I found ZDnet report very concise and th…

I found ZDnet report very concise and therefore useful to me. I would recommend it, it gave me opportunity to look things up that I didn’t know about, and explore them on my own (some hyper links are provided).On the contrary, someone looking for a research report that is more in depth might find the ZDnet report a little too brief, as they may be thirsty for more than 4-5 sentences on each trend prediction.

I was skeptical at the beginning of the report because of who was doing the predictions. Adam Garry, who works for Dell, I thought could be biased and end up pushing something that he is working on or selling. His main trend for 2011 was ‘platforms, platforms, platforms’. Not shockingly, at the end of his predictions a plug is thrown in for Dell’s Inspiron Duo (netbook platform and Connected Classroom), which “allows students to consume information as needed and easily switch to content production whenever they wanted”. Surprise, surprise.

Because this article came from December 2010, I was interested to see how many trends have come true.I realized though that it is difficult for me to judge, since I have been teaching out of North America for the last two years.

If someone had some cash and wanted to invest in ET, a 2012 similar trend prediction from these guys could be a good start. The article could inspire thoughts of “hey these guys think it’s going this way…they know more than me…maybe I should look into trend further”. One prediction that I have seen come true to some extent, was the idea of personalized learning. Although I haven’t seen it in schools, there are second language web businesses (pimsleurapproach.com) that takes student input to shape the delivery of instruction. What the individual wants to learn and what works best for him/her is what they get (I’ve seen a lot of people try to learn Chinese, and this site has shown the fastest results).

I would read this report again for my own career (I like concise), and it made me wonder, “What would the 2013 predictions entail?” My feeling is that there will be a lot of overlap between the 2011 predictions and the 2013. Perhaps giving 1 year predictions is too short for most of these ideas.To see widespread change to the industry, we might need a larger window to allow the slow wheels to turn.

I agreed with one of the criticisms from the message board:

“All this sounds great… except Chris and Adam—and so many others—seem to have forgotten that there is still a huge digital divide for low-income communities. Significant majorities of our students’ families (in Watsonville, CA) have NO computer or Internet at home, and aren’t about to run out and buy iPads, so all these great innovative possibilities—which I would LOVE to see in our schools—are not going to be very helpful… And as more of ed goes this way, the further marginalized become our poor families.”
-taltenberg

Socio-economics and geography play a large part in to the speed and ability of these trends to come to fruition. As taltenberg illustrates, even within a tech savvy state of a tech-savvy country, there is still a pattern of uneven development.

Posted in: Week 02: The Edtech Marketplace