Serendipity35

Is there anything truly disruptive in education? To a teacher, "disruptive" has the negative sound of that kid in the back row who is ruining your class. Disruptive technologies are innovations that upset the existing order of things, often in a good way.

It's an idea that comes from the business section of the bookshelves. Typical scenario: a lower-end innovation catches the fancy of the public, for example, Internet video like YouTube. It might suit the needs of people who are not being served by current products - like young people with commercial television. It it succeeds over a long enough period, the capacity/performance of the innovation begins to displace the established product. People stop watching traditional TV.

The real problem for the incumbent technology (often a big company - a Microsoft, a Blackboard) is that they often don’t react to these disruptive innovations until it’s too late. Why would they do that? Part of it is that they view this new market as rather uninteresting because it is low end, low cost and perhaps low profit.

Sometimes the disruptor isn't a small company. Look at the idea that Google is disrupting the office-productivity application software business of something like the Microsoft Office package by making its applications free and available on the Net cloud.

Is there a disruptive technology in education?  Educators might nominate cloud computing or collaborative tools.

What got me thinking about this line of questioning was a book I was reading while having a coffee at my local Barnes & Noble. (SIDENOTE: Has anyone else noticed how B&N stores with a cafe are turning into libraries? There are people there with a stack of the store's books, their notebook, a laptop and they are working. Is this a good business model for a bookstore?)

When I look at a technology like cloud computing and a service like Google Apps, I conclude that people are not using Apps because it is better than Microsoft Office. They aren't better. They use them because - Is it because they are free? Maybe. I use Apps, but I already have Office for free from my employer.

So, that book I picked up in the store was The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business written by Clayton M. Christensen.

Christensen coined the term "disruptive technology" in a 1995 article which he coauthored with Joseph Bower and his book is aimed at managers rather than educators. When he wrote a sequel, The Innovator's Solution, he replaced "disruptive technology" with the term "disruptive innovation" because he says few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character.

Christensen might say that some people use Google Apps because of "low-end disruption." The service works for users who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high-end of the market.

YouTube might be considered a "new-market disruption" because its target audience (though I'm not sure some of these technologies actually knew who their target audience was when they started) are people who felt their needs weren't being served by the existing technology. The Linux operating system (OS) when it was first introduced wasn't "better" than existing systems (like UNIX and Windows NT) but it was cheap and pretty good. Today, after many improvements, Linux might actually end up displacing the commercial UNIX distributions. Is Microsoft afraid? Even if they are not, they better be paying attention.

In education, I can't say that I see one "killer app" that is so widely used that it has dethroned a king or queen. Yes, 16mm projectors were pushed into AVA closets by the VHS players and then by the DVD players. Has streaming video pushed out the DVD? Is that a disruptive innovation or is it just video in new delivery systems?

I'm not alone in thinking about disruption in educational terms. There's actually a paper by Christensen, Aaron, and Clark from the EDUCAUSE 2001 Forum for the Future of Higher Education called "Disruption in Education."

Christensen’s theory, developed in the corporate realm, is based on the constant pursuit of excellence by both businesses and higher education institutions. As the quality of products increases, they often surpass the needs of their consumers, leaving a gap to be filled by a disruptive innovation (a product or service of lower quality or performance that more closely matches consumers’ needs). Other features make the innovation appealing as well, such as being cheaper, simpler, and more convenient to use. Early adopters of the disruptive technology or service most often are the least demanding customers in a market.

That last sentence catches me. Early adopters are the least demanding. They say: "The video quality isn't anywhere near as good as a DVD - but it works and it's free. Google Docs doesn't have all the features of Word - but I don't use most of the Word features anyway and with Docs I can collaborate on a document online easily and never even have to email a file or carry a flashdrive copy of the file."

Look at the early adopters in your school: the ones who are trying out Second Life or signed up to pilot Moodle while everyone else was in Blackboard or were the first ones to try a podcast, create a wiki, or have a blog for class. If they really were early in their adoption, they were probably willing to accept some shortcomings in the technology innovation because they also saw the potential.

Two headlines from the virtual world...

First, from the blog of Second Life comes words that Linden Labs and IBM Teleport Across Virtual Worlds. Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into another.Sounds like something out of Star Trek. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world without logging out of one world and logging in to the other.

Apparently, they have been working on this type of thing since last fall and author Nick Carr had half-seriously wondered if World of Warcraft avatars could attack and conquer parts of Second Life if they were allowed to pass from world to world.

One possible point of interest in all this for educators is that as virtual worlds slowly make their way into classrooms, interoperability across virtual worlds will become critical. For Second Life, it will help them maintain the viability of SL as an increasing number of virtual worlds become available. I'm not convinced that SL will be the platform for educators, but it may be one of them. The portability of users and digital assets will be important to creators.

In some ways, it reminds me of the CMS wars. Second Life is WebCT/Blackboard - the big commercial player with a strong foothold. But coming along are "open source" worlds that will compete and may look more attractive to educational institutions - the Moodles of virtual worlds.

Speaking of which, reading Niniane Wang's (Engineering Manager at Google) post on their house blog, I see that they have launched their own virtual world project.

...I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”.

Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.

To learn more about Lively, please visit www.lively.com. Lively is available through a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer and is Windows only for now.

Lively is not a "world" like Second Life but instead splits the space into different rooms. It runs completely in the browser and you use your Google account to log in and create your own avatars, interact with other users, watch YouTube clips on virtual TVs, share your own photos etc. It's pretty cool that the rooms can be easily embedded into any web page.

Creating rooms is fairly simple using a number of templates to get started. For now, all virtual items for Lively are for free. Moving avatars around the rooms is clunky (you have to drag them through the room) and SL users may find the rooms and limitations restrictive at this early stage. I only played for a hour or so in it, but I couldn't fly or interact much except for chat. The rooms and avatars generally look more like videogame graphics than the rich SL locations at this point.

There have been rumors for awhile that Google was planning something like this in Google Earth, and it would be exciting to think that these rooms might be able to move into the Google Earth world in some way.

Google posted a rather unimpressive Lively video in YouTube, but it will give you a sense of how these rooms and avatars look now, or check out some of the popular rooms.

Not that we need a new search engine, but I tried out a new way of searching called Viewzi. It offers a variety of ways of viewing your search results.

You start in the usual way - type in a keyword or term. I tried a vanity search on "Ronkowitz." I'm not the only one out there, but I have a good share of the web traffic, if only because of my blogs and sites. Then, you select how you want to view the results. I chose first a Thumbnails View which shows me the results in small screenshots of the sites found. Even if I choose the Simple Text View, you see a small visual of the page, the Alexa rank of the page and what search engines found the pages. The 3D Cloud View actually floated pictures of me around, but the Celebrity Photo View came up empty - so much for fame from blogging. (I also don't show up in the recipe, Amazon.com or weather views.)

I also ended up finding some items that I guess I haven't noticed in other searches or that I had forgotten were out there. I suspect that changing the way you view search results actually has an effect on what we see on that screen beyond the literal sense of viewing. (Note: topic for paper) I rediscovered that I have a Dipity site that I never bookmarked. I found out that the blog for the portfolio tool called Digication (which we are actually looking at for PCCC) once posted about my review of Digication and other similar tools on Serendipity35.

Viewzi does pull in results from search engines like Google and Yahoo, so you are really adding another level to your search. The creators have coined the term "smashup" (as in "search+mashup") to describe what they are doing.

This idea of visual search is not brand new. Last year, I had looked at oskope.com which also gives you visual results, but only one view. Viewzi has more views today than it had in its beta version that I looked at earlier and I suspect it will continue to add new viewing options.

I believe that technically Viewzi is not a "visual search engine" which is really a search engine designed to search for information on the Web by the input of an image. For example, you input a photo of a building and it searches for the location or name of the building. This type of search engine is sometimes used to search on the mobile Internet.

I did a bit of searching and turned up a site called kooaba which is being developed to allow you to access and search for digital content from your mobile phone. The kooaba engine currently allows you to search for information about movies advertised on posters. For instant access to movie information, you take a picture of any movie poster on a billboard, in a newspaper or magazine, and send it to kooaba (by MMS, e-mail or using the kooaba client). You will be immediately pointed to the correct page on their mobile movie portal, which offers you trailer downloads, reviews, blog-posts, merchandise etc. Currently this service is available in Switzerland but will be expanded to other countries in the coming weeks and they plan to add new types of objects soon. (Check out the demo on how to use kooaba.)

It's a bit spooky to think that some day soon you might be able to take a photo of me (or a statue or car or whatever) with your phone, submit it to a service, and get back search results without really knowing what you were searching for in the first place.

Did you know that the most of the Internet runs on IP version 4? That's was the version of the Internet Protocol that first saw widespread use, and it was standardized in 1981. So, since then it has been powering the expansion of the Internet.

Like Y2K, technologists realized along the way that IPv4 would have problems with that expansion at some point. The problem is address space. Without getting too tech (and get myself in trouble) the IPv4 has a 32-bit field, so there can be somewhere over four billion IP addresses on the same network.

Back in 1981, that seemed like enough for a network - unless you could have imagined that by now there would be 3 billion mobile phones worldwide in addition to all those computers.

Hasn't anyone been doing anything about this?

Turns out that IPv6 came around in 1996. That has a lot more space and the thought was that as it was adopted enough IP nodes would move across to it and lessen the address crunch and IPv4 would fade away. But that hasn't happened.

Some people predict IPv4 will still be important for ten or twenty years even though the address space will probably run out long before that.

Something that many people in education can identify with as far as software goes is that  IPv6 won't solve things right away, and we'll have to run (and support) both versions. Sounds familiar to campus users and IT staffers.

It even starts to sound like a parallel story to fossil fuels. Who uses most IPv4 addresses? The developed world. Who has the greatest demand for new addresses? Developing world. Supply. Demand.

This is network technology, and it is well beyond my tech knowledge base. When I did some cursory searching, I found information like this presentation by Randy Bush on IPv6 that seems to contradict some of the "myths" I have read in other places. I guess my interest in writing about this is not so much to sound the alarm, as it is to remind you of the incredibly rapid growth of these technologies and the unpredictability of where we will be in a few years. Kind of makes you feel nostalgic for the days when you could be safe in picking a textbook that would be good for the next ten years.