I recently had the opportunity to hear Bob Johansen from the Institute for the Future present a vision of the future that is at once compelling and frightening:

• The term “consumer” will be replaced by “participant.”
• Our perception of reality will be largely shaped by technology.
• More powerful, personalized filters will be required to block out data bombardment.
• A “generation”—an age group that shares a basic worldview and cultural experience—will continue to shrink such that parents and children may be three or four generations removed from understanding each other.
• The concept of mentoring will be flipped—youth will teach their elders (which reminds me of a funny bit by Craig Ferguson)
• To appear “trustworthy” will be held in suspicion.

The art and science of “futuring” is not new. In 1901, H.G. Wells published a collection of provocative and predictive essays entitled Anticipations. Later, he prophesized a “world brain”:

The encyclopedia of the future may conceivably be prepared and kept by an endowed organization employing thousands of workers permanently, spending and recovering millions of pounds yearly, mediating between the original thinker, the scientific investigator, the statistician, the creative worker and the reporter of realities on the one hand and the general intelligence of the public on the other. But such an organization would outgrow in scale and influence alike any single university that exists, and it would inevitably tend to take the place of the loose-knit university system of the world in the concentration of research and thought and the direction of the general education of mankind.

So I decided I would pick up a few recent threads and try my hand at imagining the future of online learning environments:

1. Creativity will finally get the respect it deserves in most areas of life. In learning material development, the relative nexus of power will shift from content experts and technology specialists to artists and communicators.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

A few weeks ago I boarded a flight to St. Louis for a conference and met a young man who made me realize how connected we’ve become with mobile technology, across not only distance, but across cultural and social divides.

On a typical connecting flight, the person in the seat next to me will be from thousands of miles away from my home , and sometimes light years away in their social, cultural and world view. Not surprisingly, this disparity can lead to just the briefest of conversations followed by hours of reading, listening to MP3 players, or watching in-flight movies.

My flight with Marc (not his real name) could have been that way. Our lives were vastly different: me–a white 50-something assistant professor from a small college town in Oregon, and Marc– a black 20-something car dealer from inner city New York.

But within moments of putting on our seat belts, we both had our mobile devices out, making our last-minute online connections before the plane’s door was closed. I had my new iPhone and Marc had his iPod Touch. There was an immediate connection as we nodded at each others technology, and the conversation began that would last for the entire three-hour flight.
Marc offered me half of his sandwich (I had foolishly neglected to get something before the flight) and we began comparing notes on our favorite apps. I described my latest hobby using Geocaching, with the iPhone’s built in GPS capabilities. Marc countered with Trapster, an app to alert you to the location of speed traps.
I shared a picture of my ride—a two-seater—with photo altered with ColorSplash. Marc countered with a photo of his motorcycle. I tapped up Cartoon-Wars, and Marc pulled up Wooden Labyrinth.

Eventually our conversation began to enter more serious territory–learning from mobile technology. I showed him how I could view science lectures on my iPhone from MIT for free on YouTube. We ruminated how open education is truly arriving, and learning about any topic (including the Theory of Relativity—another common interest) can be fully realized for free, on-line and while in motion.

We parted ways, with me promising to listen to his favorite music, rapper Juelz Santana, and Marc promising to look into the TED talks online. It was a wake-up call for me about how mobile technology can help break down so many walls, whether economic, cultural, or just the barriers set up by seat dividers.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Mobile device enhancements in GPS, image capture, computing power, APIs and the wireless networks that move mobile device bits and bytes have all matured to the point where the desktop computer is in some respects now playing catch up with the mobile device. Case in point: Imagine a new technology that leverages many of the unique mobile device characteristics you’ve come to know and love and helps you navigate your physical environment with more intentionality. It’s here and it’s called Augmented Reality (AR).

Even though AR has been around for awhile, AR app support for both Android and iPhone devices is a recent development. So, what is AR? Let’s take a virtual reality trip sans technology for some answers.

Close your eyes and imagine yourself walking the Champs-d’elysee with your significant other. You hold up your iPhone and pan your viewfinder across the Arc de Triomphe. Pop ups appear directly on top of your image-filled viewfinder providing historical video clips and a marker where the tomb of the unknown soldier lies.

This overlay of information changes as you walk and you notice information about the Grand Palais appearing on the horizon of your viewfinder. Site seeing is stirring up a hunger. You point your iPhone street level, tap your screen a few times, and digital arrows appear indicating where restaurants can be found. You scan the virtual horizon for Indian restaurants and several pop up on your screen several blocks northwest of your current location. As you view the row of cafes, patisseries, and restaurants and make your way down the street, your mobile device again dynamically overlays a digital layer of information about each establishment on top of your real-time view with links to menus, reviews and some online order forms.

You’re in Paris, so as the sun goes down, romance is in the air. Your spouse looks up to point out a bright star. You point your mobile device heavenward and activate your Sky Map AR application. Your spouse doesn’t look enthused, but within a few seconds a digital layer of content appears and your mobile device identifies the bright star as Jupiter. Not a star-gazing, Indian food-loving Francophile? How about locating subway stops, activating a digital docent in places of historical interest, fixing your car, navigating while on a bicycle or finding Twitter users who are nearby?

How big is AR for the world of E-learning? It’s obviously still a developmental technology in many respects, but I’m betting that if the chatter on the blogosphere and the initial AR apps are any indicator as to how big this wave will be, we might be looking at the shifting plates that hasten a technological tsunami for the world of location-based mobile apps.

Not surprisingly then, the initial salvo of AR apps has people (including myself) asking a wide range of questions and taking their turn at presaging the relevance of this technology for instructional potential. To put the discussion into perspective, two years ago, AR developers in Switzerland were strapping almost twenty pounds of technology to their end-user’s back, feet, and head to enable an AR experience; now an improved version of this experience is accessible via one small handheld device that fits in your pocket. How could this quantum jump not generate some level of speculation as to what the next iteration of this technology will look like?

Fast Company proclaims AR is no longer science fiction and with some qualification, states AR is the “killer app” that is both fad and future.

Steve Rosenbaum at the Huffington Post proclaims decidedly that AR is “here to stay,” while Read Write Web is looking to the future and has already posted their wish lists of potential AR apps. Amais Cascaio’s article at the Atlantic is an indictment of sorts on the “yet-to-be” abridgement of civil liberties perpetrated by AR proponents. He envisions the time when AR will move from the virtual yellow first-down lines on TV’s Monday Night Football to individuals who will aggregate data about their political opponents and push this information above AR-enabled views of a face or place of residence. Ivor Tossen at the Globe and Mail takes a more philosophical tack and frames his discussion of AR within the larger world of epistemology, “AR…What does it mean to really know something?”

Personally, the concept of a new AR-enabled browser (Layar) has me wondering whether the user will ultimately become both user and middleware as appears to be the case with some 3rd-world crowdsourcing apps. On the positive side of an AR-drenched future, should we be asking whether we might be approaching a time where our imagination will be the primary constraint when it comes to developing software to facilitate learning and parse salient characteristics of our environment? Look at some of these concepts (Some of these are more conceptual at this point) and imagine how this type of technology might redefine how you educate your audience. Currently, developing content for this space still requires a considerable toolbox of technical know-how, but I can only imagine the popularity of “off-the-shelf” templates that allow non-Cocoa programming app developers to create location-based AR learning apps like the ones that have begun to surface. A fad, the future or a more efficient way to map out ten yards on an augmented reality football field? What do you think?

Popularity: 14% [?]

I’ve been waiting patiently, but couldn’t take it any longer as I’ve watched more and more friends whip out their iPhone 3G to get a GPS fix on our location or perform some other mundane task sliced, diced and served on the micro-mobile-super computer that is the iPhone 3G. I know, I’m late to the party, but from the perspective of a technophile, I have to admit I’ve felt very much like Batman’s understudy in these situations. Ultimately, I just couldn’t wait for Verizon and Apple to make nice.  I honestly don’t know where to start and I’m not accustomed to blushing, so I’ll simply share where I see potential as it relates to learning apps on the iPhone in general.  But first things first: I’m now convinced that any dialog about the iPhone should begin with a mandatory effort to share one’s favorite iPhone apps.  In that vein, the list below highlights my top 10 learning or educational apps for the iPhone, and attempts to point out where innovation and learning potential inherent to each app might paint a picture of potential future approaches in the world of online learning experiences.

Chris’ Top 10 Eductional Apps for the iPhone

1. Touch Physics by Games 4 Touch

A glimpse of the future now: seamless, motivational learning that is fun, kinesthetic and fully accessible. Learn about friction, gravity, mass, angles and other principles of physics via a clever game that allows you to exercise agency on both the physical and mental level–suitable for just about any age over 4 years old. I’m completely intrigued by the category of “Doodle games” (games where you draw objects on the touch screen that instantiate themselves in the game). These games open up a world of possibilities for any subject and seem like the perfect convergence of device, content and user motivation.  I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention Geared by Bryan Mitchel–an extremely elegant interface that allows the user to manipulate spinning gears around variables of distance, proximity and speed.

2. Kindle for the iPhone
Of course you lose some ergonomics when compressing the Kindle into the iPhone shell, but the distribution system for e-books (especially those in the public domain) is wonderful. This app has a clever interface, lots of free books and access to the Amazon catalog via a “get book” button.

3. Abc Pocket Phonics

It’s not so much that my five year old adores this application (he does), but it’s what this type of application represents. For language acquisition, the approach is a highly compelling supplement and the touch screen features allow users to trace letters while listening to the sound or word.
Need to learn Chinese characters? Try eStroke Chinese Characters

4. iSeismometer

This application brought back memories of the first time I realized that the Wii controllers house an acceleramator and a gyrometer to measure motion and tilt. This application allows the iPhone to react to various types of external motion. This app provides a very innovative way to learn about how motion is translated into a digital representation.  You can submit your data directly to a website that associates your location with your seismograph data.  Can you think of some learning contexts for this technology?

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Popularity: 34% [?]

About ten years ago, I left UCLA in the middle of my Ph.D. work and since that time, have always had mixed emotions when contrasting the relative calm of the academic classroom with the storm of a tech company’s cubicle. Needless to say, it felt ironic to recently come full circle and return to academia. This last year at Oregon State University has been somewhat cathartic, but also surprising in terms of just how relevant E-learning has become to the academic context … and ”yes,” I had my doubts at first when I realized that some of the clouds forming over the technology industry years back have also cast a shadow over university campuses.

It was a wonderful surprise to find that many of our department’s E-learning projects focus on translating practical, research-based content for a broad cross section of the population into some type of format that can be easily understood by as many members of this audience as possible. In other words, deliverables really seem to matter to our end users and ease of access is a major factor with each project. While many projects in private industry seek to package specific proprietary information for product usage (learning software or otherwise), our projects tend to run the full gamut of content area variation (viticulture, gerontology, energy usage, gardening, canning, etc.) and are oftentimes topics that are “near and dear” to our audience. So, while our work may not be as readily classified as workplace centric, I do feel that E-learning projects that mature under the umbrella of university Extension entities can be helpful artifacts that contribute to the larger dialog of what can be deemed as both efficacious and scalable within the world of instructional technology.

To demonstrate how some of this confluence between content variation, personal/professional development, serving end-users and media comes together, I thought providing some examples would be the most efficient approach. Please note that most of the headers include a live link to the course or example–just hover your cursor over the text and click.

1. Mastery of Aging Well

Overview: An assistant professor wanted to broaden the reach of her “Aging Well” classroom-based courses by making the content available in an online format. Where possible, we tried to ensure the user experience was as straightforward and accommodating as possible based on the characteristics of our audience.  AARP sponsored this course and funding came from the USDA for its development.

Tools/Platform: PowerPoint, Adobe Presenter, Fireworks, Sony SoundForge

In support of this project:

“Getting Started” video using Camtasia

Aging Well blog to help encourage discussion of course-related topics

2. Portland Metro Area Master Gardeners Ning Site (Virtual Community)

Overview: Our group worked with several key faculty members and created a customized Ning site (using CSS, unique header). We did a basic needs analysis and populated the site with features and media that we felt would be welcomed by this audience. We then worked with this group to help ensure that there were volunteers who could help provide momentum as the community got underway. Since this site went live, the community has added numerous new features such as a Twitter widget, links to Google calendars/documents, Photosynth panoramas and many other innovative enhancements that allow gardeners to post photos and then diagnose or discuss these more collaboratively while online.
Tools: Ning, Fireworks, CSS, some Dreamweaver

3. Oregon State University BeaverTurf Ning Site (Virtual Community)
Overview: The primary stakeholder, a professor of Turf studies at Oregon State, wanted to more efficiently help foster professional relationships among golf course superintendents in the Pacific Northwest. We built a customized Ning site for his end users and “seeded” his site with videos, RSS feeds from relevant Turf groups and other assets. We also added a new Ning application to allow the group to do turf-based product reviews as this was one of many items end users requested via our needs analysis. He will also be feeding blog content into the site and we added the Twitter feed filter application to populate one page with the latest Twitter activity around turf-related key words.
Tools: Ning, Fireworks, CSS, some Dreamweaver

4. Pachyderm Presentations
This “do-it-yourself” multimedia development tool is yielding some wonderful online presentations. We offer some basic training on how to use the tool and then let faculty loose to shape their own Pachyderm story. Please note the examples below are still under development.

Ganti Murthy from the department of Biological and Ecological Engineering explains bioethanol production for the rest of us.
(or)

Sarah Griffith’s Pachyderm, “Art about Agriculture”

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Popularity: 5% [?]

The Electronic Papyrus blog recently hit 6 months of existence and we felt that some reflection on what we have learned from our experience was in order. Here is a list of lessons learned in no particular order:

Electronic Papyrus Traffic from March 2009 to September 2009 (6 months)

1)    Content quality always determines the viability of a blog. We met multiple times prior to our first post to work through issues of audience, tone, scope, main areas of interest, frequency of posts, and division of work.  We continue to meet periodically (perhaps once every other month now) to course correct or discuss strategy. Overall, we probably spend about four to five hours a week on the blog. Keep in mind though that with three contributors, this averages out to about an hour per week per contributor since each of us generally posts only once a month.

2)    Although we initially wrote our posts for a broad audience that included an academic and private enterprise readership, we have been consistently surprised to see how geographically diverse our audience is (or has become). Our readers are primarily located in the following countries (listed by highest proportion first): U.S., United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, Germany and then Italy (Cluster Map of this data). We then have a smattering of readers from all over the world, i.e. Latvia, Iran, Kuwait, Senegal, Romania, etc.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Social media networking from Twitter and Facebook, to whatever the next hot idea that evolves has one rule for success. “Know Your Audience!” is rule number one in the world of interactive communication. The real issue is less what we know about our audiences , than why we need to know.

Our university and all of the land-grant and non-land-grant peers around the country and the world are grappling with a significant issue in the new media world. We have a lot of content, which we want to push out to our target learners. Following rule number one, we know what they need. I mean really, we’re the “experts,” right? It’s our job to know who they are and what they need.

Our problem is we’re heavy on content and light on engagement. Or so says, ADVERGIRL in her latest blog post.

She lists the top four universities for actual engagement using social media networks. I’ll save you the suspense, Oregon State University is not one of them. But I think the ideas these institutions are pursing offer interesting possibilities for Outreach and Engagement at OSU.

When we consider social networks as tools for our enterprise, too often we miss the point and obsess on the “social” aspect, as if they are something that can’t be used “professionally.” However, if you focus on the “network” part of the concept it is easy to see how and where our audiences can begin to gain value engaging with us. If our goal is reciprocal, i.e. learning from the interaction as much as telling someone what we think they need to know, then the possibilities for real communication seem to surface.

The question is do we have the understanding and interest to develop online social networks that can take advantage of what we know from 100 years of face-to-face education and training? As Clive Thompson points our in his Wired magazine blog, this will not come from managers and CEOs.  Effective use of social networking will come from those who best understand their audiences and peers. It will come from those folks anywhere in an organization that are already adept at networking and understand the fundamental value of being connected.

A social network is basically the foundation for an effective team. Teams of people who know each other from some level of face-to-face interaction can be more effective in the short run than virtual teams thrown together with a goal but no previous interaction. Pure logic, it seems.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Lately I’ve been absorbed in podcasts on a variety of topics—instructional gaming, carbon markets, sleep deprivation…. I find what I want to learn about on the Web, sync to my iPhone, and listen on the go at my convenience.

Podcasts can be audio or video. RSS feeds provide subscribers the latest files, to be watched or listened to on a computer or any number of mobile devices. Podcasting makes content convenient both in time and space.

I hope I’m learning something from what I am listening to, but I’ve also been mulling over what I’m learning about the podcasting experience itself. I have 10 observations:

1. Listening to human voices talking—especially on headphones, but disconnected from visual input such as reading or watching—has an immediate, connecting, personalizing quality. Audio podcasting can capitalize on the fact that voices in isolation are enchanting to many ears, in some cases more powerful than in combination with visual images. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 14% [?]

The use of social networking tools continues to expand at a torrid pace across all layers of society both nationally and internationally. One of the larger longitudinal studies on adoption of social media in corporations comes out of Dartmouth University and shows an amazing rate of increased social media usage between 2007 and 2008.

Most recently, social networking tools have helped organize Iranian political movements and provided a catalyst to facilitate Barak Obama’s ascendency to the Presidency (read about Chris Hughes).  Who can forget the “twittering” senators who rather unceremoniously tapped on their PDAs in the middle of a senate session? I’ve lost track of the number of times a TV program has used its 30-frame-per-second platform to showcase static blog pages, quotes from Twitter and Facebook pages. From a purely technological standpoint, there’s no denying the fact that social media tools tap into an underlying human need to communicate and build social networks.

What I find intriguing is how best to utilize these tools within instructional or academic contexts. Sure, students and the upcoming generations will always be fluent in the latest social media tools, but how can business and academia leverage their fluency with the latest tools to achieve learning objectives? Some might argue that traditional models of epistemology or instruction have been rendered irrelevant by the highly collaborative, decentralizing nature of Web 2.0. I’ve read a number of articles lately that suggest the latest wave of technology is so robust that there is no longer a real need for instructional technologists, dedicated technology designers or producers.  On Harold Jarche and Jay Cross’ blog, TogetherLearn, I admittedly insinuated not long ago that there should be a more “democratized” distribution of work within educational or training departments. I am quick to agree with those who suggest Web 2.0 be used to empower learners to help create more learning content. My main contention is that the sum of effective instructional principles are not captured by a single theory of learning and in a world that continues to demand more specialization, it’s hard for me to imagine the need for skilled and experienced specialists in any domain has gone away.

On the other hand, for some, Constructivism, “just in time” learner-generated learning or decentralized peer-to-peer collaboration has displaced all other learning approaches. Since we are living in the era of the “citizen” journalist, technologist, photographer, teacher, publisher, writer, etc., the question posed might be: Is there really a need for “professionals” and do we really need training departments or traditional models of teaching people how to do things or change behavior?

Having spent time in both private industry and within academia over the last 15 or so years as an instructional technologist, I think it’s obviously important to embrace the latest technology and look for new ways of changing behavior, but I think that the reality for most enterprise-level training departments or universities is that it’s difficult at best to teach someone how to build a computer, operate on a patient or project manage an IT project without adherence to some type of process that incorporates a systematic approach to learning.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Crowdsourcing has become a popular mechanism to generate innovations and harness the contributions of mass volunteers for a specific purpose. Crowdsourcing often takes the form of a company or agency placing an open call for help to solve a problem. Individuals respond with potential solutions and in some cases receive cash rewards if their solution is selected. The concept is that the company placing the call receives a greater variety of solutions at a lower cost than would have been possible by retaining dedicated problem-solving specialists on staff.

Innovation Exchange is just one of many Web sites that have sprung up to facilitate crowdsourcing of business solutions.

MIT’s homepage design refreshes everyday, thanks to crowdsourcing.

But there is another type of crowdsourcing—one that seeks public participation not so much because of the distributed expertise but because of the sheer power of the masses.

The Galaxy Zoo project, for example, crowdsources volunteers to help classify galaxies according to their shapes. Over 200,000 people have contributed to date.

The recent tweet, blog, photo, and video feeds from Iran’s disputed presidential election could be considered a perfect storm of crowdsourcing, citizen participation feeding into the traditional news outlets.

The application of crowdsourcing to education has been discussed before—for example, by Rob Jacobs on the Education Innovation blog. Jacobs makes the case for teachers to leverage, through crowdsourcing, professional learning communities in what he calls the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative approach.

Tony Karrer’s eLearning Technology blog has also discussed crowdsourcing and e-learning technology. Exemplifying the very concept of crowdsourcing, Karrer initiated brainstorming on a new term to replace “crowdsourcing;” suggestions included “peersourcing” and “experttapping.” The type of collective input Karrer refers to appears to be focused on getting help from peers or others who have expertise in a certain area.

Another type of crowdsourcing that could also be leveraged in instructional media development is the wisdom of the masses, the potential learners who may not have any expertise in instructional design or educational curriculum development. For it is only the learners who possess the secret to how they learn.

The key to crowdsourcing is matching the need (what you are seeking) with those who can address the need (provide solutions). That is, seeking help from appropriate sources. In publishing, for example, content experts are appropriate sources of accuracy review and end-user representatives are appropriate sources of usability review.

While there may be value in an educator seeking help from other educators and professionals, as Jacob’s model suggests, there may be equal or greater value in seeking input from the learner him or herself—for it is ultimately the learner whom educators are seeking to change (that is, we want the learner to learn).

Enter crowdsourcing.

Here is the idea: Basic educational materials (publications, podcasts, learning objects, etc.) are placed in an online environment. The public is invited to enter the environment and experience the existing educational materials. They are then challenged to create and post a summary of or response to what they just learned, using whatever medium they prefer. Some users might create a short video, some might choose to write, some might create a Pachyderm.

The learner-created media would supplement the teacher-generated materials, and could enhance other learners’ experiences through social learning.

Have you tried something like this? Would you be willing to?

Popularity: 37% [?]