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Probing What's Next in Learning and Technology, Pt 2
Children in Nigeria use laptops from the One Laptop Per Child movement.
In the second part of my interview with Keene Haywood, Director of Research at the New Media Consortium, publisher of the annual Horizon Report on technology in education, we covered: the future of textbooks, visualization teaching methods, use of augmented reality and gesture-based computing, open content movement, new media literacies, and practical strategies for advancing the field of digital media and learning… more
Searching for What's Next in Learning and Digital Media
A young girl in rural South America uses a laptop from the One Laptop Per Child movement.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is publisher of the annual Horizon Report, which "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education." I recently had an opportunity to talk with Keene Haywood, Director of Research at NMC, and probe a bit further into the 2010 Horizon Report, which covered trends in mobile learning, open source content, the future of textbooks, among many other pressing topics at the intersection of technology and education.… more
Hi Olivier,
Absolutely. I think Android and Blackberry are very rich platforms too that will only get better. Its always good to have choices. If these platforms are available to you and work for your devices and location then embrace these . I think aiming for making good web experiences on these devices will be helpful too. Developing full blown apps can be expensive, time consuming and more complex. If you can do it, that's great, but the low hanging fruit would be web apps which can mostly scale across devices (except for the well publicized no Flash on Apple mobile devices). HTML5 has loads of promise but we are still not there yet.
Claroline is a nice system. Keep your eyes on the horizon for No SQL databases which will be simpler, but powerful and are optimized for cloud based operation. These will start to show up in some sectors. I know that Ning was switching to a paid only model I believe, but I think Pearson is sponsoring free Ning accounts for K-12 N. American educators. Hopefully they will expand further into S. America with this.
As smartphones get less expensive and more powerful, I think there is a lot of potential for use of the these in the classroom. The only thing really going against them is screen real estate for many simple tasks. Wonder if its possible that the cell phone may actually end up becoming the one laptop per child device down the road as they get more powerful but keep a small form factor? What's nice about a smartphone is that is really works well with smaller fingers for children younger than high school age. They can really use the keyboards and touch screens better than adults.
The iPad and Generativity
Since the announcement of Apple's iPad, reactions to the device have been extremely polarized. While some people have been highly critical of the device, others have reacted positively. Still others have reacted first negatively then positively or, more disorientingly, both at the same time. A striking similarity of many of the most-cited negative reviews of the iPad is that they appeared before the reviewers ever had a chance to interact with the device. For both positive and negative reviewers, this approach made it much easier to praise or critique the iPad as an idea, rather than as a machine, and, in doing so, to imbue this idea with magical powers that are quite different from the physical reality of the device.… more
Jim,
Thanks for the link. This looks really interesting.