Monday, January 21, 2013

Key Trends in Educational Technology -- Preliminary View

The image below is a visual representation of my recent thinking about educational technology and the important trends that I see emerging, particularly within the world of Higher Education. I will put up a complete post with explanations later in the week, but wanted to share this today.


Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Shift to Touch Will Introduce Major Changes in Education


In spring 2010, when the first iPad was released and Steve Jobs announced that the device would not provide support for Flash, a senior product manager at a major educational publisher asked me how long I felt his company had until it would need to replace its Flash-based animations and interactivities.

"Fall 2012," I said. "My guess is 25% of students in the Higher Education market will be using tablets by that time so you'd better aim to fix the Flash problem by then."

In the ensuing two years, I have tracked the growth of tablet devices in Higher Education and have consistently predicted that 25% of incoming first-year students would own tablet devices. That number seems to be corroborated, at least indirectly by the latest Pew report showing 25% of American adults own tablets, and a survey of college and university students by my employer that showed 24% tablet ownership across all student types.

Of course, the popularity of tablet devices in only just now beginning to hit its full stride. NPD's Display Research is reporting that tablet sales will surpass PC sales for the first time in 2013. According to Gartner, we have already seen the market shift, with worldwide PC shipments dropping 4.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012.

In presentations, I'm always quick to point out tablets for a variety of reasons. Adoption/market penetration trends for tablets are much higher than those we witnessed for laptops and smartphones  In addition, primarily because they are personal lifestyle devices, we are seeing a higher and more rapid refresh rate for tablets than we did for laptops and smartphones.

The biggest disruption introduced by tablets, however, is that they are touch devices and are fundamentally altering the way we interact with content and information. The ability to touch, move, and interact with information without the use of an artificial intermediary device (such as a keyboard) may prove to be the most radical shift in learning in the last century -- bigger than modern schools and universities and bigger than computers.

Touch devices will not only cause us to redesign and redefine educational technology solutions, but also our curricula and our learning content. How should we design and package content so that it can be touched and connected, and so that it offers up interactivity? How do we change our courses so that they address the kinesthetic interaction with and synthesis of information?

By the way, if you find yourself skeptical about the real popularity and impact of tablets with regards to the adoption of touch technology, keep in mind that tablets are only part of the force shaping this shift. As this CNET News article points out, laptops are also moving to touch whether we think we need it or not. By next fall, in fact, it will be difficult to find a newer Windows 8 laptop or ultrabook without touch capabilities.1

At first, I believe we will see a fairly even split between using the touch screen for navigation, Web browsing, music, and reading applications, while the physical keyboard will remain the primary method for entering formal data and working with productivity applications. That status quo isn't likely to persist, however, as voice commands added to touch capabilities will continue to expand the quantity of activity that users engage in directly and without a keyboard.

1It's easy to scoff at the impact of Windows 8, but we should keep in mind that the operating system has already tallied 60 million licenses, which puts it on par with Windows 7 adoption.

Monday, January 14, 2013

New Trends in Information Search Portend Changes in Education


The latest stats from comScore show that mobile search continues to grow rapidly and is eroding the traditional desktop search business. Mobile and vertical search — retail, travel, social — are killing the traditional desktop search business. According to Ben Schachter, of Macquaire:
"We estimate that as much as 25-30% of all Internet search traffic could be coming from mobile devices as of year-end. Moreover, in certain categories, such as restaurants, we believe that well more than 30% of queries are already coming from mobile devices (other key categories such as Consumer Electronics, Beauty & Personal, Finance/Insurance, and Autos also have a meaningful share of mobile queries)."
This latest data reflects the continuing evolution of consumer information habits, which are mutating rapidly as our lifestyles and professions become increasingly integrated with mobile devices. In terms of the broader implications of this change, here are a number of trends to watch.
  1.  Desktop-->mobile -- Mobile is just getting started. Smartphones already outsell PCs and tablets will likely follow suit this year. With desktop search our pursuit and discovery of information is limited to specific locations and specific temporal boundaries. For mobile users information research is ubiquitous.
  2. Linear-->organic -- In the desktop era information searches have been associated with a specific project or personal need and have been mostly unidirectional. We search for one thing at a time, review the results, filter those results, and search again if necessary. It's focused and linear, and we stay with the process until we manage to find what we're looking for. In the new information era, our queries are like our real life -- they are messy and organic. We look for multiple, often disparate, pieces of information at the same time and follow a crooked, serendipitous path to discovery.
  3. Discovery-->connected -- When I first began working with information in a formal manner, I used analog methods like browsing through a card catalog or printed periodical index, or simply wandering through the stacks in a library. As search technology was introduced into the process, I became focused on information discovery. In both of these phases I navigated to specific locations and and executed targeted and linear investigations. When I found what I was looking for I was left to figure out how the information was related to my overall research goals and how it might be connected to other information or areas of interest. In the new information era, however, we have come to expect consumer services that deliver increasingly connected results -- a piece of information is connected to other personal activity or research interests, or it is connected to communities of interest or related topics that lie beyond my initial inquiry.
  4. Type-->touch/voice -- Over the next five years we will witness a majority of children in elementary and middle school for whom the primary method of information research is entirely through touch or voice. Within ten years, this same phenomenon will rule information interactions of university students and the general adult population. This radical change in modalities means big changes in the way information itself is designed and distributed.
  5. Text-->graphic visualization -- Most people think of information in terms of text. That's because, historically, we have retrieved and processed information in amounts that can be rendered  feasibly as text. Moving forward, however, the amounts of information/data are becoming so large that text cannot always communicate information results adequately. This means a greater occurrence of data visualization and other new forms of presorting information.
Few would likely deny that this shift in information technologies and user behaviors portends big changes in education and learning. At the very least, I believe it means that:
  • We will need to help students develop new information literacy skills, curricular strategies for new modalities such as touch. This may well be one of the biggest challenges we face as educators since we have only known a world in which information has always been accessed indirectly through the use of intermediary devices such as keyboards.
  • We will need to adopt new methodologies for course/learning delivery. The current pedagogical model based on the linear presentation and evaluation of information will necessarily expand to embrace new information types and skills.
  • We will need to create and adopt new information/library technologies to take advantage of the incredible evolutions of information and, just as importantly, to meet the expectations of students and faculty who are also technology consumers and accustomed to the information services offered by innovative technology giants.