Affected Clapping

“The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. The 2008 Horizon Report, the fifth in this annual series. The technologies featured in the 2008 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative applications.”

The Horizon Report, an exceptionally dry piece of writing totaling 30-odd pages, outlines six emerging technologies that they think will significantly impact the educational community. Let’s go through them one-by-one and see if we can’t make sense of them:

Grassroots Video (time to adoption: one year or less):

Absolutely. I was asked the other day to redo our school’s website, and one of my first ideas was to have students making video’s explaining various components of our model, instead of simply having bodies of text describing them.

Example #1: The Merlot Elixir

“The MERLOT ELIXR project is intended to develop and test new collaborations amongst faculty development centers and online resource repositories. The goal is to create innovative models for the development, sharing and use of discipline-oriented resources which illustrate exemplary teaching practices and which also support faculty with exemplary learning objects to help implement those practices with their students.”

Example #2: MIT Tech TV

Great example of using video and education in a genuinely productive way.

VERDICT: Ready for use. Already in use by many major universities, within a year the trend should begin filtering down to High Schools, Middle Schools, eventually becoming a part of elementary education.

Collaboration Webs (time to adoption: one year or less):

Definitely, though I prefer “cloud computing”. Basically, it’s an effort to get all the software you use daily (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, email, etc.) on the Internet, where you can access those programs from anywhere. Right now the main players are Google Docs and Zoho, an online collaboration suite of software apps (think Microsoft Office designed by people who don’t work for Microsoft). But it gets better. Because it’s on the Internet it’s a lot easier to share things. If you want to work on an article with me we can both work on it at the same time online. That’s the collaboration part of the “collaboration webs”.

Example #1:
DIVA (Digital Information Virtual Archive @ San Francisco)
Seems cool, but only offers accounts for members of the “higher” educational system (professors and students at colleges can register for free accounts, with free online storage space you can use to share media with colleagues). From the website: “DIVA is the Digital Information Virtual Archive. Using DIVA, faculty and researchers at higher education institutions can store, describe, organize, collaborate on, and securely share a wide variety of files and data with their colleagues, students, and the general public.”

Example #2:

Mobile Broadband (time to adoption: two to three years):

This technology isn’t here yet, at least not for educational purposes, and even if it were it would require a long (4-5 years?) incubation period. The reason is because it will be the next generation that grows up with mobile broadband. This is important when you think about introducing cell phones to the classroom, because of the socializing factor. My students don’t have cell phone etiquette. Most of the adults I work with don’t have cell phone etiquette. Introducing cell phones into any social learning environment is tricky, and requires a new relationship with these devices; I think that relationship will take a long time to develop, and I don’t think we can count on the technology being useful in the short-term. (PS: If we lived in Europe or Asia where 3G Broadband has been around for a couple years than this would be a different discussion.)

Example #1:Montclair State University.
“Initially, Montclair State University started requiring students to own mobile phones as a campus security measure. Now, mobile technology has become an integral component of project-based learning activities in several disciplines that involve blogging, polling, and video podcasts. Course groups are created that allow students to discuss study-related questions; the Office of Information Technology reports that since many of MSU’s students commute, mobiles are very effective tools for creating a feeling of connectedness with the university.” (I know that when I think cutting-edge, I think Montclair State baby!)

VERDICT: Sounds good, but that’s the easy part. Are college kids REALLY checking out their syllabus on their Sidekick?
There were two other examples; both illustrating how shallow mobile ed is right now. It’s an infant, and the US hasn’t figured out how to get kids to stop checking out their Myspace pages long enough to get work done on their phones.
SECOND OPINION: Cell phones are changing the world, particularly the 3rd world. In an interview for the BBC, pediatrician Joel Selanikio wrote:
“The question we should be asking ourselves, then, is not “how can we buy, and support, and supply electricity for, a laptop for every schoolteacher” (much less every schoolchild), but rather “what mobile software can we write that would really add value for a schoolteacher (or student, or health worker, or businessperson) and that could run on the computer they already have in their pocket?” (Courtesy of Jon Udell)

Data Mash-Ups (Horizon says: 2-3 years) (I say less than 24 months):

This could be the silver dagger. Mash-ups are exactly what they sound like, a bunch of information that come from everywhere surrounding a singular theme or idea and thrown together. The amount of “debris” that the data makes when it hits the proverbial wall depends on the user and what you’re trying to accomplish. Go to Oamose for one of the most interesting (and fairly useless) data mash-ups. When I talk about cutting-up textbooks and putting them back together, each student making their “own”, I’m talking about data mash-ups.

Examples? Not exactly. All of The Horizon Report’s examples involved mashing up information with GPS and/or photographic content to create a “rich” visual. This style of mashup, while visually attractive, is shortsighted.

VERDICT: The real potential for mash-ups is integrating meta-searching (searching multiple places, google, yahoo, ask.com, at once) into something like google docs, so that research can be automatically collaged into a works cited page or a “research>this” page. Imagine researching breast cancer, doing a metasearch, and having the results from the entire Internet exported into a Google doc, online, with an aggregated index. Now we’re talking mash-ups.

Collective Intelligence (time to adoption: four to five years):

Think Wikipedia, only “2.0”. The examples I’ve seen so far are redundant; visual fireworks covering up content you’d find in your average google search (which is probably why The Horizon Report says it’ll take 4-5 years). The question when it comes to Collective Intelligence is transparency: The Meta Technology, created by an MIT guy (see my post, “Who is Luca D’Angelo?”), tries to add some to our web experience. See also “10 Semantic Apps to Watch”

VERDICT: Not enough information. It certainly seems like the next natural evolution in “hive computing”, using the Internet to join up bunch of minds to solve problems, but a transparent platform that’s easy for anyone to use (not just computer programmers) is not yet here.

Social Operating Systems (time to adoption: four to five years):

“The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content. This simple conceptual shift promises profound implications for the academy (?), and for the ways in which we think about knowledge and learning.”

Uh, yeah. In English, Jon Udell does a terrific job explaining one approach to Social Operating Systems in a post entitled Hosted LifeBits.

Basically, everyone at birth gets storage online for their entire life. Everything goes there: your 3rd grade report on New Jersey Fauna, your 8th grade pictures at D.C., your 11th grade college applications. Instead of sending information directly to different places: Facebook, Myspace, College X, Hospital Y, we store in one central storage facility, then simply allow these different places access to different bits of information. This way we carry our information with us our entire lives, and it’s not scattered around the Internet depending on the “type” (images, social data, personal data, financial statements, medical statements, etc.) of information.

VERDICT: Undecided. Like Collective Intelligence, the progression makes sense, but it’s too early to tell whether this is merely a vacuous term for people working together, or really a new technology.  

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