25 Jan. 2016
Today I was tasked with watching three videos of a pair of kids video conferencing- in the 80's. The videos, pulled from youtube and attached to a new 3D Game Lab quest, were essentially highlighting their prediction of what technology would look like within twenty years- specifically as it relates to classroom learning. It was pretty interesting, if you ignore the God-awful acting; they actually got a lot more right than wrong, from my perspective.
The video conferencing style used between the teacher in the classroom and a student at home with a broken leg, then between that student and another student worked a lot like Skype or other standard video-conferencing tool we have today. Small, flat screens were used, along with voice recognition and voice commands. Screen content was shifted left/right and into "windows". Really about the only things I saw that aren't quite realistic yet was actually how well voice commands worked, and how the search engine used for the 80's videos (much like in Sci-Fi movies) just happened to only bring up the exact data the kid was looking for. When, on a whim, I just did a Google search of "The Battle of Marathon" I found various websites that discussed the battle (as the kid did) but I also brought up videos, maps, pictures of monuments, even references to the movie 300 and its sequel. So aside from the questionable overly-effectiveness of the kid's search engine and voice command software, I'd honestly have to say I was pretty impressed with the accuracy of the videos, particularly given where we were at technologically in the 80's.
Lastly, I'm supposed to make my own predictions on what technology will look like in the future. On that note, I guess one thing I'd really like to see is tablets becoming affordable enough that they basically replace books and all things currently on paper. That's actually one of my biggest pet peeves- paper became obsolete at least five years ago, in my opinion. We can fit so, so many more books onto tablets a quarter of the size of your average text book. Homework can be assigned, completed, and turned in digitally, much more efficiently than by hand. The only real drawback in this day and age is that this technology still isn't necessarily affordable for every student in the country; maybe someday soon schools will be able to buy all tablets they need and "rent out" tablets to their students for the school year. It would be really great if prices for ebooks could start coming down, too, as the war between digital files and traditional, printed books starts winding down; kind of like how DVD's became a bit more affordable once VCR tapes became obsolete. There's a ton of other things I could comment on in how I think technology will change over the next ten to twenty years, but this is also supposed to be a fairly short blog, so I'll wrap this up. Bottom line, I think, technologically speaking, we're living in a really, exciting period of history.
Today I was tasked with watching three videos of a pair of kids video conferencing- in the 80's. The videos, pulled from youtube and attached to a new 3D Game Lab quest, were essentially highlighting their prediction of what technology would look like within twenty years- specifically as it relates to classroom learning. It was pretty interesting, if you ignore the God-awful acting; they actually got a lot more right than wrong, from my perspective.
The video conferencing style used between the teacher in the classroom and a student at home with a broken leg, then between that student and another student worked a lot like Skype or other standard video-conferencing tool we have today. Small, flat screens were used, along with voice recognition and voice commands. Screen content was shifted left/right and into "windows". Really about the only things I saw that aren't quite realistic yet was actually how well voice commands worked, and how the search engine used for the 80's videos (much like in Sci-Fi movies) just happened to only bring up the exact data the kid was looking for. When, on a whim, I just did a Google search of "The Battle of Marathon" I found various websites that discussed the battle (as the kid did) but I also brought up videos, maps, pictures of monuments, even references to the movie 300 and its sequel. So aside from the questionable overly-effectiveness of the kid's search engine and voice command software, I'd honestly have to say I was pretty impressed with the accuracy of the videos, particularly given where we were at technologically in the 80's.
Lastly, I'm supposed to make my own predictions on what technology will look like in the future. On that note, I guess one thing I'd really like to see is tablets becoming affordable enough that they basically replace books and all things currently on paper. That's actually one of my biggest pet peeves- paper became obsolete at least five years ago, in my opinion. We can fit so, so many more books onto tablets a quarter of the size of your average text book. Homework can be assigned, completed, and turned in digitally, much more efficiently than by hand. The only real drawback in this day and age is that this technology still isn't necessarily affordable for every student in the country; maybe someday soon schools will be able to buy all tablets they need and "rent out" tablets to their students for the school year. It would be really great if prices for ebooks could start coming down, too, as the war between digital files and traditional, printed books starts winding down; kind of like how DVD's became a bit more affordable once VCR tapes became obsolete. There's a ton of other things I could comment on in how I think technology will change over the next ten to twenty years, but this is also supposed to be a fairly short blog, so I'll wrap this up. Bottom line, I think, technologically speaking, we're living in a really, exciting period of history.
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