To ring in the New Year in a very traditional way, here’s a look at last year and predictions for this year.
Google Zeitgeist keeps track of what we have been searching for the last year. (I’m amazed at how many of the search terms I have never heard of, by the way, so don’t feel alone in that!)
And predictions for next year, from my own observations and articles around the web? Portable computing continues to get more portable, smaller, and more multi-functional. We don’t want to carry around so many devices. But the trick is to make them easy to use so that the average person would utilize them.
Biotechnology and energy fields will continue to become hotter. Search is in for some big changes(visual search, voice searching, etc.) in the next couple of years, and Google, while now mainstream, but will continue to be challenged. Internet privacy will continue to become more and more critical to protect our identities.
As we look at the future and consider that our students will be creating or marketing tools like these below, it’s interesting to ponder what skills we need to help them with now.
So here’s the list, in no certain order….
Ipods are being sold in vending machines in Atlanta and San Francisco airports. Evidently they have little trouble convincing business travelers to spontaneously purchase an Ipod to screen out travel noise.
In this interesting interview with Wired about search engines, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, reveals his next project, a search engine that functions as a community site. Ordinary users would be in charge of ranking sites for relevance and it would utilize the same community spirit used by Wikipedia. One of the most interesting things about the article to me is Wales’ willingness to say “I don’t know” about how the community will work. It seems his complete willingness to be open-ended about the project will allow it to work in a new way. How often do we say to students, I have this idea but I have no idea how it will work and let’s just try it? When asked how he would advertise the site or attract users,
Wales said, “If we’re doing interesting work and people find it fun, then people will come.” What could we do to make our classrooms more this way?
Another search tool coming down the pike that will definitely impact our students—Opera has announced a Wii browser, meaning you can use your Wii to connect to the internet and use the Wii remote to point and click. Nintendo also is reportedly releasing a game cartridge with an internet browser on it for the Nintendo DS(Game Boy).
Other new gadgets coming down the pike: The Dash Express online gps system will allow you not only to get GPS info but will get live information regarding traffic jams, destinations, routes, etc.
Technology Review describes a new neural implant being tested by Cyberkinetics, which allowed two paralyzed patients to “translate brain activity into action” and control a computer cursor and a wheelchair. While the device is currently quite large, they are already working on two wireless models that can be implanted in the patient.
And a product that is sure to roll out in 2007 and change life for students in impoverished countries is the $100 laptop. I’ve heard this downplayed a lot, but I think this is going to have an impact in the next two to three years, democratizing and empowering entire countries.
In PC Magazine’s Anderson forecast, Anderson predicts among other things that solar will go mainstream and that oil prices will go up. He predicts that Ipod and Itunes will fade, but I disagree. I expect Apple is working on ways to share music via Bluetooth or some other tool and they are working on phone/ipod technology, or internet use of the Ipod. Since the Ipod is a little hard drive, why not use it to browse the web? The iphone is predicted to make an appearance this year.
On a related note, I think the Sony e-book reader is almost dead on arrival. It may be a great idea, but the device only does one thing, and I think people want things to be more multi-functional, just for convenience.
On Fischbowl Karl Fisch made a fascinating video about future think, and one of his predictions was the Google car. Turns out Google(among others) is supporting the electric car, according to Anderson. Of course, its initial pricing of $80,000 to $100,000 puts it a tad out of the price range of educators! It does seem clear that alternative energy development is definitely entering the mainstream, and our students are likely to find opportunities in that field.
My last prediction is that this will be the last big year for Project Runway. 🙁
Your comments on my random collection of predictions? What do these mean for our curriculum, gadgets we use, or school and library design? How can we “make it work?” Happy New Year!
Just to be clear, 2020 Vision (you can link directly to it at http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/11/2020-vision.html ) was completely made up and should not be construed as actual predictions. As I said in the post, I think some of these things will come to pass and some will not, but most likely the truth will be much stranger than my fiction.
In the education space, I think there’s a good chance that 1:1 laptop initiatives will really take off in the next 2 years. It will be because of the convergence (to paraphrase Thomas Friedman) of lots of factors: declining price to performance ratios in laptops themselves, finalization of the 802.11n next generation wireless standard (a lot of school IT departments will be waiting on that before deploying full-scale wireless), increasing flat-world pressures, more educators using technology purposefully and well with students, pressure from the $100 laptop project, more web 2.0 goodies, and pressure from the students and parents themselves. I think we all have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure we help students use these tools wisely.
I agree about the laptop initiative gaining steam.
I think it’s unclear yet whether it will be the laptops we now envision or some smaller version that is somewhat more portable, like the new Samsung models seem to forecast.
I think electronic textbooks that are “living” entities are going to gain by leaps and bounds, too. Just putting a textbook online isn’t enough anymore. It needs to be markable, interactive with web links and easily updatable, too.
I wonder why more textbooks aren’t considering audible textbooks either, like podcast versions?
Some students would find that much more user friendly.
I think part of the work involved is that many teachers don’t have laptops themselves, so that seems an important step towards moving towards a laptop initiative.