Research Question One

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

You may list as many items as you wish (and we hope you will!), but please list each item separately -- that is, if you say wish to list widget1, process2, and idea3 as important, please list each item as a separate bullet point (asterisk), as we will be rank ordering these later. Do not list them as a single paragraph, as that will hamper the process.

Please also add your name or initials after each item so that we can follow up with you if we need additional information or leads to examples, as I have done here [Larry]

If an item on your list is already listed here, just add your comment to the end of it, with your initials.


Research Question One

What would you list among the established technologies that learning-focused institutions should all be using broadly today to support or enhance teaching, learning, or creative expression?

NOTE: Because this question is about "established" technologies, answers should be easy to support with actual examples and pointers to demonstration projects.


  • Academic or Learning Commons Every school needs an informal, high-traffic are where informal and formal learning environments mingle freely, and where technologies for consuming and producing content are side-by-side, encouraging learners to see the two activities and the two environments as symbiotic. [GC]
  • Anti-piracy defensive strategies As the copyright wars continue, and as tools make it increasingly easy for everyone to use materials in ways that open them up to lawsuits, ways of warding off such charges are vital. For example, publishing to DVD or flash drive keeps content from enjoying network effects. Ditto for stashing content in password-protected spaces. Non-networked devices, too. [BNA]
    • Are there solutions being piloted or in place for these? Anyone know where the model programs might be found? [LJ]
    • This item engages a few of the items that follow, including OER and other collaborative issues. Maybe a more specific item would go like this: "Clear, liberal guidelines for using copyrighted material. Intellectual Property guidelines should be up-to-date and outline defensible fair-use policies to promote maximum usability for educational resources." This statement could also address DRM considerations. Can we link to exemplary policy statements? What about Creative Commons? [GC]
    • I think that the media industry will have to change- copyright law, as it stands today is outdated and obsolete. [SM][IB]
  • Collaborative Virtual Learning Environments Collaborative virtual learning environments can be designed to develop advanced learning processes among students by engaging learners in highly engaging collaborative inquiry and problem solving activities. Geoworlds (http://www.geoworlds.org/) is a CVLE that is designed to engage high school students (piloted in an urban school) in interacting in engaging geosciences activities. The potential for the development of advanced learning processes and content skills makes the CVLE a potential replacement for passive learning processes such as lecture. Second Life has the broad audience base and income stream to allow them to focus on making the simulations' capabilities, in terms of ease of programmability and robustness of features. If a smaller organization would have to be in charge of this, the physics, graphics, and capabilities would be vastly inferior, or cost incredibly much more to accomplish. The trend towards Open Source has gained momentum and with SL deciding to have the client OS and the platform extensible and Object Oriented, community is playing a larger role with the development of the CLVEs. GeoWorlds is allowing students to learn things that would have otherwise been difficult to imagine AND interact with in other scenarios. Here, learning is "situated" in the contexts of culture and learning environment by involving the learner in realistic activities which involve collaboration with their peers and facilitators, designed to assist them in adopting the specific culture and acquiring the tools needed to discuss and reflect upon practice. The Geoworlds CVLE has students simulating what geoscientist do while they decipher the Earth’s past both with respect to life and climate. It also ties what they have learned about the Earth’s past with current real world global issues. These endeavors bring them in contact with experts in the field.(DR)
    • Agree that these are very important. [DO] I agree I think is most important for full collaboration to occur [IB]
    • These are important, remember that there is a growing movement toward Open Sim[VAD]
    • Fully agree [EDL]
  • Campus Hosted / Supported User Media Casting more than just podcasting or lecture recording, as society becomes more attuned to media rich content, our organizations ought to provide systems for hosting and making available media created by students, not just media for students [AL] [RSS]Storage is always going to be a problem for universities and often blocks creative and collaborative works. [IB]
    • This is, in its simplest form, a campus-based version of YouTube + iTunes University or equivalent tools. See TechTV or iTunes U.[PL]
    • I think this should include not only creation, but modification of these resources such that students can annotate this media and create study notes from this feature rich medium. [JamieM]
    • how do we keep this from residing only in institutional silos! - bringing them together in some way (relates to the next item on open education resources) [NN] [RSS] Agree that the solution should be collaborative across institutions [PS]
    • Some schools are using social networks and then also having podcasting areas? We are using a social network (Ning) to do all of these things with the [Flat Classroom Project -- I think that social networks should encompass a platform to share all types of media. [VAD]In Australia, NSW in particular the education department blocks any use which inhibits new learning.. we need o overcome this. [IB]
    • Innovative museum departments are seeking visitor comments on all fronts. One of the more intriguing is the Brooklyn Museum which is holding a video contest through YouTube to gather reactions to permanent collections. Creating forums to display media casting is here and growing. [SBS]
    • Explicitly educational sections of sites like YouTube, Flickr... an easy-to-identify go-to spot for educational use of these spaces. I'm thinking along the lines of the NMC Campus in Second Life. [RSS] Nice idea Rachel! Is it something we expect to happen soon, because there are examples, or something we wish would happen? [LJ] U.C. Berkeley has just placed several full courses - some of them very popular - in YouTube and they are grouped together. B erkeley is encouraging other public universities to do the same, as part of their services to the public (JPJ) Creation, consumption and critiqueing enabled by these spaces should be officially taught by Higher Education institutions [CL]
    • Inter-institutional collaborations can create spaces for sharing student media beyond a single campus. The Open Student Television Network (http://www.ostn.tv/ )is aggressively looking for student programing for distribution over their IPTV network. OSTN also sponsors a number of student media festivals. [BS]
    • CVLEs can be both centralized and distributed: I'd argue that UMW Blogs are a distributed collaborative virtual learning environment, though that may be stretching "virtual" too far. [1] But this raises another question: what's the relationship between technologies empowering distributed cognition and those empowering CVLEs and/or collective intelligence? Some interesting, subtle, and perhaps powerful distinctions AND overlaps here.[GC]
    • Shenandoah University has an interesting project they call Fridays at 11. It's a student roundtable that meets to discuss a range of current affairs topics. The talks are videotaped, edited and posted online. According to Joan Freedman at JHU, SU is looking to expand these dialogs to students at other institutions through YouTube and videoconferencing. [BS]
  • Collective Intelligence (O'Reilly term)- beyond the user generated content cited in previous reports, using sophisticated data collection devices and networked tools to pool, analyze, and visualize data. See Movie Shot Lengths and Attention Deficit Disorder for the concept of cinematics; Freebase as a new form of web-based databasing; an algorithmic approach to improve photos based on the collections at flickr [AL]
    • Do folksonomies have a place here? It seems we haven't moved much with this over the last 2-3 years and yet its potential is enormous. [NN]
    • I thought this question was on established technologies. I'd buy 'folksonomies' in this category, as per Nick's suggestion, but 'collective intelligence'? I think not [SWL] Good point, you got me ;-) [AL]
    • I believe that every course at a college should have a standard TAG and that students should use a service like delicious. Links can be shared and embedded in wikis or other course software. Additionally, sites like Diigo let you not only bookmark but annotate web pages and resources and will send the information directly to delicious. The use of "tag libraries" that could be downloaded by course would be very useful. This also allows experts and cross-world collaboration. [VAD]
    • A variant on the idea of a single tag for a course is to ask students to "describe" the course with one word. Then the instructor can have a good idea of what tag to put. In my presentations on future scenarios, a common one-word description "tag" chosen by students is "collaboration", followed by "services" and "innovation". (JPJ)
    • If "Collective Intelligence" also suggests the Surowiecki "Wisdom of Crowds," aggregation becomes very important in a particular way, as Surowiecki's "wisdom" depends on the individuals acting as individuals, not as collaborators. [GC]
    • Jon Udell's blog has some interesting examples along this line. For instance, collaborative mapping and computational thinking, [2] geographic analysis of local crime data, and collecting public health data in developing countries. Udell's explorations not only offer good analogies for what we can do in teaching and learning, they also offer interesting ideas for specific curricular innovations. [GC]
    • Until now, tagging has been rather simplistic, and subject to clouding and collisions for tags that may not be related-- Udell gives an example of someone tagging geohazards with the term "mudslide" getting mixed up with all the tags related to the drink ;-) If we can process the associated tags for patterns, we can perhaps get at more "intelligence" . As an example the clustering flickr does provides some interesting paths for discovery, e.g. http://flickr.com/photos/tags/education/clusters/ [AL]
  • DIY Repositories Constructivist learning is fundamentally about building knowledge together. Increasingly, however, we must pay more explicit attention to the fading art of building real things together. Students have less and less hands-on experience with the physical tools that are essential to fabricating objects in real life (from using a screwdriver or soldering iron to fabricating a bernoulli tube or assembling a motorized bike). Sites exist to support this kind of work from Instructables. Every campus needs one of these! [PL]
    • Phil's idea sparks up applications in service-learning environments. In addition to doing useful kinds of physical tasks in service learning, students could also create persistent documentation of their work as a way to empower people remaining in those environments after the students have gone. [GC]
  • ePortfolios A digital record of student work that is owned, controlled and authorized for viewing by the students is becoming increasingly important as we represent our work digitally. Indeed, increasingly this is the primary and perhaps only representation that we will have of it. Therefore we need to maintain a portfolio, preserve, distribute contents from it, and selectively allow access to it. Open source versions exist from OSP Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) [PL]
    • I would like to see some kind of versioning within such a system so that we can see the progress of a student from first year through to final year. This would allow to see how a student's skills have evolved throughout their studies. [JamieM]
    • Most eportfolio systems (barring a few) are geared around the showcasing element. The are not facilitating personal development issues, they are not embedded in curriculum and do not go beyond the university (either K-12 going in or employment going out). I don't know where I should post this but this seems like another area, along with folksonomies, that seems to be getting stuck. Something I'm not sure we've talked about before in the Horizon report ... trends getting 'blocked'/hijacked for other purposes (in this case probably accountability only). Also what is the relationship between eportfolios and the notion of personal learning environments? If these comments should be somewhere else, please move them. [NN] I'm not convinced the ePortfolio movement has connected with any social networking capabilities, and seem to be more institutional boxes than learner owned; seems like an old horizon best filed with learning objects [AL]
    • I want to second Nick's remarks here, as I see ePortfolios becoming a kind of learner-centered Course Management System on steroids unless more creative thinking is applied. Why not have students construct their own Personal Learning Environments with a set of protocols for syndicating content as they see fit? Cf. Jon Udell's notion of "hosted lifebits" (apparently a Microsoft initiative as well, though I know nothing of it besides the mention): hosted lifebits scenarios and hosted lifebits. [GC]
    • Much like DIY respositories- eportfolios will be owned and maintained by the owner. It is not scalable to try to track an individual throughout their entire life. [SM]
  • GPS and Locations I still think there is great potential for learning, discovery and play using the tools and infrastructure that couriers and taxicabs have at their disposal. This is more of a mapping and location placeholder rather than mobile. Location could what makes masses and masses of user created media 'parse-able' ;) [CL]
  • Haptics Something like 20% of our learners learn by touch and learn by doing. Haptics makes it possible for people to not just see equations for physics, for example, but to feel it. It makes learning so much more memorable. And, expanding the traditional visual interface to include a sense of touch could be hugely important in many, many disciplines. [DO]
    • Demonstration project: See Purdue Envision Center http://www.envision.purdue.edu/ contact: Gary Bertoline for specific projects across engineering sciences; University of Southern California's Integrated Media Systems Center Haptic Museum (http://imsc.usc.edu/tech/2002/HapticMuseum0801.pdf) [JKL]
    • All the senses will come into play, some way or another. [SM]
    • Agreed. Standards are a problem here, however.
  • IPTV Already well established in some institutions, IPTV is slow to gain ubiquity partly due to limited multicast capabilities. As networks are upgraded in coming years, IPTV’ s full potential for fostering collaboration and sharing content will be realized. [BS]
  • Lecture capture infrastructure Technology embedded in the classroom that not only captures the events during class but also sends the resulting file to a backend process that automatically runs it through the appropriate codec and then publishes it appropriately. [Malcolm]
    • It would be nice to have video enabled here as well, though that does complicate things. Still, if cheap consumer webcams have "face tracking" technology, there should be some way to cobble something together in a classroom. [GC]
    • The infrastructure should include a searchable repository that enables tracking of metadata related to copyright and other permissions. [JFG]
  • Mashups One of the challenges with learning is that we need to cluster information and associate one type of information with another, such as historical information associated with geographic information. Mashups may help people create associations (and visualizations) that could advance learning much more rapidly and effectively. [DO]
    • With web 2.0 technologies, this is prime for innovative technology couplings and overlays. Think Zeugma! [SM]
    • I think even as mundane as Google Maps (to start) to get people thinking about mashing up [CL] Not much seems to have been done in higher ed; yes seems ripe [AL]
    • Gapminder sure seems ripe for educational use http://www.gapminder.org
    • Mashups will help education go mobile and allow crossovers [EDL]
  • Mobile & Personal Devices to support collaboration with others and access to content; enhance interaction within the classroom; to extend learning spaces beyond the traditional classroom [JKL]
    • Ditto [DO]
    • Establishing formats that support publishing across multiple output devices is critical [PS] Yes -- and Flash is the front runner -- can we get it on the iPhone? [LJ]
    • mlearning is the new elearning [SM]
    • a strong vote for mobile - whereever and whenever the student wants (also see location below) [CL]
    • a must, people are mobile, we should not have them adapt to us, but we should adapt to people's lifestyles and needs [EDL]
  • Open Education Resources Not that all content used for teaching should be free, open, sharable, but as organizations of learning and content creation in times of limited resources to produce them, we should be actively engaged in systems that allow sharing of educational resources outside the walls of our own gardens. [AL] This is of particular concern to cultural institutions who need to be thinking about sharing their data so that the information has wider access [SBS]
    • I question the first part of this ... i.e. why should all learning content not be free? How that content is leveraged through learning facilitation is another matter. [NN]
    • I agree that OER will be important. [DO]
    • I believe that as a part of this, that universities should have projects such as the University of Michigan's [Arab Israeli Conflict simulation] where college students are working with high school students or even professionals. These "tandem learning" approaches take the open education resources and share them, but harness the power of all students involved to make meaningful, relevant, authentic projects. So, yes, Open Education Resources but additionally, Open Learning Experiences. [VAD] [RSS]
    • Institutions need to have policies in place that contribute to the adoption of OERs as well as look toward the dissemination of their own projects as OERs. Too often institutions provide no incentive, support, or recognition for the work that it takes to integrate an OER into one's own teaching. This is non-trivial and unrecognized. I'm not suggesting it receives the same credit as novel discovery or research generating new discoveries, but it at the same time cannot continue be labor in the dark. Similarly, when building new software developers need to look beyond their immediate motivations, often driven by the legitimate need to solve their local problem. These are important but looking at how the tool they are building is likely to be received by others doing similar work at different institutions can be enlightening and lead to development that can meet not just one's own needs but a broader set with modest additional work. [PDL]
    • I support the points made above - OER is very important for the future of education and the global 'knowledge economy' but current policies for Intellectual Property Rights and for staff incentives often work against this. International collaboration is already taking place (e.g. work funded by UNESCO) but we need the international educational community to develop a shared sense of purpose around this issue if we are serious about its importance. That will include tackling difficult discussions about business models - not all institutions are willing to share all content freely and this is partly because their current business models don't allow it. [Sarah P]
    • Strong agreement here. Also, ways of generating these resources need to be more diverse and pervasive. Cf. CommonCraft's "sketchcasts." [GC]
    • Fully agree[EDL]
  • Online Networking Portals for group collaboration and sharing of resources. A place where both students and teachers can come together and have communal as well as private areas, where multimedia can be shared, conversations started and expanded and communication between all members is easily facilitated by the software [JLindsay] To distinguish from the 1990s MyXXXXX enterprise portals, these being user generated, and easily incorporate content from external resources, e.g. http://ning.com/ http://www.pageflakes.com/ http://www.netvibes.com [AL]
    • This is also related to the environments allowing multimedia sharing, etc. One can also create "groups" for specific purposes that are private such as for classes, organizations, etc. [VAD]
    • We should consider portals that integrate items from the outside and also pieces of the portals that can be integrated into the users' other platforms or portals [EDL]
  • Open Source Learning Environments, and tools Being able to create an educational environment in open source would allow for interoperability of tools, and therefore content and resources. [EDL]
    • Agreed. Commercial CMSs are an idea whose time has gone. [GC]
    • Agree too. [SM]
  • Portable Powerful Media Capture Devices Even if we don't provide said devices, institutions should have infrastructure and network readiness to support the use and data transfer of media from pocket sized photo, audio, video capture devices. [AL] [DO] [RSS]
    • Absolutely. An obstacle I've seen is that although labs are available, often the labs do not have smart card readers, students without admin privileges cannot get their files off to use the multimedia. [VAD]
    • The Kauffman Foundation (www.kauffman.org) is pioneering a partnership with three universities in Sweden, UAE, and Florida that will develop a global project using mobile phones for STEM learning this fall on several continents with a debut competition for kids that will run during the entire Beijing Olympics and open to kids with cell phones (of varying types) around the globe, co-sponsored by telecoms. We hope this will become part of the fabric of subsequent international sporting competitions. We believe there is a real potential for a strong merger occurring between mobile devices and persistent online gaming/simulation environments. [DR]
    • Technologies such as [Cellphedia] are allowing groups of users to share information via cell phone. I think that the power of a cell phone to record, capture, share is underestimated. I give assignments now that let my students upload photos related to the topic directly to the Ning. VAD
  • Powerful Media Processing Environments Most of us have some kind of "media lab" or "multimedia kitchen," but these need to be rethought around the idea of publishing material across multiple platforms. Easy, robust, template-driven transcoding, for example, should be at the heart of any media workstation. Vast storage, lots of RAM, and very high-speed CPUs will be needed here, obviously. [GC]
  • Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Web services and related technologies are maturing to the point of wide adoption across industries and trading partners, and [DougM]
  • Social Networking Undoubtedly the most pervasive aspect of Web 2.0, the move towards the integration of social networking across edu endeavors is driven from outside our institutions. Students already use these tools extensively for personal reasons. Because of their interest, colleges and universities are increasingly seeking ways to employ similar strategies. Although there are not yet many institutional examples of social networking, there are easily dozens of examples that are familiar to students and used by them on a daily basis; institutional uses will emerge very quickly because these approaches clearly appeal to students.
  • Social Technology Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, CiteSeer, Virtual Worlds Connect, automatically generated social networks, etc., are all available to make virtual communities of co-learners across and within academic institutions. [DougM]
    • Students seem to be using multiples of these and maybe don't want the institution using them in curriculum. [NN]
    • This may vary by school or by particular social networks. My students at UMW are pretty relaxed about my participation in Facebook, for example. What's truly needed here, though, is a suite of technologies and instruction regarding syndication (see "Syndication" below). [GC] Excellent point [LJ]
    • Our students seem to want a separation of their social and academic worlds when it comes to "social technology." They prefer to get "official" messages in other ways, such as email. [JFG]
    • As our students are social beings, we need to provide them with social tools, but as they belong to several, a social network integration would be necessary, like RSS [EDL]
  • Syndication Not so much a technology, perhaps, as a way of using technology, but an essential part of what we should be using to support teaching, learning, and creative expression in our schools. Unless and until teachers and learners understand RSS/Atom or other syndication technologies at a conceptual and practical level, all this Web 2.0 goodness will remain a set of neat AJAX web pages that allow us to store data in the cloud. Once we see the power of syndication to shape and create data streams, we will understand how to build and sustain and share our own learning habitats. In my experience, it's a lot easier to explain what del.icio.us is and how to tag than it is to explain how RSS feeds can transform self-directed learning--and that sad fact needs addressing! [GC] RSS begins to fade as the focal point- all of the action in Facebook is more or less RSS like w.o the terminoloogy; same for the widgets in iGoogle or Netvibes/Pageflakes. It's more powerful when the actions we do online, generate automatically notifications to other systems [AL]
  • Tagging It seems that tagging could transform learning because it makes it so much more possible for people to find the information they are seeking. We don't really have a problem with information; we have a problem finding it. Part of that is that the formal structures don't mirror the way people think or search. Seems this could be transformative. [DO] Yet a key with tagging is that the act needs to generate a benefit at the individual level [AL]
  • User Content Sites like Flickr, Odeo, YouTube, Google Video, and Ourmedia make it easy to find images, videos, and audio clips, but the real value of these sites lies in the way that users can classify, evaluate, and add to the content that is there. The emergence of collective wisdom through tagging allows interesting materials to quickly float to the top and be found. Naturally, these materials are not necessarily all related to learning or creativity, but the process does highlight what people are paying attention to. Pervasive use of these tools is already in evidence among students. The challenge for educators is to figure out how to harness that power in a learning context — but it is moving quickly are there are examples. [LJ]
    • Students should be producers of their own knowledge- we must provide them with the fluency and tools to create breadth and depth with the skill sets they bring to campus. [SM]
    • Agreed. I also think the act of reviewing and ranking is almost as important (not quite) as the creation. Much easier to participate and acts to train students to participate. [CL]
    • I'd add a layer of the ability to remix, and utilize content from across these different realms; to make something new from them [AL]
  • Web applications Web apps allow people to create and share documents or collections of resources either for free or at very very low cost. Whether these are spreadsheets, text files, photographs, blog entries, audio or video clips, favorite places, or web links. What makes these tools effective is that collaboration and compatibility are built right in; no special process is required to make your media usable by or shareable with, someone else. Issues of file format, operating system compatibility, disk storage space, and versioning, all of which can stand in the way of productive collaborative work, virtually disappear. Most of these tools are accessible from a web browser and data is stored remotely, on a server, rather than locally on a user’s own computer.
  • Wireless supporting 802.11N (and beyond) We've put access points everywhere on our campuses (or many of us have) and patted each other on the back for our support of the future of mobile computing. The problem is that the kinds of web 2.0 and beyond technologies we need to support are bandwidth intensive. We are loath to upgrade the 802.11g APs we've put in because for email and basic web stuff they're fine. But has anyone tried to really teach using media in a classroom with 20 students all using wireless??? It just isn't feasible. It looks like we met that goal of wireless everywhere. But in places where students congregate with any density it's just not good enough. N and beyond offer not just immediate bandwidth bumps but also relax the constraint of a max of three access points overlapping so you can get the real benefit from the bandwidth that is supported. We're not done yet. [pdl]



  • Comments
    • We need to better understand learner expectations for technology and infrastructure. These expectations are changing over time; we have surveyed 16-18 year olds recently and found that there are some common misconceptions about their expectations from what technology they will engage with at their university. They certainly seem to expect ubiquitous internet access: 'They regard ubiquitous internet access as the norm'. See the JISC Report What is particularly interesting from this research is that although students use many different types of technology in their social interactions, they really aren't clear of what their expectations should be for the educational environment and their ambitions seem to be limited by their previous experiences (in school / K12). I think this indicates an obvious point but one worth making again - that it is less important to have a specific technical infrastructure and set of technologies in place (apart from good connectivity) than ensuring that the institution integrates the technology fully into its practices and processes, and helps its learners to make informed judgements about what they use and why. [Sarah P]
    • Agreed. And we would probably benefit from a clearer understanding of what is going on in K-12 classrooms. There still seems to be a lack of interest in the pedagogy and best practices that have been developed in jr. and sr. high school classes...we could build more bridges between the sr year in high school and the freshman college experience. [JFG]
    • With regard to finding information, it seems that many of our institutions still present services that support teaching and learning with technology according to an organizational chart. A simple shift would be to create portals that enable finding services through descriptive language. The next step would be to use tagging to uncover how faculty and students are actually finding what they need. Aside from providing data about service uasge, it could be a way of collecting commonly understood vocabulary for technologies and services. Faculty have cited the inability to locate information and services as an obstacle to implementation and adoption of technology. I'm suggesting our own organizations could model what we think faculty and students should be doing with academic content.[JFG]
    • Aside from understanding users' expectations, we should also understand their needs, as the needs may be stronger than expectations, in the sense that whenever there is a need, the users may be able to adapt a new technology or solution in a more natural and faster way. Applications that take off generally have tapped into an unsatisfied need. Understanding student's current life (their 24 hours) will also contribute to identifying the solutions that need to be put in place. [EDL]
      • Might this be better listed under RQ4 -- Challenges? [LJ]
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