After reading several of the reports I’m struck by how little they matter to people who actually teach students. They may be relevant to administrators, and other non-teaching staff who spend the money and make decisions about how to invest for an always unknown future but they offer little insight for classroom teachers on how to improve student learning today, tomorrow or even for this generation of students at all. In short reports such as the Gartner one are largely for people who have been out of classrooms a long time if they were ever in one and who know little about teaching, learning or the current generation of children but who do control the purse strings.
While on a personal level I found the report’s conclusions interesting I don’t believe they’re very accurate. For example I disagree with their supposition that IT departments will support more platforms. Rather I think IT departments will continue to play favorites and continue offering various levels of support for different hardware and operating systems. Platforms like Apple which are extremely standardized will receive better support because it’s easier to do so. Other platforms with more flexibility and complexity will receive less support. I do believe BYOD will continue to grow but I think its success is going to rely much more on users becoming more knowledgeable than it will on IT departments supporting users of different devices.
I also have problems with the reports notion of a personal cloud anywhere in the near future. The problem being the singular nature of the statement. There are too many companies fighting for the market and whose often competing services do not play nicely together by design. So while I agree computing will continue to move to the cloud I don’t think the way in which services are delivered will be unified anywhere in the near future.
The report’s thoughts about Enterprise App Stores was another interesting section but personally I’m curious to see what effect competing paradigms such as from the new Firefox OS and the upcoming Ubuntu for phones will have on already established markets over the next 5-10 years.
In short while I found the report interesting I would not recommend it to others because I work with classroom teachers and there’s little in the way of actionable information in it. It could be useful as a provocation but little else.
Your skepticism is becoming. A large part of the point of this exercise is to allow everyone in our cohort to find confidence in the fact that even the biggest businesses aren’t any better prepared for the future of technology than we are – that even the most authoritative research firms can’t distill what’s coming with dependable accuracy. Gartner makes money from money people, as you say, by helping them hedge their bets about what’s coming.
Another way to say this is that for several years we’ve toyed with the concept of each ETEC522 cohort publishing a competitive new “emerging learning technologies market report” as part of a group exercise. We believe that the collective intelligence here could produce something as thought provoking, actionable and relevant to the education world as anything currently out there.
Should we do it?
HI there – I liked what you had to say. I find the lack of flexibility with our school-based tech platforms a real challenge. Many of us would like to use Mac but find that we get push back from network administrators who are used to supporting PC. I would like to believe that the future involves a more flexible multi-platform system working in conjunction with one another, but that would require a big commitment from those that support technology at the school-based level.
This was not an article for teachers and did really provide any practical insight for teaching staff. As a district level administrator I would still be left a little baffled at where to start spending my money. As with many districts, focusing on something tangible like mobile apps seems to be a good place to start. When other technologies become as ubiquitous it will become less challenging to make those difficult long term strategic purchasing decisions.
I think that is a very interesting idea. Would we target the report for an audience of educators like us? Or were you thinking this be for district level administrators responsible for larger strategic choices such as in the Gartner report?
The target audience is an open question. MET is already far more than teachers…
Based on your analysis, this article would not be useful and valuable for primary grade teachers. That is too bad because educational systems (e.g., districts, schools, learning centres, etc.) are made up of many people who use (educational) technologies. Could teachers influence those who hold the purse strings? This could be a rhetorical question! After all, I have seen how management spend money on technology. Sometimes, it is questionable at best!.
It is too bad that this article cannot be recommended to teachers because we do look for (educational) technologies that could support student learning.
Thank-you for your analysis!