The pleasures and challenges of keeping up with learning technology, and with what our learners are exploring, are clearly visible in the recently released 2011 Horizon Report, published jointly by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.
Implicit in the latest report is the reminder of how much there is to master — for us and for those we serve. There is also much more: by effectively and intriguingly highlighting trends and challenges in technology and in learning, the report offers a short course in what we need to know to continue helping learners.
Emerging technology in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry
The eighth in this continuing series of reports provides a timely and effective snapshot of the tech tools that the Horizon Report authors feel will probably be very influential worldwide in the next five years — primarily in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.
It also gives us a fresh and stimulating look at what we might be ignoring because some of these tools have become a familiar part of our learning landscape.
The report cites e-books and mobile devices, for example, for their transformative nature as much as for their current ubiquity. In addition, both of these technologies, according to the experts who wrote the Horizon Report, will enter the mainstream of use for teaching and learning in institutions within the next twelve months. The report writers note the new kinds of reading experiences made possible by electronic books, including videos and interactive elements as well as bookmarking, annotation, and other useful functions, some with social features.
Mobile devices, which received attention in the 2010 report and earlier editions, continue to require attention from e-Learning developers because so many of our current students and future workplace learners are so familiar with them. To ignore mLearning, at this point, is to set ourselves up for failure as trainer-teacher-learners, the report strongly implies.
The mid-term horizon
The report also is very helpful in making us aware of what we’re likely to see on the two- to three-year horizon: the maturing of augmented reality — which the report refers to as “blended reality” — in education, and even more interesting and stimulating uses of game-based learning.
“One of the most promising aspects of augmented reality is that it can be used for visual and highly interactive forms of learning, allowing the overlay of data onto the real world as easily as it simulates dynamic process,” the writers note. The examples they cite — handheld devices helping students explore physical spaces after simulated environmental disasters, as well as using those devices to view historical images tagged to contemporary locations — hint at tools we will soon be using if we haven’t already begun incorporating them into our work.
The report also helps us understand how we’re going to be using game-based learning to more effectively work with learners. Examples explored within the report helpfully call our attention to an engineering game teaching students about cryogenics, a music game teaching students how to read and compose music, and a game teaching students “how to conduct forensics at a crime scene.” These elements are far beyond what many of us are currently using, but well within our reach if we dive into the process now rather than waiting until we’re far behind those we’re meant to assist.
The far-term horizon
There is more on the most distant horizon — four to five years from now — and the report effectively leads us to resources to prepare for what’s coming: the maturity of gesture-based computing and learning analytics.
Citing examples ranging from John Underkoffler’s 2010 TED talk on G-Speak (technology that tracks hand movements and allows users to manipulate 3-D objects in space) to haptics (tactile feedback to the user), the writers document that gesture-based computing is already present in training simulations. They predict that it will support new ways of interaction, expression, and activity.
The survey of learning analytics — the use and interpretation of data in assessing academic progress, predicting future performance, and spotting potential issues in ways that improve our ability to identify the challenges our learners face — is particularly thought- and action-provoking. The writers note that with the maturing of this technology we’re likely to be better poised to help learners overcome those difficulties before being overwhelmed.
The result, they say, is a goal that many e-Learning developers support, the enhancing of teaching, learning, and assessment.
