Finding the learning frontier: predicting impact from "Top Ten Consumer Web Apps"

Let's continue the theme of finding the frontier by watching the web industry (see Top 10 Mobile entry) through ReadWriteWeb.com's post on the Top Ten Consumer Web Applications.

While we could go through an exhaustive analysis of the top ten consumer apps of 2009 (Bing, Wolfram Alpha, Google Chrome, Posterous, Hulu, TweetDeck, Twitter, Aardvark, Google Voice, and Facebook), let's focus on WolframAlpha.com. The other applications are related to communication and social networking, and are having their own impact on learning and deserve separate treatment. This new approach to web search engines will continue changing the way we learn and present an opportunity to change the way we teach.

First, a little exploration. What is a web search engine? Is this the right category? Does the concept line up with what we're trying to do as learners? When a learner uses the web to solve a problem, she usually begins by selecting a search engine to develop a list of information resources. The assumption behind the approach is that there are one or more web pages that will have candidate answers. If we take "locating candidate solutions" as the function, search is included as one class of tools, but so are web directories, encyclopedias, and databases of articles. "Web search" is a limiting term that constrains our thinking; as problem solvers, we'd like to be able to generate candidate solutions so we can get on with the next step of exploring and evaluating solutions, applying them to our specific problem, and so on.

With this background, we can understand wolframalpha.com as both a search and a quantitative computational engine, combined, that helps problem solvers generate and explore candidate solutions. To quote directly from the site:

"As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematicacode. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

Wolfram|Alpha's knowledge base and capabilities already span a great many domains, and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support ready extension to essentially any domain that is based on systematic knowledge."

Learners may explore math, chemistry, physics, statistics, and life sciences, among the thousand+ domains.

Adding the computational element greatly expands "search" because the learner is no longer limited to reviewing answers to asked questions, but may also ask new questions and use the powerful computation engines behind the site to help get answers.

What is the timeframe for the impact? To some extent, it has been happening for decades in mathematics and science. Thinking back to when calculators were introduced, teachers lamented that students would no longer practice their times tables and this important skill would disappear. Instead, we found that students needed to focus on problem solving and developing skill in performing machine aided calculations. The availability of mathematica and derive in the classroom has shifted learning in higher education from calculating to formulating better questions and being familiar with language of computation. The wolframalpha.com engine extends the impact from mathematics and science classes to a broad range of fields and will continue challenging how we teach and support learners and brings publicly available datasets into the engine directly.

What is the timeframe for impact in other fields? How fast can wolframalpha.com expand its domains? Faster, probably than teachers will change. This type of computational mindtool is well suited for problem based learning approaches and will have its biggest impact on formal learning when teachers adopt PBL approaches.

Learners, on the other hand, will change quickly as they find power in the answers. The frontier is upon us and moving quickly.

The Dimensions of Learning -- Individual to Massively Collaborative

In searching for the frontier in the learning space, it's helpful to make a map and specify the dimensions. One important dimension on the learning space has been the continuum from individual to group learning. It's no surprise that group learning has given way from an endpoint to a midpoint as technology has enabled more and more of us to be in the same place at the same, *coughs*, ansynchronous time. That's a good illustration of how the frontier is pushed by technology. We were once comfortable with exploring how groups learn, and now we find that people are learning in what we could call, Massively Multi-Learner, Online Collaboration, or MMLOC, with apologies to MMORPG.

With a dimension defined, where are we on the continuum? Everquest, Guildwars, and Secondlife are great examples of systems where MMORPG has been applied, and some online learning has been enabled, so do they qualify as MMLOCs? The learning retreats from "massive" back to small group interaction with a massive audience from which to choose randomly. How massive can we get? Is a course with 2000 learners massive? Judge for yourself at the Massively Open Online Course, MOOC.

To be truly massive, you need to get out of the course model, as there will be limits to the coordinated action required in a course (unless we redefine "course"). One such place to go is to online learning communities where there's a defined purpose, such as learning to create curriculum or learning to apply social networking communities to learning, or even developing open software. Two of the larger defined learning communities I have found are curriki.org (size unknown) and Ning in Education (~8,000). If we're willing to adopt a model of learning where a community includes lurkers (those looking in at the community) to apprentices (those practicing on the periphery) all the way to masters (those at the center who are leading the community), then sourceforge.net is a great example with 2 million registered users dedicated to using and creating open software. Less project-oriented than sourceforge, more traditional, and bigger still, by this definition, is wikipedia.org. Wikipedia has a set of lurkers (unregistered users) that approaches the set of all online users, a set of registered users, and a much smaller set of core contributors.

Is the size of wikipedia the endpoint? The answer depends, again, on the definition of learning. If we count interacting with and creating digital content as learning, the collected set of web users is a learning community that has been thriving since its invention. (Anyone know the latest count of wikipedia or the web?)

But there is one endpoint not yet reached. Borrowing from Ray Kurzweil's idea of  "singularity", all of humanity will someday be interconnected in a meaningful thinking, collaborative learning singularity, that viewed from a distance can be seen as a highly complex organism. Is that the end? Let's really push the boundaries to include learning by machines as well - especially all machines and all people interacting in a single, cybernetic cloud. We'll explore whether that's beyond the frontier in future entries and may conclude that degree of machine integration to learning is also a dimension.

Finding the learning frontier: predicting the Top 4 Mobile Learning Apps of 2013 from the Top 10 Mobile Apps of 2012

In keeping with the theme of looking for the learning frontier in non-educational areas, the ReadWriteWeb posted a story on Gartner Group's Top Ten Mobile Apps of 2012. In any search, there may be some blind alleys before finding the good stuff, so I'll include those less direct applications to learning (and for a good reason -- you may see an application where I don't). I have kept the original numbering.


Possible Direct Application to Learning

2 Location-Based Services: "Gartner says this will be one of the most disruptive technologies in the future, with a user base growing from 96 million in 2009 to 526 million in 2012"  . Field simulations -- actually sending learners into the real-world or at least real-world spaces with GPS enabled applications that sense how close one is to another may have applciations. Thoughts where this could be useful?

3 Mobile Search and 4 Mobile Browsing:  How search and browsing apply to learning is obvious. One insight is that browsing capabilities will increase from approximately 60% to 80% of hand held devices, making access all the more likely, which is important as a practical aspect of learning if you're not supplying the devices. Another insight is that Gartner predicts a shakeup of the search services. In general, learning providers need to be ready to put  learning resources in mobile format. Any other applications here?
 
7 Near Field Communications (NFC): To quote the NFC entry in  wikipedia.org, "The significant advantage of NFC over Bluetooth is the shorter set-up time. Instead of performing manual configurations to identify Bluetooth devices, the connection between two NFC devices is established at once (under a tenth of a second)." The opportunity is the creation of a set of measurement devices that are easier to configure and possibly less expensive to create.

I am reminded of the promise of the TI calculator devices like temperature, pressure, and sonic measurement that could rapidly create time-based measurements. With mobile devices, they can also add location data, capture the data sets, upload to a common area, and support collaborative aggregation, analysis, and decision making. The medical devices (in the lsit below) could allow the creation of datasets as well.


Slight or Indirect Link to Learning


1 SMS Money Transfer and 6 Mobile Payments: no direct application to learning, except maybe for learning institutions wanting to receive payments.

5 Mobile Health Monitoring: presumably this is done by creating blue-tooth devices and applications that readthem on the mobile device. This will impact learning in health care as a subject and may also be the technology on a mass scale breakthrough needed to support other blue-tooth enabled devices for taking measurements in the field.

8 Mobile Advertising: Unsolicited, location sensitive, commercial content. If we strike the commercial and substitute with learning, there's an application there for in-the-field learning that does not require a group environment to be effective.


9 Mobile Instant Messaging: defined as an alternative to SMS. Not clear if there's a true prediction here, so in the "slight to none" category.

10 Mobile Music: the music may have not direct application, but as a gateway technology, it has implications for mobile content, ala iTunesU.

Mobile Internet Devices for Learning

The NMC report lists mobile internet devices as one of the near horizon technologies that will penetrate higher ed down under (greater than 16%). The availability of Apple's iTunesU and iPod/iPhone devices led to adoption of this approach by several universities in the US. More recently some universities have adopted Amazon's Kindle ; a number of vendors have seen their netbooks adopted. The increasing availability of wireless networks helps speed adoption, particularly by students, if not only for learning purposes. The rapid increase in availability of smart phones and supporting networks, combined with an increasing number of applications, enables informal learning now and formal learning adoption in the near horizon.

  The history of education is littered with promising technology innovations that later turned out to be marginally effective, such as film strips, videos, and even classroom computers, proving that it's not the technology itself, but the availability, teacher preparation, applications, and the degree of thinking designed into the learning experience. With that experience in mind, what are the features of mobile computing technology that enable quality learning?

Here's a partial list, and please post ideas of your own:

• Mostly anywhere availability: the devices can be taken to the "field" to help guide realistic learning opportunities, record data, capture pictures and videos of events, and with GPS or location software, record location information; specialized development of sensors could also allow weather, chemical or other data collection. Imagine all the high schools in a state taking field trips at hundreds or thousands of locations with students collecting and integrating into a common geospatial dataset water and other environmental readings. Imagine further that the science classes help students analyze the data as practicing sicentists and publishing their findings in a collaborative "State of the State" report.
• Real-time connectivity across distance: at its simplest, this is phone or text communication, but with the proper organization and perhaps apps like twitter allowing point-to-multi-point communication, simulations of distributed organizations, emergency management situations, and distributed coordination are possible. Several years ago, Colorado Technical University and the Challenger Learning Center hosted a network-based Mt. Pinatubo-like crises simulation, that is now possible much more affordably with group communication devices.
• Mediated, real-world communication: the mediated aspect of modern workplace communication is learned best by actual practice with workplace devices; too much performance simulation in face-to-face situations does not reflect current and future practice. Simulations designed to expose the limitations of devices can improve the use of such devices.
  
• Affordable, complex applications (mindtools to go): the affordability factor may increase the availability of devices and applications so that more learners can engage thinking constructively;
• Access to information: the kindle device gives convenient access to books, the iPhone to audio and video lectures; but while non-traditional delivery of traditional content is useful, even more useful is the availability represented by searchable sources such as wikipedia.org or even access to expertise networks through texting.

These features are some of the advantages specific to mobile smart devices. Please share your experiences and ideas.

Side note, technorati claim code: B6WUWRZHJMZ4.

Where do we find the learning frontier?

The title asks, where do we find the learning frontier? Well, on average, not in the classroom. In the spirit of discovery, I picked up the recent NMC report on learning down under in Australia and New Zealand. What I found echoes the approach I've used for predicting the next generation of learning technology: the tools for learning in the future are those that  people use to work, play, and communicate, in the present.

The rise of social networking is an example. People are increasingly finding the Web as a communication tool (facebook, linkedin, myspace) and if we believe that the social element is an important part of  learning (see social constructionism or the theories of Vygostky),  then informal learning is definitely on the rise. Communities of Practice are also built on the foundation of good communication. Another blog entry in TLF begins to look at facebook in particular and another social site, Ning in Education, looks at the use of the Ning platform for supporting or actually organizing learning (and is one itself for those who want to learn more).

To the extent that learning should concern itself with employability (ask any undergrad how important this is), using the tools in the learning environment that are used at work to create valuable work products (see PLM), looking at the work and play frontier is especially useful.

One of my goals in writing this blog is to discover that frontier collectively with you all. Please post in the comments your blogs or thoughts on examples that you believe predict learning innovations to come.

Also, as the NMC reports (and reported earlier in Mindstorms by Seymour Papert), schools are remarkably resistant to adoption of technology in meaningful ways, so examples of successful adoption strategies are needed.

Keep pushing the frontier!

What students need to learn (1): information, visual, technological literacy

What do students need to learn? A recent report from the New Media Consoritum on new media in Australia and New Zealand points out that while our students are surrounded by the most technology and media rich environment, they do not necessarily know how to effectively use these riches for communication and thinking. The way the report puts the issue is:

"There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy."

Another part of the report states the value of creativity and innovation in the real world is going up, yet schools remain largely silent on this topic. The three skills above can be enablers of innovation and creativity, if they are taught well using projects as the motivators (see PLM or PBL).

In future blogs, I'll highlight some of the NMC's cases that illustrate how our friends down under are making headway on these subjects. But, before you read those, take a moment to ask how you would accomplish this type of learning in your environment. Please post in the comments below.

Problem-based Learning

One proven model of learning that is quite promising for technologically based systems is problem-based learning. It's bee used for teaching diagnosis, design, policy development, and other typically difficult subjects to teach authentically.

A good source of reading on the subject is the Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, a free online journal dedicated to scholarly research in the area of problem-based learning (what a surprise *grins*). 

If you're new to the idea of problem-based learning, I suggest you start with an overview article. Read as much or little as you like. I enjoyed the 3C3R article for it's model on how to think about the many sides of successful PBL implementation.

If you're exploring problem-based learning, especially online, please post a comment and link.