SLN SOLsummit 2010 http://slnsolsummit2010.edublogs.org February 25, 2010 Bryan Alexander, Director of Research, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. Emerging technologies for teaching and learning: a tour of the 2010 horizon How is the landscape for teaching and learning with technology changing this year? We begin with an overview of current methods for apprehending emergent technologies, including Delphi, futures markets, networks, and scenarios. Drawing on those methods we identify a series of emerging trends, from interface changes to open content to gaming. Next we delve into several high-impact fields. Social media has already transformed the general cybercultural world, and is reshaping the academy. Mobile devices have begun to revolutionize many levels of our technological interactions. I research and develop programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts colleges. My specialties include digital writing, weblogs, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, wireless culture and teaching, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. I contribute to a series of weblogs, including NITLE Tech News, MANE IT leaders, and Smartmobs, when not creating digital learning objects (like Gormenghast). I’ve taught English and information technology studies at the University of Michigan and Centenary College. http://blogs.nitle.org/let http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander http://www.slideshare.net/BryanAlexander

1. Emerging
technologies
for
teaching and
learning:
touring the
2010 horizon
SUNY Learning Network - February 2010

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

3. How does academia tend to apprehend
emerging technologies?
• Panic/siege mode
• Vendors
• Futurism methods
• Networks, online
and off-
• Informal curricula
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

4. Five responses
• Take advantage of
preexisting projects and
services
• DIY
• Literacy: new media
• Scan influence
• Curriculum
(pagedooley, Flickr)

5. 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

6. 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

7. How do information technologies change?
Janet Murray’s two-step
argument
1.Theater->film
2.Printed page->Web
(Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT, 1997.)

8. How do information technologies
change?
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. …”

9. “…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…”

10. “… 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

11. How do information technologies
change?
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…”

12. “…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)

13. How do information technologies
change?
Change the format:
the humble
marginal
annotation
• Glossators
(Franciscus
Accursius, Denis
Godefroi)
• Then the Geneva
Bible

14. New becomes old
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient
Mariner - second edition, 1817
(Virginia e-text)

15. Generate new content types
Another response to overload
• Cyclopedia
(Ephraim
Chambers, 1728)
• Encyclopedie (1751-
1772)

16. 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)

17. Seeing the future
• Extrapolation
• Delphi
• Scenarios
• Futures market
• Environmental
scan

18. Apprehending the futures
Principles of Forecasting (2001)
(http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/methodologytree.html)

19. 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

20. Limitations
• Trend lines vary
• Doesn’t account
for new things
• The Black Swan
(Taleb, 2007)

21. Delphi
• Assemble
experts
• Probe for
opinions
• Rank and distill
ideas
• Reiterate

22. 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”

23. Limitations
• Groupthink
• Information
compression
• The Black Swan

24. Scenarios
Stories about futures • Roles and times
• Event and response • Emergent practices and
• Creativity patterns

25. Limitations
• Culture
• Resources
• The Black
Swan

26. Futures market
Features Advantages
• Propositions in time • Continuous
• Shares to be traded • Distributed feedback
• Affordances of play

27. Will 25 or more institutions be
participating in Flickr’s Creative
Commons project by March 26, 2009?

28. Limitations
• Quantitative
threshold
• Physical proximity
• Market metaphor
• The Black Swan

29. Scanning
• Environmental
scanning
• Pattern
recognition

30. Crowdsourcing
Different levels • Crowd computing
• Social network • Iterated resource feeds

31. Emergent future: one revolution
Mobile devices Or ubicomp:
• Phone, WiFi, Bluetooth • Mark Weiser, 1988ff
• Portability • 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.”

32. 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).

33. What do we already use
and know?
• Laptops
• Mp3 players
• Clickers
• Netbooks
• Machines with IP
addresses • Tablet PCs
• Cameras (through • Palm Pilot
Flip) • Pocket PC

34. Ecosystem model
• Types of wireless
• Multiple,
connected devices
• Web services
Example: iPhone
Utah State University
Example: Kindle http://blogs.nitle.org/let/2009/10/0
9/anatomy-on-the-iphone/

35. Evolving practices and issues
• Digital layer • Social
over spaces connectors
• Expanded media • Multitasking
consumption  Small groups
and capture  Attention index
• Uneven uptake  On/off

36. Evolving pedagogies
In class Out of class:
• Quick polling • Content delivery
and associated • Information and
activities media capture
• Live search • Backchannel
• Backchannel

37. 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/2009/05/0
6/the-laptop-in-the-classroom/

38. Backchannel
Increased
amount and
variety of
discussion
(for better and
for worse)
• Chat, Twitter
(dotguy_az)

39. Smartphones
Uses out of
class:
1. Content
delivery
2. Social
interaction
3. Content
capture

40. “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.”

41. Can we apply clicker pedagogies to
smartphones?
In class: assessment vs
constructivist
approaches
Pedagogical themes
• Anonymity yet
universality
• Aimed at large size
class, often

42. 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

43. Apps for .edu
• iPhone in the lead
• Campus life apps
• Development kits and forks

44. Smartpens
• Text scanning
(OCR)
• Audio recording
• Web service
Michael Wesch
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=206

45. Uses in class
• Discussion
recordings
• Annotation
• Grading (UQ)
• “Pencasting”
Professor Shawn Evans,.
Washington and Lee University
October 2009;
http://www.livescribe.com/

46. ebook readers

47. Advantages
• Cost savings per book
• Weight savings
• Subscription updates
• Dictionary
• Public domain by cable

48. Ebook reader constraints
• Limitations of device interfaces
• Device cost
• Ebook limitations: DRM, availability,
quality
• Annotation issues

49. Netbooks continue

50. Tablets 2.0

51. Likely uses
From Tablet 1.0:
• drawing (art)
• drawing (math)
• non-Latin characters
foreign languages
Since 1.0:
• Multimedia
consumption
• Appeal of
touchscreen

52. Emerging stuff for
2010
AR moves into a
boom?

53. Rotterdam Market Hall;
Mondrian;
Abbey Road;
http://layar.com/layar-30-launched-
5-cases-to-show-the-power-
of-the-platform/

54. Emerging stuff for "For all its faults, the keyboard will remain the
2010 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
Beyond the mouse breaking down."
http://blogs.nitle.org/archive/2008/07/22/
move_over_mouse_gartner/

55. Web 2.0 in 2009
-growing in scale
-growing practices
(after Schmelling,
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/7/30sc
hmelling.html)

57. 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
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 Cole
on the Colbert Report (http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/)

58. David Sifry, September
2008; ScienceBlogs
(http://technorati.com/bloggi
ng/state-of-the-
blogosphere/)

59. Social images are large
• 3 billion+ photos in Flickr
• 4,230,432 - 32,170,657
shareable
(first stat, Flickr blog, November 2008
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/11/03/3-billion/;
Second stat, Flickr CC search page, March 2009,
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ )

60. • LinkedIn: 30 million users claimed
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/14/as-the-economy-sours-linkedins-popularity-grows/

61. (eMarketer, March 2009; Scott
Sigler, 2008)

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

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

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

65. Realtime search
• Emerging market
• Not always useful
• No clear leader

66. Practices mainstreams: data mashups, Web 2.0
as platform • Programming staff
• Open APIs • Perceived recognition
• Access to data
• “Mashup”
(AccessCeramics
project, Lewis and
Clark College)

67. Practice: tag clouds
Folksonomies mainstreamed
24 hours of Twitter’s #SLNSOLSUMMIT

68. Classic forms developing
Diigo

69. Practices: years of edublogging
Selected, documented • Creative writing
practices: • Distributed seminars
• Publish syllabus • Campus organizations
• Publish student papers • Prospective students
• Discussion • Library collections
• Journaling • Alumni relations
• Project blogs • Project management
• Public scholarship • Liveblogging

70. External hosting reexamined

71. The specter of Wikipedia
Wikipedia remains
• growth and pedagogies

72. Web 2.0 content
distribution models:
Rutgers;
University of Mary
Washington;
http://www.journalofameri
canhistory.org/podcast/

73. Beyond the
classroom
• accessCeramics,
Lewis and Clark
College
• 1000 images,
February 2009
(http://accesscerami
cs.blogspot.com/200
9/02/today-is-big-
milestone-as-weve-
reached.html)

74. PLE vs LMS
• Self-created • Small pieces, loosely
• Consumer products joined
• Personalization • Variable levels of
presence
Beyond the
students:
Professional
development
Reputation growth

75. New forms
River of news wars: Twitter vs Facebook vs Buzz

76. New… things
• Google Wave, SAP

77. Your turn, constructivistically
What else are you More:
seeing? • Understand
• Organizing stuff in affordances
constructive and
useful way
• What are the ways
these tools improve
teaching and learning?
• Keeping up with
next.gen

78. Your turn, constructivistically
What else are you How are you finding
seeing? this stuff out?
• Organizing stuff in
constructive and
useful way
• What are the ways
these tools improve
teaching and learning?
• Keeping up with
next.gen

79. 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

80. 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/EDUCAUSEReview
MagazineVolume44/ApprehendingtheFutureEmergingT/171774.
More sources there.

81. The ultimate links
NITLE
http://nitle.org
Our blog
http://blogs.nitle.org/
NITLE prediction markets game
http://markets.nitle.org/
Bryan on Twitter
http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander

82. The ultimate links
Techne
http://blogs.nitle.org/
Bryan on Twitter
http://twitter.com
/BryanAlexander

83. The ultimate links
NITLE prediction markets game
http://markets.nitle.org/
NITLE
http://nitle.org