Month: May 2011

The 2011 Horizon Report is out. The report selects 6 technologies that will have an impact on education in the next five years. The six technologies include:

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles
• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning
• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

Quite the risk takers – these prognosticators.

My additions:

Micro-payments – I hate the term “business model” because so many people talk about it, but I am not sure I understand what it means. However, I think funding is key to whatever will come next – I don’t believe free gets you very far. I think the future is online and I think some system (see Readability) for paying content providers based on student use might work.

Individualized educational progress – one of the things that initially got me interested in technology was the potential to address individual needs. I think it is time to accept the reality that students are capable of advancing at different rates and develop systems that will recognize progress rather than time spent.

Public wifi – we seem to be in a time when the public good is ignored in political decisions. But I predict the limitations of this perspective will soon become evident and services that meet the needs of the public will be advanced over business interests. Health care reform is clearly the present poster child. I think universal access to affordable Internet access will become more and more of an equity issue.

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the “improvement in search” technology and the question of whether these improvements are actually beneficial.

I have read at least a half dozen books about Google or search (pretty much the same things now). The data-oriented approach Google uses to make decisions has always intrigued me. The origins of search and the Google way made some sense to me as an academic. Quality of publications are sometimes judged based on citation and citation indices – how often your are cited, prestige value of different journals, etc.  This background offered the analogy by which I understood what Google was doing. I just finished a new book on Google (Steven Levy’s In the Plex) and this account offered some new tidbits concerning data Google uses. For example, if I submit a similar search following an initial review of top “hits” from a previous search I may not be pleased with the results of the previous search. What I came to understand was that my personal evaluation of the information Google prioritized for me was of interest to Google and Google would attempt to alter the suggestions I was given accordingly?

The problem with this (see previous post) is that Google and other companies have found ways to show us what we want to see and not what we should see. In some situations, this difference matters. By feeding our biases, Google offers us a way to “view only Fox News or MSNBC” as we seek information. We are likely accepting of what we find, but we are not encouraged to view challenging positions. Maybe we really need to worry if Google has made us stupid.

Could Google fix this? What if I wanted an option that would ignore my personal biases? I would think one solution would be to offer a search option that says “ignore my personal history”.