Tech in Ed Is Not Always EdTech

How many general technology trends will have an impact on education? Tech strategist Amber MacArthur writes that 2016 tech headlines were often negative (fake news online, exploding Samsung phones, US election hacking allegations) but her own list of 4 trends for 2017 ignore what she calls "micro busts in the life cycle of technology" in favor of larger trends. In Amber's list, I find a surge in companies supporting social entrepreneurship as the least likely, but the other three all have educational impact possibilities.

She looks at that emerging generation of digital-first thinkers that we are calling Generation Z. She also discusses two trends that have been on the horizon for a few years without having a real educational impact:  artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

Generation Z is still being defined but they are described as as being wary of brands (and your college is a brand) and more committed to social change than millennials, and they are more adept at using tech (filtering content, using devices) being the first truly digital generation. They are the youth born from around 1996, so they include a wide range of students ranging from 5-21 today.

Can we extrapolate their "wants" as workers to the classroom? They want a physical workspace, but a the ability to work remotely and have flexible hours. That sounds like an online student to me. And yet some believe this suggests Gen Z will place more importance on face-to-face communication than many millennials.  

AI will certainly impact industry, but probably not the classroom - unless you consider how those changes in the job market will impact what we teach.

This CNBC article by Jeff Selingo sees the connection. "The question that politicians should be discussing now is what kind of education is needed to stay ahead of automation, or more likely, to complement technology. Previous changes in the nature of work all required massive policy shifts in education. Universal high school started at the beginning of the 19th Century in the move from the farm to the factory. The move from the factory to the office in the 1960s and 1970s required education after high school and began the universal college movement."

The Internet of Things might give us greater efficiencies in homes and many industries, but will IoT enter education? IoT works on data and once again that means that we need to be teaching about these trends and the technologies that support them. There is a growing demand for big data analysts and people who can secure that data.
Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, spoke on a panel at the World Economic Forum: "The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won't even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room."

FURTHER READING
Future of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Jobs (Pew Internet)  
The Internet of Things Heat Map (Forrester)  


                Amber MacArthur sampler

Popular Courses and Skills

I keep getting emails from course and training providers (most are what we can call MOOCs) like edX and Coursera, and also from job sites like Glassdoor telling me about the most popular courses and skills on their sites.

Without comment, here is a partial list of ones that have been sent to me. I leave it up to you to draw conclusions about what this says about current learning trends.

The Science of Happiness

Conversational English Skills

Introduction to Project Management

Introduction to Linux

Introduction to Java Programming

The Science of Everyday Thinking

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

TOEFL® Test Preparation: The Insider’s Guide

Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel

Introduction to Computer Science

Python for Everybody

Python Programming  

Data Science

R Programming

Introduction to Project Management

Project Management

Analytics Management

TESOL Certificate: Teach English Now!

English Instruction

Business Analytics

Software Product Management

Product Management

Big Data

Hadoop

Digital Marketing

SEO Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social Media

Social Marketing

Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence   

Business Foundations


A Digital Ivy League?


Harvard

Harvard Square: Harvard University, Johnston Gate by Wally Gobetz on Flickr



Last fall, Anuar Lequerica, who has been writing about MOOC trends, wrote about "Harvard and the Rise of a Digital Ivy League" on class-central.com. It was apparent in 2011/2012 when the MOOC exploded into a much wider view that many of the "elite" universities were going to be the boldest experimenters. That's still true.

The "digital Ivy League" includes schools such as MIT, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan. Not sticking to the traditional American Ivy League list, you can include Delft University of Technology and some Australian universities.

And then there is Harvard. The Harvard name still carries a lot of weight and they have been very active in MOOCs. They have 80+ MOOCs taught by more than 120 faculty, with over 4.5 million enrollments from over 1.5 million unique course participants in 193 countries.

Harvard was a  co-founder the MOOC platform edX.

I found it very interesting that about a third of HarvardX MOOC learners self-identify as teachers. Teacher-as-student has been a trend since those early MOOC days. My first looks into MOOCs was to see what other professors teaching courses similar to my own were doing online.  Harvard has recognized that audience and has been developing tools to help teachers incorporate and effectively use MOOC content in their classrooms.

Harvard is also experimenting with offering their MOOCs along with support in community centers.

There are still many people, including myself, taking free or paid MOOCs as students in order to learn something new either to further our professional skills or just for personal interest in growth. This past month I have taken a course on building digital dashboards on the professional side, and a course on Scandinavian cinema for the personal side.

The MOOC has matured.



 


The Future Is Farther Away Than Expected



This is the time when I tire of seeing end of the year wrap-ups and best-of-the-year lists. I particularly find predictions about the year(s) to come annoying. I'm tired of hearing people ask "Where are the things I saw on The Jetsons and in movies about the future?"

Another popular year-end news story is to look back on some past prediction about our present and see if they got anything correct. For example, Brian Williams did a 2-minute story on NBC way back in 2007 about the futuristic year 2017. Watching it, I thought that even when they got things right, the results just feel wrong. Not wrong as in "incorrect" but in the sense of illicit or reprehensible.



They got some predictions correct, but their focus is a kind of technological, biometric nightmare of ubiquitous facial recognition, microchip ID implants (more common on pets than people in 2016), that build upon iris scans and fingerprint ID (as on your phone) that were becoming viable in 2007.

Like most predictions, the writers almost always think change will happen faster than it really does occur.

Have you found really easy hospital patient identification to be a reality? My doctor is still trying to scan my old records as PDF files. Are you free of needing your wallet and keys? Yes, some (not the majority) people use their phones to pay and have a car without a key, but change comes slower than we expect. That is not so much because we can't create the new technology. It is about adoption.

The smartphone is a good example of a technology that had a rapid adoption rate. It was accepted and purchased much faster than other technologies.

Are you still thinking that a drone will deliver your pizza and Amazon order in 2017? When will the roads be filled my almost all driverless cars?

Relax, you have plenty of time.



(This post also appeared on my One-Page Schoolhouse website)