Id like to make some predictions for 2012 as well. Just a few humble predictions and observations.

1. Education everywhere

And by everywhere I don’t mean the whole any device anytime anywhere hype. I mean, everyone in every part of the world (except cultures that don’t accept technology and our views of Education of course) will have access to quality Education and educational technology. We will see more initiatives such as EducateNCare, which encourages professionals to provide some of their knowledge and time to tutors children in developing countries online. With initiatives such as this, others will see the need to equip this on the other end of the connection, the local students and teachers. We’ll be even more aware of the need to capacitate professionals in their own native countries.

2. Open educational content will actually be OPEN

Many institutions offer open courseware and content for anyone to access. What we will see is more open source content out there, not just open access content, but content that can be reshaped, and shared forward with other educators and learners via a license such as Creative Commons.

3. Learning on smart TVs
With all these smart devices proliferating, Education should take more advantage of them and be, well, smart Education. eLearning is made mostly with the old desktop metaphor in mind. But thing about all kids of fantastic learning experiences we could have of we designed for different smart devices. I’m not talking just about mobile devices with gyroscopes, location awareness, multitouch interfaces, I mean even (smart) connected TVs. If even the good ol’ tube is changing; why cant we innovate in how we do education in it as well?

4. Micro-location learning and information

We’re all familiar with the concept of GPS devices or mobile map applications taking you from point A to point B with guided turn-by-turn directions and pop-up traffic/trip conditions and events warnings. However, these technologies are normally only for outdoors navigation. You’re lost inside a building. This is a problem that Google has taken on now with their new solution Google Maps indoors feature, which offers guidance inside buildings such as airports.  However, in 2012 we’ll see the rise of microlocation-based learning, which can provide guidance within buildings and institutions indoors. Imagine the educational uses of such mobile applications: exploring the workplace, accurately connecting with others inside of buildings to share information and perhaps serendipitously  meet up for lunch (yes, learning is about forging relationships with others with whom we share or not interests), on-demand information about machines as a learner walks by it. Better yet,  as the learner walks by that very same machine, s/he will  be prompted by an alert on their location-aware device that there is something wrong with it and that it needs repair, not only that, but the alert will show what exactly is wrong with it and give the user an option to follow an interactive strep-by-step repair “tour”. On the job support, information, and true task-based learning about specific concepts, tools, processes as the learner actually does it.

5. Education institutions will allow more social media

With the advent of better content aggregation and curation techniques, Education institutions will appreciate more of the educational applications of social media and feel safer in letting students access social media resources to learn. Youtube has recently released it’s Youtube EDU which allows educators and schools to allow access (mostly) to content they approve on their channel by using technologies such as filters. Students will be given access to a variety of social media services in school as these services start to offer options for content access based on some of the issues faced by schools, issues such as inappropriate or distracting content.

6. [Bonus Prediction] Motion-based learning gets popular and affordable

As devices like the XBox Kinect and Playstation Move start to become more popular, we should see more affordable motion-based learning experiences in the field. Moreover, we should see precise motion training and job aids coupled with Augmented Reality HUDs as employees try to solve real-life problems in the workplace.

However, content aggregation can still be an overwhelming task. That’s where content curation comes in play. Services like Smartbrief thrive at selecting target news for users by means of curators. Only the “best content” (at the curators will) are included in perdsonalized newsletters or news briefs which the users can select to receive via email.

Similarly, Youtube is launching Youtube EDU to solve what has been a major pain point for educators trying to use Youtube in the classroom for a long time: inappropriate and irrelevant content. A curation platform for educators, Youtube for Schools allows teachers to select just the right educational videos for their students.

According to Mashable, there are already over 400 playlists curated by Youtube itself in partnership with 600 Education venues including major ones such as the Smithsonian and TED, all organized by grade level, content area (such as Lifelong Learning) and subject matter.

Educators can learn more about producing and sharing their own Youtube videos in the tutorials presented here as well as submit their own playlists to Youtube EDU.

This is a great visualization tool for information shared on your (or someone else’s) Twitter stream. Links, photos, videos and other media are all nicely distributed on a newspaper-like web page. You can create newspapers from a username (@[username]), a hashtag (#[word]) or a Twitter list. These days, when most of us suffer from information overload, this is a great tool to help you aggregate, organize and skim through a lot of information.

Here is my newspaper “The Enzo Silva Daily” based on my username and those I follow (basically lots of instructional design, social media, tech and learning people).

I also created one for the Learning 2010 conference (#L2010) here.

Enjoy.

This feature has a lot of potential for digital story telling. Teachers or students can create interactive stories that evolve with the reader’s every choice.

In fact, the Google Apps team emphasizes this possible use on that same blog post with the sample interactive adventure “The Hunt for the terrible Dr. von Schneider”. To interact with this story, just click this link and then click “Choose this template” on the next page. This will add the form to YOUR spreadsheets. Go to your http://docs.google.com account and open the “Copy of Choose your own adventure form” spreadsheet. Click “Form” and “Go to live form” on the tool bar. Voilà!

It is a short little adventure but it illustrates the concept fairly well.

Based on the Google Apps team’s post, as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. To create a story, go to Google Docs and create a new form with an enticing choice at the beginning.

2. Check the box next to Go to page based on answer while editing the question. Select the corresponding pages they should be directed to based on their answer.

3. Users can be sent back to the same page after being split apart during the story. Under the Add Item menu, select Page break. Then, select what page you’d like your form respondents to be directed to under the drop down menu in the page break.

Here are some highlights and resources from the presentation.

Resources and Ideas

• Apple Learning Interchange – http://ali.apple.com
• Learning in Hand – http://learninginhand.com
• iPods in Education Webcast – http://macenterprise.org
• iPods in Education: The Potential for Language Acquisition – http://e2t2.binghamton.edu/pdfs/ iPod_Lang_Acquisition_whitepaper.pdf

Unexpected Uses of the iPods

(http://www.oculture.com/2007/04/10_unexpected_u.html)

1. Train Doctors to Save Lives – American College of Cardiology indicates iPods are used to listen to recorded heart sounds to teach medical students how to better recognize different conditions 2. Bring Criminals to Justice – United States federal district court has started using iPods to hold copies of wiretap transmissions in a large drug-conspiracy case 3. Get Yourself Into Serious Shape – TrailRunner is a free program that helps you plan your route and then loads your iPods with maps, distances, and time goals

4. Tour Around Great Cities – iSubwayMaps lets you download subway maps from 24 major cities across the globe. They range from New York City, Paris, and Berlin to Moscow, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Audio tours of New York and Paris downloard Soundwalk narrated by a celebrity for $12.

5. Calculate the Right Tip – TipKalc helps you figure out the tip and grand total

6. Record Flight data – LoPresti Speed announced plans to use iPods as flight data recorders in light aircrafts (will have the ability to record over 500 hours of flight time data)

7. Throw a Meaner Curveball – Pitcher for the Houston Astros, started using video iPod to review pitching frame by frame to improved overall techniques 8. Learn Foreign Language – University students are using iPods to record lectures, take notes, and even create electronic flash cards 9. Memory Stick – save your Microsoft office files 10. Wikipedia – download one of the largest encyclopedias on your iPod (FREE)

More ideas from other practitioners can be found in the Apple Interchange Learning Community which I highlighted in a previous post.

According to the blog “Open Source at Google”, the application was released with the intention of driving developers to develop Web applications with Google’s App Engine. The team encourages developers to look into the source code to find out how specific Web application development challenges were overcome. The team of developers at Google hopes CloudCourse to become a sort of poster child for App Engine.

But what can CloudCourse do? According to the developers:

Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):

• Sync service – to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
• Room info service – to schedule classes in your locations
• User info service – to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)

The technologies used to develop CloudCourse are: App Engine, Django, Python and the Closure Javascript library. According to the team that developed it: should be a breeze to install…

Let me know (in the comments here) what your experience is like if you do try to use ClourCourse.

And so do many people in charge of K12, Higher Education, eLearning departments at corporations, and other “authorities” in Education: they see social media as a threat instead of an ally in doing what Education is all about, constructing communities of practice, taking knowledge to the masses, letting people construct knowledge, reach out to other learners… Many times when they use social media, they simply clone a popular service inside walled gardens, missing on the wealth of knowledge already out there.

Educators fail to see even major services like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter as learning communities and channels for knowledge creation and distribution perhaps because their policies are based in “old school” (pun intended) paradigms of authoritative learning. “What will happen when we admit Wikipedia can be a legitimate source of knowledge?” “What will happen when we let our learners loose on video sharing sites?” “I don’t even understand microblogging, how can I use it in the classroom/as the classroom?” and other questions are asked by friends of mine in Education all the time. Let’s not forget our roles as “facilitators” in the new media era…

What are questions and answers YOU might have about using social media in Education?

Why don’t we see more of social media applied to learning experiences?

Where have you seen it? Have YOU used social media to facilitate learning?

Here is a short list with some websites I visit regularly just by curiosity or when a need arises (e.g. “I need a free alternative to software [such]“).

Alternativeto.net – This website lists software (and web applications) that are similar to other resources you may know. For instance. if you are interested in an alternative to Photoshop, you can search for Photoshop on the website’s main page and be redirected to a list of similar tools, all tagged with relevant keywords. Each tool you decide to find out more about has its own page with:

• links to the developer’s website for downloads and documentation
• feature set
• platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, Web),
• community ratings,
• comments by other users that have the software,
• whether it is open source, commercial, or free of charge.

See this sample search for Photoshop.

Similarsites.com – The name says it all: Similarsites lets you find alternatives to websites you already know. The search results and information provided here are by far less comprehensive than what’s seen on Alternativeto. However, it does provide a quite accurate list with links to sites that are similar to the one you searched for in their database.

osalt.com – osalt lets you search for open source alternatives to commercial software you may know, and vice-versa.

Go2Web20.net – This website is a great aggregator for Web applications. The search is very comprehensive with very well-delimited tags. Even though the name is a bit dated with the “2.0″ designation there, their are constantly adding new websites to their database.

Listio.com – Very similar to Go2Web20, Listio keeps an excellent list of Websites and Web applications. The difference here is that Listio is more community-run. À la Digg, people post, vote, and comment about websites they find useful. When you find a Website you like, Listio shows you a list of similar ones.

KillerStartups – Another community-submitted, community-voted list of useful Websites and Web applications.

Tip: you can also just do a Google search with the name of a tool or website you know + “alternative.” For instance: photoshop alternative.

“The real time web is taking the world by storm! Twitter has grown exponentially in one year with an extremely simple service that does only one thing: keep you in touch with what your friends are doing, in real time. Facebook entirely redesigned its most important assets, its home page and opened its feed to third parties. Given the growth of the Twitter and Facebook ecosystems with thousands of applications and new uses, startups as well all major players are adapting their services to compete in this environment. There was the static web, the social web and now here comes a new web: the real-time web.”

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