Serendipity35

I first encountered the term "Internet of Things" (IoT) in 2013. It is the idea that "things" (physical devices) would be connected in their own network(s). The talk was that things in your home, office and vehicles would be wirelessly connected because they were embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity. Things would talk to things. Things would collect and exchange data.

Some of the early predictions seemed rather silly. Taking a tagged carton of milk out of the refrigerator and not putting it back would tell my food ordering device (such as an Amazon Echo) that I was out of milk. My empty Bluetooth coffee mug would tell the Keurig coffeemaker to make me another cup.

But the "smart home" - something that pre-dates the Internet - where the HVAC knew I was almost home and adjusted the temperature off the economical setting to my comfort zone and maybe put on the front light and started dinner, was rather appealing.

In 2014, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) published its “7 Things You Should Know About the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (and its annoying abbreviation of IoT) sounded rather ominous as I imagined them proliferating across our social and physical landscapes. The ELI report said “the IoT has its roots in industrial production, where machine-to-machine communication enabled the manufacture of complex items, but it is now expanding in the commercial realm, where small monitoring devices allow such things as ovens, cars, garage doors, and the human heartbeat to be checked from a computing device.”

Some of the discussions have also been about considerations of values, ethics and ideology, especially if you consider the sharing of the data gathered. 

As your watch gathers data about your activity, food intake and heart rate, it has valuable data about your health. I do this on my Fitbit with its app. Perhaps you share that with an online service (as with the Apple watch & Apple itself) in order to get further feedback information about your health and fitness and even recommendations about things to do to improve it. If you want a really complete analysis, you are asked (hopefully) to share your medications, health history etc. Now, what if that is shared with your medical insurer and your employer?

Might we end up with a Minority Report of predictive analytics that tell the insurance company and your employer whether or not you are a risk?

Okay, I made a leap there, but not a huge one. 

This summer, EDUCAUSE published a few articles on IoT concerning higher education and the collaboration required for the IoT to work. I don't see education at any level really making significant use of IoT right now, though colleges are certainly gathering more and more data about students. That data might be used to improve admissions. Perhaps, your LMS gathers data about student activity and inactivity and can use it to predict what students need academic interventions.

It's more of an academic challenge to find things that can be used currently.

History Lesson: Way back in 1988, Mark Weiser talked about computers embedded into everyday objects and called this third wave "ubiquitous computing." Pre-Internet, this was the idea of many computers, not just the one on your desk, for one person. Add ten years and in 1999, Keven Ashton posited a fourth wave which he called the Internet of Things.

Connection was the key to both ideas. It took another decade until cheaper and smaller processors and chipsets, growing coverage of broadband networks, Bluetooth and smartphones made some of the promises of IoT seem reasonable. 

Almost any thing could be connected to the Internet. We would have guessed at computers of all sizes, cars and appliances. I don't think things such as light bulbs would have been on anyone's list.

Some forecasters predict 20 billion devices will be connected by 2020; others put the number closer to 40-100+ billion connected devices by that time.

And what will educators do with this?

A lot of people panicked at the end of 2015 about stories in the media about Google planning to kill the Chrome OS that runs Chromebooks. Well, not kill, but merge with their Android operating system.

One group that would be hurt by that is schools. Many schools have invested in Chromebooks as an inexpensive platform for student computing. Purchases increased in the past two years due to the tech requirement for districts needing to administer the computer-based PARCC exam as part of the Common Core State Standards.

Some people have predicted that the Chromebook is headed to the "Google Graveyard," a virtual place filled with projects that the company launched, promoted and then pulled the plug on.

Do you remember Jaiku, Knol, Picnik, Reader or Wave? They are just a few of the big and small projects moved to the graveyard. The real tragedy is when educators invest time and effort, if not money, into building programs around any piece of free software or service, only to have it and their program fade into the tech sunset.

Well, that's not the case with Chromebooks, according to a Google blog post saying that it is still committed to Chrome OS.  "Over the last few days, there's been some confusion about the future of Chrome OS and Chromebooks based on speculation that Chrome OS will be folded into Android. While we've been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there's no plan to phase out Chrome OS."

The company has said before that it had plans to merge Chrome OS and Android. (In June 2014 at it's Google I/O conference, they showed an example with a beta method to run Android apps on Chromebooks.)

Still, the sunsetting of technology and in this case the sunset kills of Google products and services can wreak havoc in a school or company that relies on them.

Still, I am encouraged by Google's constant search for new thing and services. I recently read about Fluency Tutor™  which helps teachers to help struggling readers by making reading aloud more fun and satisfying. It is especially for struggling and reluctant readers, as well as students learning English as a second language.

Students record themselves reading and then share with the teacher, but in a way that is separate from the pressures of reading aloud in class. When I taught middle school, it was apparent very quickly which students dreaded having to read aloud in class. I knew that the experience was important to their learning, but also saw the pain it caused some kids.

Fluency Tutor works best for schools using Google Apps for Education (GAFE) as it integrates with Google Drive and Google Classroom. It works with most online content, so it can be used along with other online instructional programs.

Let's hope that if teachers implement it, it survives.

In my preparation for presenting at the Connecticut Education Network's Annual Conference on May 15, I have been getting more into the maker movement and makerspaces.

My presentation is on "Flipping Professional Learning" but it is paired with one on makerspaces in libraries and my flipped activity for participants is from the makerspace world.

Makerspaces are frequently found in libraries. A makerspace is a place where people come together to design and build projects. Makerspaces typically provide access to materials, tools, and technologies that individuals probably don't own (such as a 3D printer and scanner) and allow for hands-on exploration and participatory learning. They are also known as fablabs (as in fabrication), hackerspaces (but don't think only of computer code) or tech shops.

The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement goes back a lot further - maybe centuries back. Your grandparents were probably DIY'ers out of necessity. But makerspaces strive to be more than workshops with tools.And libraries have evolved to be more than just collections of books. Libraries as community centers for people to gather and work together makes them a natural place for makerspaces. Those spaces are being reconfigured around broader learning and research needs and less around the management of a print collection.

Makers might be writing and illustrating a e-zine, creating an Arduino to program a robot, screenprinting t-shirts, or creating model houses with a 3D printer. Besides offering tools and equipment that are too expensive or specialized for most people to own, these spaces also provide a gathering place for like-minded makers who can mentor and collaborate.

As The Makings of Maker Spaces: Space for Creation, Not Just Consumption says “Maker spaces in libraries are the latest step in the evolving debate over what public libraries’ core mission is or should be. From collecting in an era of scarce resources to curation in an era of overabundant ones, some libraries are moving to incorporate cocreation: providing the tools to help patrons produce their own works of art or information and sometimes also collecting the results to share with other members of the ­community.

The maker movement rose out of hacker and DIY cultures and moved into community centers, church basements and libraries. But as the maker movement migrates into higher education, engineering schools have been a natural place for maker spaces, but in the best cases colleges are taking a more multidisciplinary approach. The space can be a meetup for artists, musicians, writers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs and computer scientists to exchanges ideas.

• Makeitatyourlibrary.org has many activities for kids and adults


• Makerspaces, Participatory Learning, and Libraries


• The Maker Movement Goes to College


• Makerspaces Move into Academic Libraries


• http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/a-librarians-guide-to-makerspaces

Makerspaces: A New Wave of Library Service: The Westport (CT) Public Library  from ALATechSource

 

You won't be logging into Orkut any more - if you ever did log in. Do you know about Orkut? Maybe this post about its demise is also your introduction to Google’s first foray into social networking.

Started in 2004, Orkut saw impressive early growth and has been popular in some countries, but never caught on in English-speaking countries. It didn't help that 2004 was also the year that Facebook started in 2004.

Orkut by 2008 was the top social media site in Brazil and India. Eventually, Facebook overtook Orkut even in Brazil and India. In India, Facebook surpassed Orkut in terms of total registered users in 2010. In Brazil, the same happened in 2012. I have written about Orkut a few times and had created an account to see what it was all about, but never really found it compelling.

Meanwhile, Google launched its current attempt at a social network, Google+, in 2011. Plus has been more successful in the U.S. but is still struggling and user numbers still lag way behind those of Facebook.

Google announced it would shut down Orkut (as it has done with a good number of other services like Buzz and Wave) on September 30, 2014 and is no longer accepting new users. You can export your profile data, posts and photos using a service called Google Takeout that will be available until September 2016.