Trends

Today, March 26, 2012, Blackboard Inc. announced "a major investment in open source" with a news release that it has acquired Moodlerooms and NetSpot, two leading providers of open source online learning solutions to the education industry. Both organizations will "continue to operate independently to support their clients."

Moodlerooms and NetSpot are official Moodle Partners, and each will continue their current programs to support clients with no changes to their leadership or their support and service models.

In addition, each team will also become part of Blackboard’s new Education Open Source Services group, dedicated to supporting the use and development of open source learning technologies globally.

It is hard to predict a trend in educational technology for the next year. But I recently came across a piece attempting to identify the "Most Significant Metatrends for the Next 10 Years."

From this list, I definitely agree that taking 5, 7, 8, 9 & 10 collectively, we have much of my own argument for a new kind of school (School or University 2.0 are often the tags for these ideas).

This top ten of metatrends are from A Communiqué from the Horizon Project Retreat, January 2012, which is a NMC Horizon Project publication under a Creative Commons attribution license.

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.

2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and e-reader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices.

3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network--and already is at its edges. mobiThinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85 percent of new devices can access the mobile Web.

4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.

5. Openness - concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information--is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media.

6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry.

7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments--but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa.

8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount.

9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia--and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.


10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

A new report from Gartner,"The New PC Era: The Personal Cloud,"predicts that in the next two years users will store more of their data in the cloud than on their personal computers.

While this means that those users will have greater device flexibility and probably be more productive, schools and businesses will have to rethink their delivery of applications and services.

Gartner identifies five "megatrends" to the personal cloud (as opposed to the services we already use in the cloud for work and school): consumerization, virtualization, app-ification, the self-service cloud, and the mobility shift.

I agree with Gartner's idea that the tendency that past decade has been for new technology to emerge first in the consumer market rather than the enterprise market. Why? Increasing user tech literacy, better mobile devices, the ubiquity of Internet access, social media, and, to a degree, the "democratization" of technology. (Though the shift to smarter and more expensive mobile devices and service plans also means the possibility of more limited access to this technology.)

My own community college campus is just moving to virtualization this academic year. Not everyone on campus is happy with having a "dumber" terminal on their desk that stores things in the cloud. They don't like giving up control, but the advantages are clear if done correctly.
I have spent a lot of time this past year thinking, writing and presenting on the "app-ification" trend in the way applications are being designed, delivered, and consumed by users. Apps have users continually accessing server/cloud-resident applications on their phones, tablets and pads - and increasingly on their more traditional laptops. Unlike the computer in my office that is getting dumber, my smartphone is getting smarter. Add to that better user interfaces, touch and gesture-based controls, speech recognition, location and contextual awareness and my phone IS my computer.

When I travel this week to a conference, my only device will be my iPhone. I will miss the bigger features of my laptopn, but I don't miss bringing it along. I have never been a fan of having to pay for the Net in a hotel that just got hundreds of dollars from me, when I can get it free in a place where I make a $3 coffee purchase. My phone will jump on the free wi-fi or get me what I need through my data plan.

Like many users, my first taste of any personal cloud was using Google Documents. I used it to store my own documents, share them with co-workers and access them at different locations and on different computers. It almost eliminated my use of flashdrives.

More recently, I started using Dropbox which offers free cloud storage and also paid services for greater storage. You can get a free account on Dropbox easily. You can install their small app on a computer and then your Dropbox folder's files are automatically synced and backed up online. If I work on a document or PowerPoint at work, it's there when I get home and open the folder on my home office computer. If I am working on a computer that isn't my own, I can still access all my Dropbox files online at their site. I use that for all my presentations and for "carrying" documents to other locations. You could also use it to backup your photos or videos (though that might require purchasing additional storage). You get at least 2GB free.

The story is that Dropbox was initially written co-founder Drew Houston forgot his USB key on a bus ride. Students with a valid school email address get 500MB for each person they invite to Dropbox, so I recommend using it to my students.

This mobility shift because of the increased use of smartphones and tablets needed the cloud to allow these devices to do tasks that we associate with "computers."  Of course, what we think of as a computer or even as technology is also changing.

Are we in the post-PC era? Not yet. But personal computing is certainly changing and it will continue to impact how we work and learn.

Slideshare does an annual "Zeitgeist" about what people are doing with their presentations these days.

For 2011, they found that:

– the average presentation has 22 slides, up from 19 in 2010.
- Japanese presentations have the most slides per presentation, but they have reduced their average number of slides from 42 in 2010 to 29 in 2011.
- men still include more slides than women in their presentations
- the average file size for presentations was 9.2MB, up from 7.9MB in 2010.
- as far as tagging, the “business” tag remained in first place, with “marketing” and “design” replacing “market” and “research” from 2010.
- relative traffic comes mostly from technology blogs - Techcrunch was #1 with Mashable, Read Write Web, VentureBeat, and GigaOm close behind.
- Microsoft PowerPoint at 81% crushes Apple's Keynote at 1.7% of the posted presentations.