Horizon2007:Research Question Three

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PROCESS: Please enter your responses to the research question in the space below.

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Research Question Three

What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that learning-focused institutions should begin to take notice during the next 3 to 5 years? What organizations or companies are the leaders in these technologies?


  • eBooks with key underlying technologies like E-ink, that enables very high-contract displays that do not need backlighting, the eBook is finally poised for a real chance. (See Sony's new entry in this area) A market where this has a very viable chance is in higher ed, where the cost of textbooks is an increasingly major issue for students. Cost reductions afforded by removing the paper publishing component could offset the initial high cost of these devices and make them attractive -- not to mention the reduction in sore shoulders from lugging all those books around in backpacks! While these devices do not yet have an established user base, I think that they will gain one in higher ed early and very likely within the 2-3 year horizon. Furthermore, over the 2-3 year time frame, it is highly likely color will be added, making these devices very appropriate for textbooks. [LJ]
  • Mobile devices on steroids – all-in-one [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • 3d shared immersion experiences – military for testing and training, SL [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • VR simulations NASA, military, gaming industry, augmented reality (SL) [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • User preference engines – getting to know users/profiling the learner, applying what is known to what is delivered to students (learning styles/preferences) identity management – tracking user preferences [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Ubiquitous broadband – need to be able to get to media rich content everywhere – on all devices [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Bio security systems [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Social network tools that are media rich and RSS capable [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Wearable computing – location aware devices [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Ubiquitous computing and telephony [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Information searching technologies – cross-database searching, Google scholar [U Wisconsin educational tech staff]
  • Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) a relatively new term, PLEs are really just a recognition of the fundamentally distributed practices within which learning takes place. PLEs are the first attempt to produce tools and platforms which make creating, organising, accessing and presenting distributed data from a variety of sources and for a variety of communities and audiences easier. As well as invoking an important and timely set of technical, organisational, and legal issues, PLEs represent a conceptual shift away from: 1. Object-oriented approaches to learning provision – PLEs primarily support production, collaboration, customisation, content and community mashup, 2. Predominantly institutional/single location based-provision 3. The credibility of thinking about or developing applications or suites of aps or environments in isolation from the range of choices available to learners, their preferences and needs – PLEs shift agency and ownership to learners. [Josie Fraser]
  • Social Community sites Not for learning yet, or at least not formally, but worth watching for opportunities [Roy Pea] Check out Elgg which is already being used informally and formally internationally in education– it’s the first fully-realised education based social community site software, facilitating user-centred and networked distributed learning practices and factoring in evaluation and assessment. [Josie Fraser]
  • Synthetic/Virtual Worlds (a la Second Life, Croquet) [Richard Katz][Roy Pea][Josie Fraser](Jean Paul)
  • Tagging/folksonomy Flickr, Technorati, del.icio.us, our own wiki. Captured collective intelligence; social networking bookmarking tools [Roy Pea](Jean Paul)
  • Geo-aware social applications to facilitate tagging places Plazes Mobile Muse [Cyprien][Josie Fraser]
  • Wi-Max for cell phones [Roy Pea]
  • Virtual Meeting Software [Timmo Dugdale]
  • Narrative Presentation Technologies [Timmo Dugdale]
  • Collaborative Writing / Editing Editing [Timmo Dugdale]
  • Next generation search tools Ambient Findability[Timmo Dugdale]
  • Context and location aware technologies [Timmo Dugdale]
  • Browser-based applications google notebook, spreadsheet, etc[Timmo Dugdale]
  • Web 2.0 technologies [Timmo Dugdale]
  • Smartboard technologies Many new features, including layered experiences. See Polyvision [Roy Pea]
  • Video & audio sharing includes podcasting, remixing, and tagging these resources. Sharing "points of view" YouTube. [Roy Pea]
  • Videogames as learning platforms. [Richard Katz]
  • Wearable Computing. [Kristina][Cyprien]
  • 2-D and 3-D visualization tools When I enter SL, I always click on the mini-map of the sim. Why? Because, in effect, I'm interested in knowing if anyone else with my broadly defined 'interests' is in the sim. Through more intelligent use of emerging 'affinity identification technologies', students and faculty will be able to experience both structured and ad-hoc, 2D, 3D and real time community for learning (and other experiences). [Lev Gonick](Jean Paul) It sounds more like an interest in social presence visualization?? [AL]
  • Pervasive Broadband and Wireless in the next 3-5 years the United States will have no choice (if it wishes to maintain and advance its position in the global economy) but to embrace local and regional broadband and wireless initiatives as a building block to a national broadband strategy. The role of universities could be/should be a strategic stakeholder in communities around the nation in aligning the academic, research, learning needs of the university with this proxy for a national broadband strategy. [Lev Gonick]
  • Inplanted technologies the world of electrical functional stimulation (Earl Bakken's medtronics and/or FES activities in Cleveland http://fescenter.case.edu/, Salisbury (UK) http://www.salisburyfes.com/ and elsewhere represents a growing maturation of bio-medical engineering as an academic discpline to enhance the quality of human life. I expect that over the next 3-5 years cognitive conditions like Alzheimer's, Autism, and other neurological conditions will emerge on the horizon in what has thus far been focused on mechanical stimulation moves to neurological stimulation and alteration. [Lev Gonick]
  • Internet-wide User-centric Identity Systems - Sxip, mIDm, Google Auth API, etc - it is no longer plausible to build systems in which the students' previous, current and future online identities are completely ignored. Shibboleth is not the answer. Whole sets of problems (life long learning, eportfolios) can have much more interesting solutions if we stop taking an inward facing view and adopt technologies that students will use before and after their campus engagements. Please watch this amazing presentation if you need further convincing [Scott Leslie] [Cyprien]
  • Real-Time (Accurate?) Language Translation as the world flattens, bigger and bigger needs to bridge the gaps in our languages. Polly Glotto just a crude demo [AL] This demo of real time voice translation blew my socks off personally Ray Kurzweil demo of Translating Telephone [Scott Leslie]
  • Robust Transcribing and Captioning tools for voice annotated presentations and screen recordings [JH] Make that "automated" [AL]
  • Google Books Google Books - I know it's a single site and not a 'technology' per se, but the ability to query the text in the ever-expanding set of print works that Google Books and their partners have OCR'd seems like it will enable many innovations and disruptions in scholarly research [Scott Leslie]
  • Social bookmarking One of the greatest challenges facing students/faculty who use large information spaces is to remember and retrieve items that they have previously found and thought to be interesting.Perhaps the most familiar approach to “refinding” information on the Web has been through the use of personal bookmarks, supported by various Web browsers.The desire to find and share information among small groups, teams, and communities of practice has lead to systems that allow groups to share bookmarks. Ongoing research is creating the first systems that allow users to make inferences about interests and expertize of other members of a class or faculty group. As the Internet keeps growing, these tools will grow in importance. (JPJ)
  • Text comprehension and abstracting systemThe ever-growing amount of documents available in the Web/Internet has increased the value of abstracts, and abstracting systems and services, as instruments for concentrating and supplying relevant information. Ongoing research in different disciplines, with abstracting as the common subject matter, points to the usefulness of the concept. Next step will involve image description and interpretation as part of the abstracting. (JPJ)
  • Digital Notetaking devices like Logitech's Digital Pen could change the way student work with class notes, especially if integration with systems like Tegrity succeeds in reaching it's audience. Stiil very costly at this point [Bill Shewbridge] Online note taking and easily sharable notes. (No more loaning notebooks out to friends or making photocopies.) myNoteIT CollegeV2 [ER] Also JotSpot Live and SynchroEdit [AL]
  • 3G (and beyond) Mobile phones and their ability to be used in the field. Looking at standards and how they can be implemented at the school level [IB]
  • Nokia Lifeblog Real time generation and sharing of photos, movies, etc Lifeblog, Nikon Professional Digital Camera with WiFi and GPS Nikon D200 Wifi GPS [Cyprien]
  • Ad Hoc Networks for areas without ubiquitous wireless or for applications to transfer virally Zigbee or separate from controlled networks. / Torrent Style networks BitTorrent [Cyprien] Networks formed by bouncing the signal from one mobile phone to another .. no repeater stations. Negroponte talked about this 'future' 2 years ago, are we getting closer?
  • Person-Computer Interfacing See the Jeff Han video from TEDtalk - to me this has the greatest potential to be the next big thing, the implications for how we might interact with computers and how this would hardwire the brain differently makes it worth following. [NN]
  • Remote labs It's time we started sharing high-cost, limited available resources like experimental equipment for laboratories. The architecture for doing so is there and the opportunity for creating a shared collection of classic experiments in science and engineering is beckoning. (see http://icampus.mit.edu/ilabs) The inhibitors are the continued institutional and even departmental silos that prevent vision from being raised above the floor [PDL]
  • Random search and retrieval from media sources Three years may be too far out because this is an area where research is moving rapidly. The proliferation of digital content (podcaats, streaming video, etc.) has dramatically increased the amount of material out on the net with potential learning value. The inability to search and retrieve randomly specific content (words, phrases) that bring from within these media objects the segment with the search term you seek diminishes their value. Good automated tools to do this are emerging (ok... this is an internal URL not for broadcast - you need Real Player installed in your browser to use it -- check out http://www.galaxy.csail.mit.edu/lectures for an example of searching across MIT OCW and MIT World digital media content) [PDL]
  • enter your response here [LJ]

etc...


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