Saturday, January 22, 2011

2010 Horizon Report

The 2010 Horizon Report discusses a number of technologies and trends that are judged to be important to the future of "teaching, learning and creative inquiry" in the coming years, as well as a number of challenges associated with these upcoming changes.  Of the greatest interest to me is the link between one of the trends and the technology associated with it.

The trend of interest:
"People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to."
2010 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, Smith, Rachel S. and Stone, Sonja. 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2010. 

The technology: "Mobile computing, by which we mean use of the network-capable devices students are already carrying" coming into more widespread use in classrooms.
The convergence of this trend and this technology has implications into both social and technological areas.  Technologically, we have the capability to expand our classrooms outward to encompass any location in which the student may be located.  However, the technology presents a number of challenges.  I am a fairly sophisticated user, and have worked with a variety of formats for e-learning.  One that has me frustrated at the moment is the use of audio books.  I love the ease of listening to the audio book while I drive, cook dinner, etc.  It gives me a way to extend my education into time that would otherwise be "wasted" in the sense of not being used to accomplish any of my most important goals.  However, audio books checked out from different libraries have different formats.  Some work on the PC you download them to, and that is all.  Some will transfer to an Apple device (iPod, iPad, etc.) but not to other mobile devices.  Some work on Windows mobile devices, but not others.  None appear to work well on my Android-based smartphone.  If I want to hear my book, I have had to carry my laptop with me and set it up at max volume in the passenger seat of my car to hear certain titles.  I do end up able to "work, learn and study" where I want to (in my car), but it isn't easy, intuitive or even especially effective.  I have the feeling less determined (stubborn?) users would give up trying at some point short of finding the sub-optimal solution that I came up with.

Socially, the dynamic of learning changes as we learn how to collaborate, interact and teach with a "virtual" student body rather than with the physically captive audience in a lecture hall.  Students located in remote environments have a greater potential for distraction than those who come to class.  In an Adobe Connect lecture I gave this week, the one student attending the class was listening to me from her desk at work.  Somehow I doubt if either my topic or the work she was doing got her best efforts in this multitasking.  When the students are in front of me, I know who is paying attention and who is texting or playing Angry Birds in class.  With the virtual environment, normal social cues are replaced with text.  I can't see where the blank stares are versus where the light bulbs have illuminated.  With no feedback other than the absence of specific questions, I find myself unsure if I have covered materials sufficiently and can move on to the next topic, or if I need to try to find another way to explain capital budgeting so it makes sense to this group of students.  As the trend to push more of the educational process out to mobile devices continues, I can't help wondering if all this convenience comes to us at the cost of effectiveness in really understanding the materials presented.

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