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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