Tech in Ed Is Not Always EdTech

How many general technology trends will have an impact on education? Tech strategist Amber MacArthur writes that 2016 tech headlines were often negative (fake news online, exploding Samsung phones, US election hacking allegations) but her own list of 4 trends for 2017 ignore what she calls "micro busts in the life cycle of technology" in favor of larger trends. In Amber's list, I find a surge in companies supporting social entrepreneurship as the least likely, but the other three all have educational impact possibilities.

She looks at that emerging generation of digital-first thinkers that we are calling Generation Z. She also discusses two trends that have been on the horizon for a few years without having a real educational impact:  artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

Generation Z is still being defined but they are described as as being wary of brands (and your college is a brand) and more committed to social change than millennials, and they are more adept at using tech (filtering content, using devices) being the first truly digital generation. They are the youth born from around 1996, so they include a wide range of students ranging from 5-21 today.

Can we extrapolate their "wants" as workers to the classroom? They want a physical workspace, but a the ability to work remotely and have flexible hours. That sounds like an online student to me. And yet some believe this suggests Gen Z will place more importance on face-to-face communication than many millennials.  

AI will certainly impact industry, but probably not the classroom - unless you consider how those changes in the job market will impact what we teach.

This CNBC article by Jeff Selingo sees the connection. "The question that politicians should be discussing now is what kind of education is needed to stay ahead of automation, or more likely, to complement technology. Previous changes in the nature of work all required massive policy shifts in education. Universal high school started at the beginning of the 19th Century in the move from the farm to the factory. The move from the factory to the office in the 1960s and 1970s required education after high school and began the universal college movement."

The Internet of Things might give us greater efficiencies in homes and many industries, but will IoT enter education? IoT works on data and once again that means that we need to be teaching about these trends and the technologies that support them. There is a growing demand for big data analysts and people who can secure that data.
Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, spoke on a panel at the World Economic Forum: "The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won't even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room."

FURTHER READING
Future of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Jobs (Pew Internet)  
The Internet of Things Heat Map (Forrester)  


                Amber MacArthur sampler

The Apple User Experience

user design



September is not only the start of a new academic year, but also the time for Apple announcements. Apple has an odd connection to its users. They are devoted, often called "fan boys," who used to line up at stores for new products. I doubt the lines will be very long for their newest announcements. But they have famously been known - especially in the Jobs days - to not listen to users but to tell user what they want and need.

The new iPhones, called the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, aren't very new. The most attention has gone to the new iPhones lacking a headphone jack. This helps make them more water-resistant, but it will require Bluetooth earbuds or phones. That is a significant additional cost and it will sap more power from that precious battery. Some of us also plug other external devices using that plug (I do that in my car.) This is the kind of deletion that recalls the removal of floppy disk drives, additional USB ports and CD/DVD drives which force users to move on and trash older media and devices. Is that good user design and a good user experience?

A colleague said to me that Apple's approach is like many teachers: tell the users what they need, rather than base your design on what they want. If you believe that Apple (or teachers) know better what their users need, then it is good design. But anyone who studies or works in user design would say that in both cases not spending more time in assessing what your users want is a flaw.

As an iPhone user, I was not looking for a revised home button with force sensitivity which will vibrate to give feedback - and I'm not sure that I need it. The iPhones are more water-resistant, but we all know that "resistant" is not "waterproof." Don't drop it in the toilet and expect no problems.

The Plus model of the new iPhone includes a dual-lens camera to take more professional-grade photos. But Android phones have had much better cameras without two lenses for a few years.

I don't see the Apple Watch as a hit, but the Apple Watch Series 2 will appear. It has GPS and Pokémon Go is available for it. Does that make you want to run out and buy one?

After the death of Steve Jobs, the cry went up that Apple would stop innovating and some of those who said that feel that they were correct in their prediction. Whatever happened to that Apple TV that Jobs was saying was on its way? The biggest change in smartphones the past few years is that users are using them less and less as phones and more and more as a computer. Your "phone company" contract is really a data contract.

I'm not sure that much more can be done with smartphones as hardware. the more important changes may be in the operating systems, battery life, more AI and new business models for data.


Is Education Ready to Connect to the Internet of Things?

IoT

I first encountered the term "Internet of Things" (IoT) in 2013. It is the idea that "things" (physical devices) would be connected in their own network(s). The talk was that things in your home, office and vehicles would be wirelessly connected because they were embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity. Things would talk to things. Things would collect and exchange data.

Some of the early predictions seemed rather silly. Taking a tagged carton of milk out of the refrigerator and not putting it back would tell my food ordering device (such as an Amazon Echo) that I was out of milk. My empty Bluetooth coffee mug would tell the Keurig coffeemaker to make me another cup.

But the "smart home" - something that pre-dates the Internet - where the HVAC knew I was almost home and adjusted the temperature off the economical setting to my comfort zone and maybe put on the front light and started dinner, was rather appealing.

In 2014, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) published its “7 Things You Should Know About the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (and its annoying abbreviation of IoT) sounded rather ominous as I imagined them proliferating across our social and physical landscapes. The ELI report said “the IoT has its roots in industrial production, where machine-to-machine communication enabled the manufacture of complex items, but it is now expanding in the commercial realm, where small monitoring devices allow such things as ovens, cars, garage doors, and the human heartbeat to be checked from a computing device.”

Some of the discussions have also been about considerations of values, ethics and ideology, especially if you consider the sharing of the data gathered. 

As your watch gathers data about your activity, food intake and heart rate, it has valuable data about your health. I do this on my Fitbit with its app. Perhaps you share that with an online service (as with the Apple watch & Apple itself) in order to get further feedback information about your health and fitness and even recommendations about things to do to improve it. If you want a really complete analysis, you are asked (hopefully) to share your medications, health history etc. Now, what if that is shared with your medical insurer and your employer?

Might we end up with a Minority Report of predictive analytics that tell the insurance company and your employer whether or not you are a risk?

Okay, I made a leap there, but not a huge one. 

This summer, EDUCAUSE published a few articles on IoT concerning higher education and the collaboration required for the IoT to work. I don't see education at any level really making significant use of IoT right now, though colleges are certainly gathering more and more data about students. That data might be used to improve admissions. Perhaps, your LMS gathers data about student activity and inactivity and can use it to predict what students need academic interventions.

It's more of an academic challenge to find things that can be used currently.

History Lesson: Way back in 1988, Mark Weiser talked about computers embedded into everyday objects and called this third wave "ubiquitous computing." Pre-Internet, this was the idea of many computers, not just the one on your desk, for one person. Add ten years and in 1999, Keven Ashton posited a fourth wave which he called the Internet of Things.

Connection was the key to both ideas. It took another decade until cheaper and smaller processors and chipsets, growing coverage of broadband networks, Bluetooth and smartphones made some of the promises of IoT seem reasonable. 

Almost any thing could be connected to the Internet. We would have guessed at computers of all sizes, cars and appliances. I don't think things such as light bulbs would have been on anyone's list.

Some forecasters predict 20 billion devices will be connected by 2020; others put the number closer to 40-100+ billion connected devices by that time.

And what will educators do with this?


The Augmented Reality of Pokémon Go

Go
People have been searching for creatures and running down their phone batteries this month since Pokémon Go was released.
Is there any connection of this technology to education, Ken? Let's see.

First off, Pokémon Go is a smartphone game that uses your phone’s GPS and clock to detect where and when you are in the game and make Pokémon creatures appear around you on the screen. The objective is to go and catch them.

This combination of a game and the real world interacting is known as augmented reality (AR). AR is often confused with VR - virtual reality. VR creates a totally artificial environment, while augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it.

The term augmented reality goes back to 1990 and a Boeing researcher, Thomas Caudell, who used it to describe the use of head-mounted displays by electricians assembling complicated wiring harnesses.

A commercial applications of AR technology that most people have seen is the yellow "first down" line that we see on televised football games which, of course, is not on the actual field.

Google Glass and the displays called "heads-up" in car windshields are another consumer AR application. there are many more uses of the technology in industries like healthcare, public safety, gas and oil, tourism and marketing.

Back to the game... My son played the card game and handheld video versions 20 years ago, so I had a bit of Pokémon education. I read that it is based on the hobby of bug catching which is apparently popular in Japan, where the games originated. Like bug catching or birding, the goal is to capture actual bugs or virtual birds and Pokémon creatures and add them to your life list. The first generation of Pokémon games began with 151 creatures and has expanded to 700+, but so far only the original 151 are available in the Pokémon Go app.

I have seen a number of news reports about people doing silly, distracted things while playing the game, along with more sinister tales of people being lured by someone via a creature or riding a bike or driving while playing. (The app has a feature to try to stop you using from it while moving quickly, as in a car.)

Thinking about educational applications for the game itself doesn't yield anything for me. Although it does require you to explore your real-world environment, the objective is frivolous. So, what we should consider is the use of VR in education beyond the game, while appreciating that the gaming aspect of the app is what drives its appeal and should be used as a motivator for more educational uses.
AR
The easiest use of VR in college classrooms is to make use of the apps already out there in industries. Students in an engineering major should certainly be comfortable with understanding and using VR from their field. In the illustration above, software (metaio Engineer) allows someone to see an overlay visualization of future facilities within the current environment. Another application can be having work and maintenance instructions directly appear on a component when it is viewed.
Augmented reality can be a virtual world, even a MMO game. The past year we have heard more about virtual reality and VR headsets and goggles (like Oculus Rift) which are more immersive, but also more awkward to use.This immersiveness is an older concept and some readers may recall the use of the term "telepresence.” 

Telepresence referred to a set of technologies which allowed a person to feel as if they were present, or to to give the appearance of being present, or to have some impact at place other than their true location. Telerobotics does this, but more commonly it was the move from videotelephony to videoconferencing. Those applications have been around since the end of the last century and we have come a god way forward from traditional videoconferencing to doing it with hand-held mobile devices, enabling collaboration independent of location.

In education, we experimented with these applications and with the software for MMOs, mirror worlds, augmented reality, lifelogging, and products like Second Life. Pokémon Go is Second Life but now there is no avatar to represent us. We are in the game and the game is the world around us, augmented as needed. The world of the game is the world.