The New Local Paper

It's getting harder to come across people who still read their local news paper (or watch the local news for that matter). Especially in cities (like D.C.), I think reading local events is more of an exception rather than the rule.

Well if your local paper doesn't have RSS feeds or anything like that, you can just wait for a few more years until "EveryBlock" makes it to your neighborhood. EveryBlock tauts itself as a one stop shop for everything related to your neighborhood in order to enable you to keep track of what is happening. Really, it's just an extension of RSS feeds, but it's nice that it does all of the work for you. From the EveryBlock website...

EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.

I mentioned you may have to wait a couple of years, because they only have data for Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. I expect to see Washington D.C. coming up shortly. For me, this would be especially useful for checking out upcoming events and crime statistics in the neighborhood. The Washington Post does have a tool that helps with that (you need to register for an account), but I tend to only look at it once in a great while.

Library of Congress' Photos

For those not fortunate enough :-) to live in the Washington D.C. area, you may have never gone to the Library of Congress (I've actually only been once just to take some pictures...I really should join some time). Anyway, the Library of Congress recently added over 3,000 photos to Flickr.

Their reason for doing so (excerpt from the Library of Congress website):

Offering historical photograph collections through Flickr gives the Library of Congress a welcome opportunity to share some of our most popular images with a new visual community.

Internet Pajamas!!!!

In my previous post, I had a link to the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore. One of their projects is on building Internet Pajamas. To me, this is sort of creepy...but I love how it shows the realm of the possible in the field of mixed reality.

Description from the MXR website...

Internet Pajama is a novel wearable system aimed at promoting physical interaction in remote communication between parent and child. This system enables parent and child to hug one another through a novel hugging interface device and a wearable, hug reproducing jacket connected through the Internet. The hugging device is a small, mobile doll with embedded pressure sensing circuit that is able to sense varying levels of human force. This device sends hug signals to a haptic jacket that simulates the feeling of being hugged to the wearer. It features high fidelity, air pockets actuating to reproduce hug, heating elements to produce warmth that accompanies hug and color changing display to indicate distance of separation between the end users.

Where is all the augmented reality?

Ever since the term "augmented reality" was coined in 1990, there has been a fascination with the technology and concept. Unfortunately, it seems like the technology never makes it out of the R&D labs and into mainstream use.

As with a lot of other technology, the military has been the leaders in investing time/money toward augmented and mixed reality. At I/ITSEC, there are always a handful of developers showcasing their augmented reality technology...and actually, this year I saw a dramatic increase in what is possible. Obvious applications for soldiers and Marines are 1) real-time information and graphics overlaid on vision in order to enhance performance, and 2) blended virtual and real information to create realistic training environments.

In actuality, augmented and mixed reality is just a subset of embedded information and training. I think that the real crux is in the paradox that technology is successful and disseminated if it is able to disappear and be hidden to the user. Often times, the technology is most successful when it doesn't require training to succeed (i.e. look no further than video games...players are not interested in reading the user manual; they just want to play). As the technology gets smaller and is increasingly integrated into existing displays (i.e. sunglasses, windshields, etc.), we will see an explosion of possible uses.

There is a lot of information out on the Internet about augmented reality. Just a few to wet the appetite...

• ASTD Article - written in 2004, but still has some great points on the trends.
• Mixed Reality Lab - a lab associated with the National University of Singapore. They do a lot of interesting projects in the field. The link is to their current/completed project list.
• Mixed Reality - Wiki entry on the topic.

MIT Research

Back when I first started getting into the field, I remember reading some articles and publications from Kurt Squire and James Paul Gee who were tied in to some of the research that MIT was doing on games for learning. MIT has come out with some more good research.

Specifically, in 2005, the MacArthur Foundation at MIT undertook a new grant-based initiative. They recently released the results of the two-year effort. Here is the link for the series of interdisciplinary studies in the field of digital media and learning. There is a lot of good information in these six books. They are free for download and definitely worth a read (or at least a glance since there is ~1,200 pages of reading material).

The six books are:

• Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth


• Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility


• The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning


• Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected


• Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media


• Youth, Identify, and Digital Media

Web 2.0 Enables Trash-Talking

One great thing about Web 2.0 is that it enables a whole new level of trash-talking. For example, my brother and I have been emailing each other and going back and forth the past few days over which is better: cats or dogs (I have a cat...he has a dog). In an effort to state our individual cases the loudest, we have both spent time searching the YouTube archives for video that supported our claims.

Unfortunately, this video does not serve the "cat fans" well. I find this particularly funny because we have a cat and we have a child gate; however, our cat jumps over the gate much better.

FAS TWiki for Virtual Worlds

I came across a TWiki on Virtual Worlds funded by the Federation of American Scientists. This is a great resource for keeping up to date (or getting up to date) on anything and everything in Virtual Worlds.

After quickly browsing through their list of Virtual Worlds (there are a lot), I came across an interesting article and website in their Recent News section. It is a website devoted to Virtual Law. This is a topic that has definitely flown under the radar (or I just missed the articles)...and for all of the 2008 predictions that have been floating around, here is an interesting top 10 predictions for Virtual Law in 2008.

Forget WiFi...here comes Eye-Fi

To be honest...Eye-Fi isn't actually meant to replace WiFi, but rather complement it. Here's a description of Eye-Fi from Fortune:

What the Eye-Fi does is automatically stream photos from your digital camera via your Wi-Fi network to your PC or an online photo service. What the Eye-Fi team has done essentially is wrap a service around a common flash memory card and a low-power Wi-Fi chip from Atheros (ATHR). It’s these lower power Wi-Fi chips that are extremely interesting, when you start thinking about other services they enable.

These "other services" are nothing earth-shattering, but they are neat little capabilities. Eye-Fi would enable communication between a host of devices and gadgets:

It could be smarter light switches that turn off and on via an e-mail or text message, or LCD picture frames that stream your e-mail to your bedside and upload a recipe to the kitchen screen every day before dinner. Or maybe some slick mini-display that scrolls updates from your Facebook friends on one side, reads you the news on the other, and does any number of other things that you find important or entertaining.

Probably will involve an increased emphasis on security for the wireless network. It wouldn't be good having someone else be able to turn your lights on/off.

Salary and Compensation Report from The eLearning Guild

I was just perusing The eLearning Guild's 2008 report on salary and compensation for the the industry (you can join for free to read the report). On the whole, The eLearning Guild does some excellent research, but my one gripe is that sometimes they drill down so much that the data is not very useful. This is a result of the extremely small number of data entries they receive for certain metrics (i.e. there are several instances where only one person fits the breakdown).

I know this is hardly their fault for not being able to get more people to respond and they are only trying to provide as much visualization of the data as possible, but what is someone to do when they read that one male (age 60-70) is making $15,000 as an intern, while another male (age 50-60) is making $83,000 as an intern? As any statistician knows, the higher the sample size, the more likely it is to be representative of the population. I think reporting on data sets of "1" are misleading at best and give someone (in this case...interns) in the industry a greatly skewed sense of what is to be expected.

I'm not just picking on The eLearning Guild. Training Magazine does the same thing.

Top 10 Wireless Trends

In the spirit of predictions in learning technologies for 2008, I came across this list of Top 10 Wireless Trends for the New Year. This list is below, but I would also recommend reading the article to understand more of what they mean:

1. Wireless networks will remain the domain of wireless operators.

2. The first Android (Google's mobile platform) phones hit the market.

3. Cameraphones will get even fancier.

4. Mobile phone ads will come to a cell phone screen near you.

5. WiMax will become available.

6. Openness will continue to dominate the wireless lexicon.

7. Nokia will become a major mobile software player.

8. Getting lost will get harder.

9. More touchscreens.

10. Silicon Valley will become a wireless industry hot spot.

Gadgetmania

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is going on in Las Vegas this week. Since it is closed to the general public, I have to resort to living vicariously through journalists and bloggers who are fortunate enough to attend the event.

CNN is sending a host of journalists to cover the show. They have several articles that are worth a read. One article covers Bill Gate's last speech at CES as the CEO of Microsoft. In it, he talks about the future of the Xbox platform, voice recognition in phones, the future of data storage and collaboration in the Internet Age, and the future of TV (MS will be broadcasting this summer's Olympic Games using their Silverlight software).

I foresee several tech gadgets that will impact the learning field being unveiled at the show. Here is a link to a list of 14 gizmos that will be unveiled at the show.

Value of Predictions

I've been reading a few posts on 2008 predictions. Stephen Downes wrote a post that critiqued and graded several of the 2007 predictions. It was an interesting read, but I found myself agreeing with some of the concerns Karl Kapp raised about the whole grading activity...especially the portion of grading your own prediction. Stephen gave himself an A-; however, his "prediction" on the trend of video continuing in popularity is very much of the "more of the same" prediction that he criticizes other people for. Also, since the personal learning environment didn't happen (which he said it would) and paid content and software remains strong (which he said it wouldn't), it begs the question of why the A-. Yes...the Wii may have been the greatest tech story of the year, but this hardly had a earth moving shift on the learning market.

All that being said, Stephen does bring up good points on what makes a good prediction. That is, it should actually happen, and it should be precise and novel. This helped me revise my original prediction, but in the end, I guess I don't get that wrapped up about predictions in general. Someone that guessed it correctly this year could fail miserably next year. I think the real value is seeing what different people from different expertise view as up-and-coming areas in the learning field because it expands your horizon.

What I actually appreciated most about Stephen's post was his summary of what happened in the learning field in 2007 (which probably wasn't his original intention). Because there were such a wide range of predictions, it was a nice little recap of the field in 2007.

The Big Question for January

After returning from a nice, long Christmas/New Year vacation, I've been playing catch-up on emails and blogs (thank goodness for Google Reader). One of the interesting posts was Tony Karrer's "Big Question" for January. The question is "What are your predictions for Learning in 2008?" Back in October, I did a short post on the numerous amount of claims, predictions, and trends (usually displayed as a Top 10 list).

I indicated in the post back in October (and the prediction remains for 2008) that the number one trend will be an emphasis on performance improvement. We've already seen some of the shift with web 2.0 technologies and getting employees information when and where they need it. In 2008, there will be more than one learning initiative that will fail simply because it did not consider the desired performance of the individual. I believe that this also ties into a larger accountability requirement for the field. Specifically, the field will be held accountable for the claims we are making (i.e. Games will increase X; allowing employees to blog will add Y; a Wiki will result in Z; etc.). This will be the number one hurdle that informal learning technologies will face.

I think in 2007, the learning field looked like it slowed down, but in actuality it just grew in a different direction. I would agree that grown-breaking growth in formal learning slowed, but we saw tremendous potential and growth in informal learning. In order to sustain that growth, there will need to be data that supports the claims.

One other thing that I think we will see in 2008 is the release of brain-controlled programs for learning and performance improvement on tasks. These have been in the R&D stage for a few years (specifically for controlling video games, but 2008 will mark the release of this technology for the learning field.

I'm interested in reading what other predictions there are for 2008. In the end, I believe each year holds great promise for the learning field and the year will most likely be marked by controlled growth. "Controlled growth" meaning there will be some fads that come and go, but in the end, the field will be better off next year at this time.