Databus Issue: 2008 2 07/17/2008
Emerging Technologies
Bonnie Marks Executive DirectorCTAP Looks at the 2008 Horizon Report
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What are the emerging technologies that will shape K-12 education in the upcoming years? Collaborative Web technologies, mashups and mobile broadband will take a role, as will social operating systems, grassroots video and collective intelligence, according to the 2008 Horizon Report recently released by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.
While the report focuses on education at the university level, it’s easy to extrapolate the research findings to K-12, where we already see some of these emerging technologies in use. The 2008 Horizon report focuses on six key technology areas that were identified as likely to have a major impact on learning focused organizations. They divide the findings up into those technologies that will have an impact in the near term (upcoming year), mid-term (2-3 years) and later (4-5 years).
The technologies the report identifies that will have a significant impact in the upcoming year include grassroots video and collaboration webs. Grassroots video refers to user-generated video, which can be inexpensively recorded on consumer equipment, including cell phones, and easily disseminated and shared through sites like YouTube, iTunesU, and TeacherTube. It’s become increasingly common now to find news clips, tutorials and informative videos at sites that handle hosting services that make posting easy.
Also on the near horizon is collaborative Web technology, which many K-12 schools have begun to use. Many new tools for collaborative work are available, most of them small, flexible and free. Educators simply open their web browsers to these sites, where they can edit group documents, hold online meetings, share information and data. Examples include Google Docs (docs.google.com), skrbl (skrbl.com), and the Ning social network (ning.com). Computer-Using Educators recently created a CUE community on Ning, to foster collaboration among K-12 educators (community.cue.org). Conference presentations and handouts from the 2008 CUE conference will be posted there. In addition, there are shared videos, photos, discussion groups, and a forum. In the Bay Area CTAP region, we’ve found that Google Docs and wikis do a lot to bridge the distance between us. We have a main wiki page on PBwiki that connects to wikis for all of our key projects and committees. It enables us to work together in real time, as well as asynchronously. A leading edge example of collaborative webs is the Skoolaborate project (www.skoolaborate.com), a global project that uses a mix of technology, from blogs to virtual worlds.
Technologies that will impact education on the mid-term horizon include mobile broadband and data mashups. Currently most examples are focused on the integration of maps with data. An early example of mashups would be the School Performance Maps (http://schoolperformancemaps.com/ca/), which map school API scores on a Google map, providing a geographic visual of API by neighborhoods. An excellent curricular use of mashups would be the Google Lit Trips site (www.googlelittrips.org), developed by Bay Area educator Jerome Burg. On this site, Jerome “mashes up” Google Earth with images and information to engage students studying works of literature. Mobile broadband is also in early stages of adoption for use in education, for activities like virtual field trips and project-based learning. With more than a billion new mobile devices manufactured each year, capabilities are increasing while prices are becoming more affordable. New displays and interfaces will make it possible to use mobiles to access Internet content, which can then be delivered over cellular or local wireless networks. In CTAP Region IV, we’ve provided professional development to teachers in a project called “Touch History” where teachers learn to use the Calisphere resources (www.calisphere.org) from the University of California on the iPod Touch. While at this point, they are using a computer to access Calisphere, future broadband connectivity will enable direct access using mobile broadband. I also can see teachers and students accessing the excellent videos and lesson materials that KQED has available through iTunesU. I’ve been hiking in Redwood Regional park and been able to share the KQED Quest video of “Ladybug Pajama Party” with young hikers, who are fascinated to see the phenomena they just witnessed explained by the park ranger that I had stored on the iPod in my pocket.
Looking four to five years down the road, the Horizon Report has identified collective intelligence and social operating systems. Collective intelligence includes community development of wikis (like Wikipedia or Cellphedia) and the use of shared tagging. Some already in use examples for this type of intelligence currently exist in industry. Google’s PageRank system, which assigns value to a web page based on the number of pages that link to it, uses patterns to determine relevancy when search terms are used. Amazon.com uses patterns in comparing users to other buyers to recommend purchases. Shared tagging is already beginning to be used. Recently the Library of Congress posted 3,000 of their post popular historic photos to Flickr in an area called “The Commons” (www.flickr.com/commons), with an invitation to contribute tags. They described the effort as “a modest beginning to enhance their metadata.” One day later, more than 19,000 tags were added and 500 comments left. Both the LOC and Flickr were astounded by the response.
The last emerging technology described in the report, social operating systems, represent the next generation of social networking. According to the report, such systems will “support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives.” An early example is Xobni (www.xobni.com), which is a tool that extends the email program Microsoft Outlook. Using Xobni, each time a user selects an email in their inbox, a pane displays all the relevant information about that person (how often you e-mail them, what times of day you get messages from them, what attachments you’ve sent them, etc.) Xobni places the person at the center of this data, and gathers information for the user to help manage their interactions. Would tomorrow’s teacher like such a capability in looking at students in their student data system? What a great impact that could have!
The Horizon Report is published each year by Educause and the New Media Consortium.
It can be downloaded at: ( http://www.nmc.org/horizon/ ).
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Author information:
Bonnie Marks is the Executive Director of CTAP Region 4, a project funded by the California Department of Education serving seven San Francisco Bay Area Counties through the Alameda County Office of Education. She can be reached at bmarks@acoe.org.
