Being there ... in the unevenly distributed future
Alan Levine, CogDog
Give my mobile number to a stranger I’d only met online? A virtual dog? Well yes, that’s what I did, as preparation for participating in an eye-opening session presented by Alan Levine at Darling Harbour on 18 October 2007.
This high energy technology event, featured a man renowned world-wide for his evangelism in finding “meaningful uses of technology in learning”. Alan’s work with the New Media Consortium involves providing service and resources to more than 230 universities, colleges, and museums, including 3 Australian universities via web tools, resources, and communications.
Alan Levine was funded to undertake a national speaking tour, by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.
For the last four years the New Media Consortium, has produced The Horizon Report, a concise scanning of the horizon of technologies that projects which ones are going to be widely used in the arenas of education and creative expression.
The Alan Levine workshop had two parts – the first part was a showcase of social technology, illustrating the notion of ‘being there’. The second part drew on the Horizon Report’s predictions for the future of technology in education.
Being There …..
Alan presented in person, to the hundred people in the audience, with the large screen behind him showing great visuals. Thanks to a second large screen to the side, we were able to follow three external environments, coordinated by our own Alex Hayes, LearnScope that highlighted the notion of “Being There”.
This was a presentation that reached many audiences in many ways. Apart from the people in the room, others were being involved with the presentation by way of various free share programs:
- Ustream.tv a live stream via ustream.tv was run from the camera on Alan’s laptop. Alan said it was the first time he’d ever done such a broadcast, but called it “drop dead easy to do” - a button click to have the video recorded, which can be linked to, or embedded, or even downloaded. Chat about the session was conducted via Twitter. “I cannot believe this works so smooth and it is free” were Alan’s comments in his blog afterward.
- Twitter – we had a view of Alan’s own twitter account with colleagues and devotees of Alan from around the globe were commenting and replying online to the workshop
- Second life – Alex had the audio being sent into Second Life via the voice chat, and it was clear some people somewhere were having virtual fun listening and interacting in their second bodies.
The wider audience again, will be those who access the information – streaming, chats, commentary and slides through Alan’s wikispaces and blog site or through the NSW LearnScope site.
And my mobile number? Well, along with everyone else’s it was used to pose questions to the live audience via text, with responses being displayed on screen as they came in. It was quite a din when all the phones played their incoming message tones at the same time.
…In the unevenly distributed future
This part of the event related to Alan’s work with the Horizon Report, predicting future trends in communication technology. Key messages included:
Dive in
This stuff can’t be examined from the outside, dive in, “mix it up and mash it up”. To understand its potential, you have to “be there.”
We are our networks
Our expertise is now in our networks rather than a single person. George Siemen’s theory of Connecitivism argues that learning is a network formation process - the quality and currency of our networks determines the quality of our learning.
Too big to ignore
Internet growth has been massive and is growing organically, eg 120, 000 new blogs are being created every day, over 70million weblogs in total from March 03-March 07 have been tracked.
Social software use is following the same pattern - in the United States 90% of college students have Facebook accounts; 11.4 million, or 33% Canadian people have joined Facebook since June 2004.
Social proprioception
Constant Contact media such as instant messaging, SMS, twitter give a group of people a sense of itself and enable real life, unstructured collaboration, resulting in constant development and improvement of material.
Developments
Interconnections between the technologies are happening – eg Google street view allows us to see a map representationally and in reality. Levine showed examples of how we can watch the internet expand before our eyes, such as Blogger Play, which displays in realtime, the photos people are posting to their Blogger sites.
Tips for social networking
- Sense of play
- “Self” is everyone’s favourite subject
- May not know/see/like audience
- Mistakes ok if drop it pick it up
- Document, leave tracks write up, publish
Questions
- Where do we draw the line between personal and educational?
- What happens in education if we ignore what’s going on outside the walls?
- Who drives decision-making?
- How do you do this, keep excitement without worrying how to control?
Technology walls
Like all the famous physical walls (Great, Berlin, Hadrian’s), technology walls don’t work well. Energy is spent on maintaining the walls, losing track of what they are to do. Our most important asset is people and what they can do creatively. Blocking is detrimental and is pushing our creative energy outside the walls. We heard the voice of Canadian technology expert Scott Leslie describe how “institutions need to become permeable – ways to make things cross their boundaries – will take time to reconceive organisations in an open world
The future
Alan shared the New media Consortium’s shortlist of emerging technologies which will impact on education, drawn from The Horizon Report, the 2007 shortlist of technologies in education for the USA included:
Under one year |
User created content |
|
Social networking |
2-3 years |
Mobile phones (iphone) |
|
Virtual worlds |
4-5 years |
New scholarship* and emerging forms of publication |
|
Massively multiplayer educational gaming |
*New scholarship is the process of getting recognition for scholarly work presented online. Currently research is being done and shared in online spaces, but not recognised for purposes of status and tenure in the same way as published work on paper.
See Also
NSW Learnscope
Cogdogroo
Cogdogblog.com
The New Media Consortium
The Horizon report