My Favorite Five Emerging Technologies

My Favorite Five of the 30 Emerging Technologies by Dr. Curtis Bonk
One of the most important areas to me is the use of assistive technology in helping students to achieve. Not only can technology helped differently abled students to have success, but these same tools can be used with primary grade students to help them have more success.

Digital libraries is a huge resource that is wildly under-utilized by learners. Free resources like Michigan's e-Library (http://mel.org/SPT--BrowseResourcesNewMeL.php) is full of full-text books, regional, national, and international newspapers and periodicals, historical resources like photographs and diaries, fiction book resources, and medical, legal, research, and educational databases just to begin. For residents of Michigan, MeL is probably one of the best things provided by our state government, but probably less 5% of the residents will even use it once (IMO).

Games and simulations are tools that can be used cost-effectivelly and more safely than their real world counterparts. A principal I work with was very excited when he heard about the opportunity for students in the middle grades to be able to do dissections on the computer. This would save money and it would keep possibly harmful chemicals away from the students. Additionally, each year, students in my 7th grade classes participate in a stock market simulation (vse.marketwatch.com). They track their stocks, make trades, and present their learning to the whole group at the end. It provides me a very authentic use of spreadsheets and graphing with which to teach students the reason why we have Excel on our computers.

I believe that the use of intelligent agents will greatly expand. Right now, many people use RSS (really simple syndication) feeds from news and information sites to give them the latest updates. As more and more pertinent infomration becomes available online, the growth of this type of tool will explode.

Peer-to-peer collaboration may very well allow our students to continue working on projects outside of the school environment. Many students are already adept at using chat rooms and other interactive resources to communicate. To go the next step and start having htem collaborate on projects in such an environment will not be a difficult transition (getting them to do it, that's another story). Tools like Google docs already allow users to assign rights to edit documents. This is a simple way to begin the transition to peer-to-peer collaboration.

The author of the paper, Dr. Bonk, believes that the tools most likely to impact online learning over the next 2 years are reusable content objects (e.g. PowerPoint presentation used in more than one class), wireless technolgoy, peer to peer collaboration, digital libraries, and simulations and games. By far, the tool that will influence course webisties is intereactive simulation.