators (FranciscusAccursius, Denis Godefroi)

• Then the Geneva Bible

How do information technologies change?

New becomes old

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner - second edition, 1817

(Virginia e-text)

Generate new content types

Another response to overload

• Cyclopedia(Ephraim Chambers, 1728)

• Encyclopedie (1751-1772)

Re-see the past

Dr. Johnson the blogger:

“Of other parts of life, memory can give some account; at some hours I have been gay, and at others serious; I have sometimes mingled in conversation, and sometimes meditated in solitude; one day has been spent in consulting the ancient sages, and another in writing Adventurers.”

– Adventurer #137 (February 26, 1754)

Seeing the future

• Extrapolation

• Delphi

• Scenarios

• Futures market

• Environmental scan

Principles of Forecasting (2001) (http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/methodologytree.html)

Apprehending the futures

Extrapolation

iPhone Apps Store downloads

1. April 2009 1.0 billion

2. July 2009 1.5 billion

3. Sept 2009 2.0 billion

-works with data sources

-can lead to more data-gathering, metrics

Limitations

• Trend lines vary

• Doesn’t account for new things

• The Black Swan (Taleb, 2007)

Delphi

• Assemble experts

• Probe for opinions

• Rank and distill ideas

• Reiterate

Example: the Horizon Report

• “[A] comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, blogs, and interviews

• [We] discussed existing applications and brainstormed new ones.

• A key criterion was the potential relevance of the topics to teaching, learning, research, and creative expression.

• Iteration, ranking, reiteration, reranking”

Limitations

• Groupthink

• Information compression

• The Black Swan

Scenarios Stories about futures

• Event and response

• Creativity

• Roles and times

• Emergent practices and patterns

Limitations

• Culture

• Resources

• The Black Swan

Futures marketFeatures• Propositions in time

• Shares to be traded

Advantages• Continuous

• Distributed feedback

• Affordances of play

Will 25 or more institutions be participating in Flickr’s Creative

Commons project by March 26, 2009?

Limitations

• Quantitative threshold

• Physical proximity

• Market metaphor

• The Black Swan

Scanning

• Environmental scanning

• Pattern recognition

Crowdsourcing

Different levels

• Social network

• Crowd computing

• Iterated resource feeds

Emergent future: one revolution

Mobile devices• Phone, WiFi, Bluetooth• Portability

Or ubicomp:• Mark Weiser, 1988ff• Ex: "The Computer for the

Twenty-First Century" (1991)

• “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

What it means, top-level

“A device ecology”

-Petra Wentzel, "Wireless All the Way: Users’ Feedback on Education through Online PDAs"

(presentation at the EDUCAUSE annual conferenceAnaheim, Calif., November 7,

2003).

What do we already use and know?

• Laptops• Mp3 players• Clickers • Netbooks• Machines with IP

addresses• Cameras (through

Flip)

• Tablet PCs• Palm Pilot• Pocket PC

Ecosystem model

• Types of wireless

• Multiple, connected devices

• Web services

Example: iPhone

Example: Kindle Utah State Universityhttp://blogs.nitle.org/let/2009/10/0

9/anatomy-on-the-iphone/

Evolving practices and issues

• Digital layer over spaces

• Expanded media consumption and capture

• Uneven uptake

• Social connectors

• Multitasking

Small groups

Attention index

On/off

Evolving pedagogies

In class

• Quick polling and associated activities

• Live search

• Backchannel

Out of class:

• Content delivery

• Information and media capture

• Backchannel

Live search and content access

“Students who have superb search skills have introduced useful material or questions into discussion. In a few cases, I’ve had students find pertinent archival video in response to the drift of the conversation which I’ve then put up on the classroom projector.”

-professor Tim Burke, Swarthmore College

http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2009/05/06/the-laptop-in-the-classroom/

Increased amount and variety of discussion

(for better and for worse)

• Chat, Twitter

Backchannel

(dotguy_az)

Smartphones

Uses out of class:

1. Content delivery

2. Social interaction

3. Content capture

“The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world. In 2020, while "one laptop per child" and other initiatives to bring networked digital communications to everyone are successful on many levels, the mobile phone—now with significant computing power—is the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world, providing information in a portable, well-connected form at a relatively low price.”

Can we apply clicker pedagogies to smartphones?

In class: assessment vs constructivist approaches

Pedagogical themes

• Anonymity yet universality

• Aimed at large size class, often

Can we apply clicker pedagogies to smartphones?

Clickers for questions

• Binary or multiple

• Student-generated

Using results

• Hide, reveal, or share?

• Snap poll

• Discussion generating

Apps for .edu

• iPhone in the lead

• Campus life apps

• Development kits and forks

Smartpens• Text scanning

(OCR)

• Audio recording

• Web service

Michael Weschhttp://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=206

Uses in class• Discussion

recordings

• Annotation

• Grading (UQ)

• “Pencasting”

Professor Shawn Evans,.Washington and Lee University

October 2009;http://www.livescribe.com/

ebook readers

Advantages

• Cost savings per book

• Weight savings

• Subscription updates

• Dictionary

• Public domain by cable

Ebook reader constraints

• Limitations of device interfaces

• Device cost

• Ebook limitations: DRM, availability, quality

• Annotation issues

Netbooks continue

Tablets 2.0

Likely uses

From Tablet 1.0:• drawing (art)• drawing (math)• non-Latin characters

foreign languagesSince 1.0:• Multimedia

consumption• Appeal of

touchscreen

Emerging stuff for 2010

AR moves into a boom?

Rotterdam Market Hall;

Mondrian;

Abbey Road;

http://layar.com/layar-30-launched-5-cases-to-show-the-power-of-the-platform/

Emerging stuff for 2010

Beyond the mouse

http://blogs.nitle.org/archive/2008/07/22/move_over_mouse_gartner/

"For all its faults, the keyboard will remain the primary text input device. Nothing is easily going to replace it," he said. "But the idea of a keyboard with a mouse as a control interface is breaking down."

Web 2.0 in 2009

-growing in scale

-growing practices

(after Schmelling, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/7/30schmelling.html)

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)

• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US…

• Total internet audience 188.9 million

eMarketer (May 2008)

o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)

o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

David Sifry, September 2008; Juan Coleon the Colbert Report (http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/)

Universal McCann (March 2008)

• 184 million worldwide have started a blog | 26.4 US

• 346 million read blogs | 60.3 US

• 77% of active Internet users read blogs

David Sifry, September 2008; ScienceBlogs

(http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/)

(first stat, Flickr blog, November 2008http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/11/03/3-billion/;Second stat, Flickr CC search page, March 2009,http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ )

Social images are large

• 3 billion+ photos in Flickr

• 4,230,432 - 32,170,657 shareable

• LinkedIn: 30 million users claimed

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/14/as-the-economy-sours-linkedins-popularity-grows/

(eMarketer, March 2009; Scott Sigler, 2008)

“There are currently 2,807,974 articles in the English Wikipedia.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia , March 2009)

YouTube nearly youbiquitous

Senate and House channels, January 2009http://www.physorg.com/news151139956.html

Facebook growth

400 million users (February 2010, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics )

Realtime search

• Emerging market

• Not always useful

• No clear leader

Practices mainstreams: data mashups, Web 2.0 as platform

• Open APIs

• Access to data

• “Mashup”

(AccessCeramics project, Lewis and Clark College)

• Programming staff

• Perceived recognition

24 hours of Twitter’s #SLNSOLSUMMIT

Practice: tag clouds

Folksonomies mainstreamed

Classic forms developing

Diigo

Practices: years of edublogging

Selected, documented practices:

• Publish syllabus

• Publish student papers

• Discussion

• Journaling

• Project blogs

• Public scholarship

• Creative writing

• Distributed seminars

• Campus organizations

• Prospective students

• Library collections

• Alumni relations

• Project management

• Liveblogging

External hosting reexamined

The specter of WikipediaWikipedia remains

• growth and pedagogies

Web 2.0 content distribution models:

Rutgers;University of Mary

Washington;http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/podcast/

Beyond the classroom

• accessCeramics, Lewis and Clark College

• 1000 images, February 2009 (http://accessceramics.blogspot.com/2009/02/today-is-big-milestone-as-weve-reached.html)

PLE vs LMS

• Self-created

• Consumer products

• Personalization

• Small pieces, loosely joined

• Variable levels of presence

Beyond the students:Professional developmentReputation growth

New forms

River of news wars: Twitter vs Facebook vs Buzz

New… things

• Google Wave, SAP

Your turn, constructivistically

What else are you seeing?

• Organizing stuff in constructive and useful way

• What are the ways these tools improve teaching and learning?

• Keeping up with next.gen

More:

• Understand affordances

Your turn, constructivistically

What else are you seeing?

• Organizing stuff in constructive and useful way

• What are the ways these tools improve teaching and learning?

• Keeping up with next.gen

How are you finding this stuff out?

Citations

• iCub, http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2009/09/robot-children-toddle-out-of-the-uncanny-valley.html

• Principles of Forecasting chart, http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/methodologytree.html

• accessCeramics, Lewis and Clark, http://accessceramics.org/

• Nassim Taleb, http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

• Black Swans: Field Museum Library, http://www.flickr.com/photos/field_museum_library/3405475664/; gnuckx cc0, http://www.flickr.com/photos/34409164@N06/3209135920/

• Great California Shakeout, http://www.shakeout.org/media/index.html

More citations

• NITLE Prediction Markets, http://markets.nitle.org/

• Cat and kitten, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanalexander

• Bing’s Twitter search, http://www.bing.com/twitter

• Episilon Aurigae crowdsourcing, http://mysite.du.edu/~rstencel/epsaurnews.htm

• Horizon Report 2010 wiki, http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org/

• “Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality”, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 3 (May/June 2009): 12–29. http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/ApprehendingtheFutureEmergingT/171774. More sources there.

The ultimate links

NITLEhttp://nitle.org

Our bloghttp://blogs.nitle.org/

NITLE prediction markets gamehttp://markets.nitle.org/

Bryan on Twitterhttp://twitter.com/BryanAlexander

The ultimate links

Techne

http://blogs.nitle.org/

Bryan on Twitter

http://twitter.com

/BryanAlexander

The ultimate links

NITLE prediction markets game

http://markets.nitle.org/

NITLE

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