Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Reading the Horizon Report

Reading the Horizon Report
The report highlights six of the fifty emerging technologies with considerable potential for teaching, learning and creative inquiry. For the near term, electronic books and mobiles are moving closer to mainstream adoption for educational purposes. Modern electronic readers support note taking, research activities, and social interaction while mobiles, which are the preferred tool for Internet access for most, are capable computing and learning devices. For the next two to three years, Horizon sees the emerging of augmented reality and game-based learning. These exist in popular culture, and have already made their appearances on a number of campuses. With the advance of hardware, software and network communication, these technologies are being integrated into course works and many institutions have already used the potential of ‘games for learning’ to foster collaboration, problem-solving, and procedural thinking. Looking to the far-term horizon, which is four to five years from now, it is speculated that gesture based computing and learning analytics are garnering significant interest and exposure.  Gesture-based computing moves the control of computers from a mouse and keyboard to the motions of the body via new input devices such as Kinect, SixthSense, and Tamper. With learning analytics, data of student engagement, performance and progress are gathered and analyzed in order to revise curricula, teaching and assessment in real time.
The technologies described are very interesting. During Christmas time, I got the firsthand experience with gesture-based computing via a Kinect/Xbox game called Dance Central, in which,the Kinect technology reads the player's moves as he dances according to the dance routine playing out for him and judges how well he does it compare to his competitor. It was one of the most fun times for our family gathering.  I think the combination of augmented reality technology and gesture-based computing can make classroom teaching and presentation fun and natural (as opposed to point and click). 

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