The annual “Horizon Report” is a collaborative effort between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). Each year, the report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years.
The areas of emerging technology cited for 2010 are:
Time to adoption: One Year or Less
Mobile Computing
Open Content
Time to adoption: Two to Three Years
Electronic Books
Simple Augmented Reality
Time to adoption: Four to Five Years
Gesture-based Computing
Visual Data Analysis
Each section of the report provides live Web links to examples and additional readings. The findings for the 2010 Report resulted from the work of the 47-person Advisory Board, with experts from ten countries.
Murdoch is a member of EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/) who are a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. They are US based, but many universities around the world are members.
The most widely read online articles from 2009 focused on current IT issues, emerging technologies, learning spaces, the wiki-ized university, open educational resources, faculty development, and teaching & learning challenges are below:
I also suggest you regularly read the “7 Things” articles which provide explanations and use cases for emerging technology. You can access the site at http://www.educause.edu/7Things.
No doubt you have read the newspapers or seen the news stories.
Apple released their “iPad” yesterday to great fanfare and emotion that’s typical to most of Apple’s marketing launches.
You can see Steve Jobs’s (CEO of Apple) video here and there’s a good summary from Engadget (just remember they’re talking about the US market and prices).
What’s talked about is what’s missing from the iPad, namely:
OLED (HD) screen
USB
SD slot
Camera
GPS
Flash Support
Multitasking
keyboard (alhpough you can buy an extra docking station & keyboard)
HDMI
These “missing” pieces will be added in new releases via demand from customers, so don’t be too worried. When it’s released in Australia mid this year, I’d suggest the price for the top of the range 64Gb will be close to $1,000. The main impact will be it’s ability to corner the eBooks market similar to how iTunes revolutionised access and purchasing of music. With the “iBooks” application and access to a number of publishers, you can go to the iBooks store, search, pay, download and be reading a book in seconds. I’d expect text books to follow, so we need to be prepared for students using these devices on campus. I wonder if you can highlight or mark-up a text book on the iPad?
Welcome to my report about recently attending the “CES” in Las Vegas.
The International “Consumer Electronics Show” (CES) is held each January in Las Vegas; this year it was from 7-10th Januaryat the Las Vegas Convention Centre, Hilton and Venetian Hotels.
To explain what CES is, the website best describes it:
“With more than four decades of success, the International CES reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive.
The International CES is produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the consumer technology industry. CEA represents more than 2,000 corporate members involved in the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronics products. All profits from CES are reinvested into industry services, including technical training and education, industry promotion, engineering standards development, market research and legislative advocacy.”
In simple terms, the show is a combination of several large exhibition halls broken into subject areas : Audio, Digital Imaging, Emerging Technology, Gaming, High Performance Audio, Home Networking/Systems, Home Theatre/Video, In-Vehicle Technology and Wireless. Add in world-class keynote speakers, individually focused workshops, super-sessions, knowledge tracks and vendors sessions results in a spectacular show of world size perspective. The scale is what’s different about CES. With over 2,500 exhibitors and 110,000 visitors over the 5 days, it’s just mind boggling. Please also note that it is essentially a trade show and not open to the general public although you can attend for free as an “Industry Representative” as I did.
There were keynotes from the following people from 6 – 8th January. Click on the names to see the official video.
I also attended a number of sessions including a newly added “Summit” on Higher Education Technology. The day-long event consisted of a number of presentations and panel discussions which were in the most very interesting. At one point, Richard Dreyfuss (to drop a name) made a very passionate plea about preserving the American way and its education system. A noble pursuit.
The titles of each session during the summit are below.
Students as Digital Consumers
High Tech U
Keynote - Mary J. Canter, Under Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education
Virtual Learning: Will Anyone ever go to class gain
How Disruptive Innovation will change the way college Students learn
A High Tech Education for a High Tech World
High Tech Backpack
From Dewey to Digital
Make Me a Perfect Match: Finding a College, Catching a Student in the Virtual World
Some notes from the sessions:
There are over 4,000 post-secondary institutions (private & public) in US and over 15m students
“Student Monitor LLC”, conduct student research, monthly discretionary spending, annual earnings, employment type-FT/PT, average age & family income
‘The What’s in’ list for student; top three are Facebook, texting and iPhone; drinking beer is fourth!
Policy prohibiting texting, IM & tweeting in class; Should we do this?
Acquiring software, 28% downloaded, but many “borrow”
94% of students are online
Most common online activities – check grades, check other profile, complete assignment, check email, check weather
92% on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo360
Online courses – 69% report one or more components online
Textbooks – purchased new paper, reused & ebooks; prefer used as already highlighted
Increase in digital ebooks, but still only 9% – many prefer printed material, but used (50%)
Wireless reading devices – Kindle, Sony eReader, Franklin & other. One of the reasons for low adoptions is that students can’t buy a used book (with notes) and/or eBooks cannot be marked up. Note, most of the newer eBooks can do this.
Cell phone ownership is high and spend 40% texting
Penn State University magazine is challenged using Google Wave by students
During the “HighTech Backpack” session, a number of products relevant to Higher Education were demonstrated.
Princeton Review is a source of University rankings and information (for the US)
“Learn what you need to know” should be the motto for students and in fact everyone
iPhone applications for just about anything keep appearing (over 100,000 now)
Abeliene College is a major user and exemplar for iPhone/iTouch - they give one to each student
Students are using technology to assist with just about everything they do
Students expect to:
Engage with others
Access anything, anywhere, anytime
See continual innovation (rapidly) – need to try things and be prepared to fail; it’s the only way you will learn
YouTube “UDU” and Google Apps, web based and mobile plus cross-collaboration amongst various products
Some are using online courses that educates students about policy – privacy, literacy & plagiarism before they get access to online resources and must complete and be marked as done. Could do the same here.
Moving away from learn & test to much more interactive forms of assessment testing competetancy.
I like this quote “don’t waste a good crisis”
296m in people in US
We really need understanding what our student do and where; this is the key in providing appropriate services to them; we therefore need to be become more ”intimate” with our students.
Products of Interest for Murdoch University
Although there were literally 10’s of thousands of products on display, only a few were relevant to Murdoch University. Here’s my summary of a few that may be useful.
Digital Pens
“LiveScribe” digital pen is a “smart pen” that records ink and voice as you write and then replayed as it was written. The website best describes its features at http://www.livescribe.com/. I can see this being used in teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry where drawing, diagrams and writing with vicerecordingthat keeps pace with the writing and then replayed via a web page. We have two (2) pens for demonstration purposes – contact me for details.
Car Leasing & Pooling
“Zipcar”. A fleet car service where you don’t own the car and it comes to you. After one becomes a “Zipstar” you can rent a car for a few hours or days by booking via a website and picking it up from a nominated location (that could be on campus). Your smart card then allows you to open the car, get the keys and drive off and then return it to the same spot. See http://zipcar.com/business. This could reduce our dependency on pool and lease vehicles for people that only use them occasionally.
Online Books
A number of company’s e.g. ‘CourseSmart’ http://www.coursesmart.com/ are now providing electronic versions of text books at a lower cost that the paper version for both students and academics. The books are “purchased” for a period of time, typically at 1/2 or less than the printed version, although not second-hand prices! Most companies will allow academics to review the books for little or no cost and then recommend them to students. You of course need some sort of eReader or laptop to read the book and the ability to mark-up, but I’d expect this will revolutionise how we distribute and use text books in the future. We will need to investigate online booksellers in Australia. Don’t forget that second hand books also sometimes contain very useful notes completed by past students that are highly valued! How are we going to replicate this?
Content
A number of companies are providing generic content that can be used to construct specific courses curricula for our use. Some examples are “2Tor“ and “Cengage“ and “Pearson eCollege“ where they will partner with a University or solely provide content online.
eReaders
eReaders were a major feature at the show with dozens of different suppliers, shapes, sizes, functions and operating systems. They are all low-cost in the range $150 – $500. One of note was the double-sided ”enTourage eDGe” – details are at http://enTourageeDGe.com. There appears to be a lot of hype about these devices, but they join a heavily crowded market of mobile devices that call read eBooks.
3D TV for Home
Every major manufacturer of TV’s, (Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and TCL) has developed 3D TV’sfor the home market. Although details on availability and cost are sketchy, they work just like the ones in cinema’s complete with3D goggles. They are however expected to be expensive to start with as with most new technology. There may be some value for Murdoch in providing more perspective to video, but given the cost to equip with TV’s, projectors and glasses then it’s still some years away from being of use to us. I’d be interested in others’ thoughts on this however.
Smartphones
There was plenty attention on smart phones with the Motorola “Backflip”, Palm’s “Pixi Plus” and of course Google’s”Nexus One” (although not officially released at the show). Smart phones are constantly evolving and improving with the latest model having the best features, fastest processor and increased storage. It’s value for Murdoch is to people that use smartph0nes – more and more functionality is being added to supplement the use of and access to information contained in the computer or the “cloud”.
Tablets & laptops
There’s lots of attention on tablets and laptops especially from Sony, HP, Lenovo and Dell. A tablet in this case is typically a device that has a larger screen (2-3 x than a smart phone) and use touch controls instead of a keyboard. They run a variety of operating systems including Windows 7 and Android and have access to the Internet via 3G or wireless. Apple has also just released their long-awaited entry into this market with the “iPad”; is this going to be another major disruptive technology like the iPhone? These types of devices will be useful as eReaders or small laptops. As they are predominately touch based, it will be interesting to see how well they will be adopted.
Pocket Projector
A number of manufacturers released mini or pocket data projectors. 3M released their ‘MPro120′ that can display images from net books, MP3 players smart phones and digital cameras. It only can project small images up to about 60cm square, but it could be useful for demonstration purposes.
Laptop Wachdog
A true gadget, but the ‘BlueNio’ will beep if it’s out of range of the device it’s linked with (via Bluetooth). That’s about 2-3m. This would be useful for travellers who leave equipment in transit lounges…know anyone who does this?
Induction Charging
A number of companies are introducing cordless charging pads that use induction to charge your smart phone, gadget or laptop. It works by purchasing a specially designed sleeve for your device and simply place it on the induction pad for charging. The device pads are about $90 and gadget sleeves about $30 each. For an example, see http://www.wipower.com. Note that Dell are introducing induction charging with all of their laptops shortly.
Keyboard and Mouse 2.0
“Celluon” has released a mouse and keyboard projection system that replaces the traditional hardware. The mouse picks up hand and finger gestures and the keyboard via a red-light projected keyboard onto a flat surface. See http://www.celluon.com. This could be useful for the traveller with a smart phone but these are real gadgets for the enthusiasts.
Language
Rosetta Stone have been around for a while in the language instructional area. What’s new is their release of new software that speaks and records/compares speech as well as the ability to link with a compatible learner over the Internet to test your skills. This could be a useful supplement for our English teaching units in MIT.
Document Camera
“HoverCam” is a low cost high-definition digital document/image camera – more information at http://www.thehovercam.com. This could be useful replacement to the document cameras in use today in our lecture theatres.
Manual Charging
I love things like this as they are simple and useful. ”Yogen” http://yogenstore.com have released a pull-charging device that generates a current for charging mobile devices. Very useful when you don’t have a spare power point!
And some more video…
Meet the stars
Entourage Edge
….and that’s about it. As I said above, there’s thousands of gadgets that could be useful to us. I have copies of publications from the show including Exhibition and Hall guides, daily newspapers and brochures if you’re interested.
I also managed to take a trip to the Grand Canyon – it’s utterly spectacular. This is me, living on the edge….
Note: Handheld video captured with Ultra Flip camcorder, 8Gb model; can be loaned from me.
Another interesting website at http://www.wordle.net/ allows you to create “Word Clouds”. As the website explains:
“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”
Here’s one I created for some of the content from this blog.
It’s useful as it shows what words are used the most; similar to a tag cloud.
You may know that Murdoch has recently added the iPhone to its list of approved devices. You can read about this in the Technology Position Statement (TPS). One of the neat things about iPhones are applications. You may have seen on TV that ANZ have customised their eBanking system to work through the iPhone. There are hundreds of applications available that be used for all sorts of things. Most applications are available for download through iTunes - some are free and some you need to pay for. Just remember that you need to pay for any non-work related applications.
I’m interested in your top 10 applications that would be of use to students and staff at Murdoch.
