Reading Selection # 4

Johnson, Laurence F. Alan Levine, Rachel S. Smith and Keene Haywood. Key Emerging Technologies for Postsecondary Education. Austin, TX: Horizon Report, 2010.

This article was written to discuss the up and coming technologies in the field of education for post secondary education. It brings up not only the key emerging technologies, but also the key trends in education that are requiring these updates in technology. The first trend is that "the abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making coaching, and credentialing." The second trend is that "people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever they want to." The third trend is that "the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized." The final trend is that "the work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.

The article goes on to discuss some of the critical challenges of new technologies then goes into the new emerging technologies. The first technology is Mobile Computing. This is definitely a technology that can be taken advantage of, because almost everybody on a college campus now-a-days has a mobile device, or smart phone. The second emerging technology is Open Content. This involves placing academic content online and freely available for their students. The third emerging technology is electronic books. This makes sense, because they are becoming so popular with the public, and it would save students tons of money. The fourth emerging technology is simple augmented reality, which refers to the shift that has made augmented reality accessible to almost anybody. The last two emerging technologies are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

The first few emerging technologies I already knew about,  but the last couple were totally new to me. I did not really know anything about simple augmented reality, gesture-based computing, or visual data analysis. This article has opened me up a little bit more to some new technologies in the education world. Learning about these new technologies will cause me to probably look into them a little more, and keep an eye out for them, and to possibly put a few of them into use as long as the technology is available to me.