In the blogosphere world, the end/beginning of a year brings forth a multitude of reflections on the past and predictions for the New Year. This year was no exception, and I have selected a few interesting Internet postings that you can keep in the back of your mind when planning your educational sessions, or engaging in your strategic directions or curriculum revision meetings this coming year!
- 2011 will be the year of the tablet with iPad sales alone predicted to reach anywhere from 36 to 65 million units. Interesting how predictions can be out by a few 29 million, but you get the point. Although there will be competition, at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, reporters believe that the iPad will continue to dominate the market. If you have not already seen these tablets in your workplace or educational institutions, you probably will in the near future.
- There are approximately 205.8 million registered domains on the Internet. Think of that the next time you ask a learner to find the "best X" on the Web. Your learners may actually be getting some of their information from Facebook, seeing it is the 3rd largest Web site on the Internet and 30 billion pieces of content are being shared.
- Mobile learning needs to be taken seriously given that it is expected that mobile broadband users will hit 1 billion this year. I have said on numerous occasions that one of the best ways to provide education to face-paced healthcare professionals was to give each of them an institutional mobile device (could be used for many other purposes and then you won't have to worry about privacy, security, etc.) and then broadcast an extremely short educational tip-of-the-day (i.e., one or two lines). Young people love their phones, and no matter what you do, you are probably losing the battle against banning phones in the classroom or the workplace, so why not just think of better ways to use those phones for educational purposes.
- 700 Billion YouTube videos were watched in 2010. It wasn't too long ago (less than 2 years) that videos were blocked from being watched in my workplace. Every chance I had I voiced my concern that we were missing out on literally millions of potential teaching/learning opportunities. The old saying, a
picturevideo is worth a thousand words will work in whatever educational session you have planned. And if you don't like YouTube, there are 47 alternatives.
- Twitter continues to pick up steam with 44% of all accounts being established in the first half of 2010. Even the University of Manitoba, Faculty of Medicine has a Twitter account to make announcements such as the blogging of our Dean.
- Some of the content in the below video may seem a little extreme when it comes to the future of education, but it might not be so far fetched. It does give you much to think about when considering those capital purchases this year!
- Personally, my prediction for the coming year is that what was once available and free may not be free anymore or even available. Near the end of 2010, there was shock and panic posted by many bloggers that Delicious, a favourite social bookmarking site, was going to vanish. I for one felt the pain in my chest and immediately found a way to download all of my bookmarked Web sites from Delicious, and based on a list of potential bookmarking sites, I selected the one from Google. I am still not sure it that is the best one for me, but at least I didn't lose all of my bookmarks and I can access all the bookmarks from any computer. Is Delicious going away for good...who knows? Another favourite of mine is a site called Xtranormal where you can easily create avatar/comic like movies. Well, much to my dismay, when I was about to create a movie for my Transforming Health Care Through Informatics course that I am teaching on a sessional basis for Athabasca University, I found that the site was no longer FREE. I was in from the very beginning with Xtranormal, so I had a few credits left to create the movie, and they say that educators can request free access, but it is already about 10 days, and my request for free access has still not been approved. There are still thousands of free Web 2.0 tools out there, but realistically, how many can one educator use? My advice is to not put all of your eggs in one basket, as one day the bottom might fall out of that basket leaving all of your hard work in a virtual hole.
My closing point is to keep an open mind when it comes to trying new things. I can clearly remember sitting in one of my doctoral classes at Nova Southeastern University when one of my classmates pointed out this new type of Web 2.0 technology called Twitter. Well, I thought to myself, how stupid is that…what is the point of only being able to send a message of only 140 characters in length. Maybe if I would have opened my mind up a bit more I would be counting the numbers in my bank account as opposed to typing this blog for free!
