10 predictions for tech in 2019— from enterprisersproject.com by Carla Rudder IT leaders look at the road ahead and predict what’s next for containers, security, blockchain, and more
Excerpts:
We asked IT leaders and tech experts what they see on the horizon for the future of technology. We intentionally left the question open-ended, and as a result, the answers represent a broad range of what IT professionals may expect to face in the new year. Let’s dig in…
3. Security becomes must-have developer skill. Developers who have job interviews next year will see a new question added to the usual list.
5. Ethics take center stage with tech talent
Robert Reeves, CTO and co-founder, Datical: “More companies (prompted by their employees) will become increasingly concerned about the ethics of their technology. Microsoft is raising concerns of the dangers of facial recognition technology; Google employees are very concerned about their AI products being used by the Department of Defense. The economy is good for tech right now and the job market is becoming tighter. Thus, I expect those companies to take their employees’ concerns very seriously. Of course, all bets are off when (not if) we dip into a recession. But, for 2019, be prepared for more employees of tech giants to raise ethical concerns and for those concerns to be taken seriously and addressed.”’
7. Customers expect instant satisfaction “All customers will be the customer of ‘now,’ with expectations of immediate and personalized service; single-click approval for loans, sales quotes on the spot, and deliveries in hours instead of days. The window of opportunity for customer satisfaction will keep closing and technology will evolve to keep pace. Real-time analytics will become faster and smarter as data that is external to the organization, such as social, news and weather, will be included for more insights. The move to the cloud will accelerate with the growing adoption of open-source vendors.”
From DSC: Regarding #7 above…as the years progress, how do you suppose this type of environment where people expect instant satisfaction and personalized service will impact education/training?
Finally, it’s worth looking at the top 30 trend over time. Obviously the University of Phoenix is no longer the 800 pound gorilla in distance education, with two not-for-profits – Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University – poised to overtake Phoenix in the next year or two. This view also shows the tendency for most institutions to top out at approximately 60,000 students, but this may be changing with the three counter-examples above as well as Grand Canyon University.
A few years ago, in a move toward professional learning, LinkedIn bought Lynda.com for $1.5 billion, adding the well-known library of video-based courses to its professional social network. Today LinkedIn officials announced that they plan to open up their platform to let in educational videos from other providers as well—but with a catch or two.
The plan, announced Friday, is to let companies or colleges who already subscribe to LinkedIn Learning add content from a select group of other providers. The company or college will still have to subscribe to those other services separately, so it’s essentially an integration—but it does mark a change in approach.
For LinkedIn, the goal is to become the front door for employees as they look for micro-courses for professional development.
LinkedIn also announced another service for its LinkedIn Learning platform called Q&A, which will give subscribers the ability to pose a question they have about the video lessons they’re taking. The question will first be sent to bots, but if that doesn’t yield an answer the query will be sent on to other learners, and in some cases the instructor who created the videos.
LinkedIn has become quite a juggernaut in the corporate learning market. Last time I checked the company had more than 17 million users, 14,000 corporate customers, more than 3,000 courses and was growing at high double-digit rates. And all this in only about two years.
And the company just threw down the gauntlet; it’s now announcing it has completely opened up its learning platform to external content partners. This is the company’s formal announcement that LinkedIn Learning is not just an amazing array of content, it is a corporate learning platform. The company wants to become a single place for all organizational learning content.
LinkedIn now offers skills-based learning recommendations to any user through its machine learning algorithms.
Is there demand for staying relevant? For learning new skills? For reinventing oneself?
From DSC: So…look out higher ed and traditional forms of accreditation — your window of opportunity may be starting to close. Alternatives to traditional higher ed continue to appear on the scene and gain momentum. LinkedIn — and/or similar organizations in the future — along with blockchain and big data backed efforts may gain traction in the future and start taking away some major market share. If employers get solid performance from their employees who have gone this route…higher ed better look out.
Microsoft/LinkedIn/Lynda.com are nicely positioned to be a major player who can offer society a next generation learning platform at an incredible price — offering up-to-date, microlearning along with new forms of credentialing. It’s what I’ve been calling the Amazon.com of higher ed(previously the Walmart of Education) for ~10 years. It will take place in a strategy/platform similar to this one.
Meet the 83-Year-Old App Developer Who Says Edtech Should Better Support Seniors — from edsurge.com by Sydney Johnson Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Now at age 83, Wakamiya beams with excitement when she recounts her journey, which has been featured in news outlets and even at Apple’s developer conference last year. But through learning how to code, she believes that experience offers an even more important lesson to today’s education and technology companies: don’t forget about senior citizens.Today’s education technology products overwhelmingly target young people.And while there’s a growing industry around serving adult learners in higher education, companies largely neglect to consider the needs of the elderly.
My daughter is a maker. She spends hours tinkering with sewing machines and slime recipes, building salamander habitats and the like. She hangs out with her school friends inside apps that teach math and problem solving through multi-player games. All the while, they are learning to communicate and collaborate in ways that are completely foreign to their grandparent’s generation. She is 10 years old and represents a shift in human cognitive processing brought about by the mastery of technology from a very young age. Her generation and those that come after have never known a time without technology. Personal devices have changed the shared human experience and there is no turning back.
The spaces in which this new human chooses to occupy must cater to their style of existence. They see every display as interactive and are growing up knowing that the entirety of human knowledge is available to them by simply asking Alexa. The 3D printer is a familiar concept and space travel for pleasure will be the norm when they have children of their own.
Current trends in active and collaborative learning are evolving alongside these young minds and when appropriately implemented, enable experiential learning and creative encounters that are changing the very nature of the learning process. Attention to the spaces that will support the educators is also paramount to this success. Lesson plans and teaching style must flip with the classroom. The learning space is just a room without the educator and their content.
…
8. Flexible and Reconfigurable With floor space at a premium, classrooms need to be able to adapt to a multitude of uses and pedagogies. Flexible furniture will allow the individual instructor freedom to set up the space as needed for their intended activities without impacting the next person to use the room. Construction material choices are key to achieving an easily reconfigurable space. Raised floors and individually controllable lighting fixtures allow a room to go from lecture to group work with ease. Whiteboard paints and rail mounting systems make walls reconfigurable too!.
Active Learning, Flipped Classroom, SCALE-UP, TEAL Classroom, whatever label you choose to place before it, the classroom, learning spaces of all sorts, are changing. The occupants of these spaces demand that they are able to effectively, and comfortably, share ideas and collaborate on projects with their counterparts both in person and in the ether. A global shift is happening in the way humans share ideas. Disruptive technology, on a level not seen since the assembly line, is driving a change in the way humans interact with other humans. The future is collaborative.
1) Augmented reality can save lives through showing defibrillators nearby
2) Google Glass might help new mothers struggling with breastfeeding
3) Patients can describe their symptoms better through augmented reality
4) Nurses can find veins easier with augmented reality
5) Motivating runners through zombies
6) Pharma companies can provide more innovative drug information
7) Augmented reality can assist surgeons in the OR
8) Google’s digital contact lens can transform how we look at the world
No doubt about it. Virtual reality isn’t just for gamers and gadget geeks anymore. In fact, as the technology gets better and cheaper, VR is the wave of the future when it comes to creating a truly memorable and effective learning experience – and for good reason.
Multiple Learning Attributes. To begin with, it empowers us to create any number of safely immersive virtual learning environments that feel and respond much as they would in real life, as students engage and explore, interact with and manipulate objects within these worlds. Imagine teleporting your students to re-enact historic battles; explore outer space; or travel the inner workings of the human body. What’s more, using sophisticated controls, they can actually “practice” complex procedures like cardiac surgery, or master difficult concepts, such as the molecular properties of brain cells.
Likewise, VR gives new meaning to the term “field trip,” by enabling students to virtually experience first-hand some of the world’s great museums, natural wonders and notable landmarks. You can also embed 360-degree objects within the virtual classroom to support course content, much as Drexel University Online is doing after assembling its one-of-a-kind VRtifacts+ repository. And you can use it to live-stream events, guest lectures and campus tours, in addition to hosting virtual community spaces where learners can meet and connect in a seemingly “real” environment.
At EduTECH Asia 2018 this week in Singapore, EON Reality spent two full days speaking, promoting, and demonstrating the latest updates to the AVR Platform to the thousands of education and technology professionals in attendance.
With a focus on how the AVR Platform can best be used in the education world, EON Reality’s discussion, ‘Augmented and Virtual Reality in Education: The Shift to Classroom 3.0,’ highlighted Wednesday’s offerings with a full presentation and hands-on demos of the new tools in Creator AVR. Over the course of both days, visitors filled the EON Reality booth to get their own one-on-one experience of Creator AVR, Virtual Trainer, and the ways in which AR Assist can help out in the classroom.
The AVR Platform’s three products are the fundamental tools of EON Reality’s Classroom 3.0 vision for the Immersed Flipped Classrooms of the future. With Creator AVR — a SaaS-based learning and content creation solution — leading the way, the AVR Platform empowers Classroom 3.0 by providing teachers and educators of all types with the tools needed to create Augmented and Virtual Reality learning modules.
Bringing Asian educators from all over the continent together, EON Reality’s presence at EduTECH showed just how significantly Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality can elevate the overall educational experience going forward. After two full days of demonstrations, EON Reality introduced the AVR Platform to approximately 1500 teachers, school administration officials, and other decision-makers in Asia’s education industry.
As the AVR Platform expands to educational markets around the world, EON Reality’s revolutionary spin on traditional learning branches into new cultures and nations. With local Singaporean educational institutions like Temasek Polytechnic already onboard, the EduTECH Asia 2018 conference marked the continued spread of Classroom 3.0 and the AVR Platform on both a regional and global level.
The rise of crypto in higher education — from blog.coinbase.com Coinbase regularly engages with students and universities across the country as part of recruiting efforts. We partnered with Qriously to ask students directly about their thoughts on crypto and blockchain — and in this report, we outline findings on the growing roster of crypto and blockchain courses amid a steady rise in student interest.
Key Findings
42 percent of the world’s top 50 universities now offer at least one course on crypto or blockchain
Students from a range of majors are interested in crypto and blockchain courses — and universities are adding courses across a variety of departments
Original Coinbase research includes a Qriously survey of 675 U.S. students, a comprehensive review of courses at 50 international universities, and interviews with professors and students
Are ‘smart’ classrooms the future? — from campustechnology.com by Julie Johnston Indiana University explores that question by bringing together tech partners and university leaders to share ideas on how to design classrooms that make better use of faculty and student time.
Excerpt:
To achieve these goals, we are investigating smart solutions that will:
Untether instructors from the room’s podium, allowing them control from anywhere in the room;
Streamline the start of class, including biometric login to the room’s technology, behind-the-scenes routing of course content to room displays, control of lights and automatic attendance taking;
Offer whiteboards that can be captured, routed to different displays in the room and saved for future viewing and editing;
Provide small-group collaboration displays and the ability to easily route content to and from these displays; and
Deliver these features through a simple, user-friendly and reliable room/technology interface.
…
Activities included collaborative brainstorming focusing on these questions:
What else can we do to create the classroom of the future?
What current technology exists to solve these problems?
What could be developed that doesn’t yet exist?
What’s next?
From DSC: Though many peoples’ — including faculty members’ — eyes gloss over when we start talking about learning spaces and smart classrooms, it’s still an important topic. Personally, I’d rather be learning in an engaging, exciting learning environment that’s outfitted with a variety of tools (physically as well as digitally and virtually-based) that make sense for that community of learners. Also, faculty members have very limited time to get across campus and into the classroom and get things setup…the more things that can be automated in those setup situations the better!
IT analyst firm Gartner has named its top 10 trends for 2019, and the “immersive user experience” is on the list, alongside blockchain, quantum computing and seven other drivers influencing how we interact with the world. The annual trend list covers breakout tech with broad impact and tech that could reach a tipping point in the near future.
Amazon loves to use the word flywheel to describe how various parts of its massive business work as a single perpetual motion machine. It now has a powerful AI flywheel, where machine-learning innovations in one part of the company fuel the efforts of other teams, who in turn can build products or offer services to affect other groups, or even the company at large. Offering its machine-learning platforms to outsiders as a paid service makes the effort itself profitable—and in certain cases scoops up yet more data to level up the technology even more.
It took a lot of six-pagers to transform Amazon from a deep-learning wannabe into a formidable power. The results of this transformation can be seen throughout the company—including in arecommendations system that now runs on a totally new machine-learning infrastructure.Amazon is smarter in suggesting what you should read next, what items you should add to your shopping list, and what movie you might want to watch tonight. And this year Thirumalai started a new job, heading Amazon search, where he intends to use deep learning in every aspect of the service.
“If you asked me seven or eight years ago how big a force Amazon was in AI, I would have said, ‘They aren’t,’” says Pedro Domingos, a top computer science professor at the University of Washington. “But they have really come on aggressively. Now they are becoming a force.”
Maybe the force.
From DSC: When will we begin to see more mainstream recommendation engines for learning-basedmaterials? With the demand for people to reinvent themselves, such a next generation learning platform can’t come soon enough!
Turning over control to learners to create/enhance their own web-based learner profiles; and allowing people to say who can access their learning profiles.
AI-based recommendation engines to help people identify curated, effective digital playlists for what they want to learn about.
Voice-driven interfaces.
Matching employees to employers.
Matching one’s learning preferences (not styles) with the content being presented as one piece of a personalized learning experience.
From cradle to grave. Lifelong learning.
Multimedia-based, interactive content.
Asynchronously and synchronously connecting with others learning about the same content.
We’re about to embark on a period in American history where career reinvention will be critical, perhaps more so than it’s ever been before. In the next decade, as many as 50 million American workers—a third of the total—will need to change careers, according to McKinsey Global Institute. Automation, in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) and RPA (robotic process automation), is the primary driver. McKinsey observes: “There are few precedents in which societies have successfully retrained such large numbers of people.”
Online learning continues to expand in higher ed with the addition of several online master’s degrees and a new for-profit college that offers a hybrid of vocational training and liberal arts curriculum online.
Inside Higher Ed reported the nonprofit learning provider edX is offering nine master’s degrees through five U.S. universities — the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, Arizona State University and the University of California, San Diego. The programs include cybersecurity, data science, analytics, computer science and marketing, and they cost from around $10,000 to $22,000. Most offer stackable certificates, helping students who change their educational trajectory.
Former Harvard University Dean of Social Science Stephen Kosslyn, meanwhile, will open Foundry College in January. The for-profit, two-year program targets adult learners who want to upskill, and it includes training in soft skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. Students will pay about $1,000 per course, though the college is waiving tuition for its first cohort.
In the 2030 and beyond world, employers will no longer be a separate entity from the education establishment. Pressures from both the supply and demand side are so large that employers and learners will end up, by default, co-designing new learning experiences, where all learning counts.
OBJECTIVES FOR CONVENINGS
Identify the skills everyone will need to navigate the changing relationship between machine intelligence and people over the next 10-12 years.
Develop implications for work, workers, students, working learners, employers, and policymakers.
Identify a preliminary set of actions that need to be taken now to best prepare for the changing work + learn ecosystem.
Three key questions guided the discussions:
What are the LEAST and MOST essential skills needed for the future?
Where and how will tomorrow’s workers and learners acquire the skills they really need?
Who is accountable for making sure individuals can thrive in this new economy?
This report summarizes the experts’ views on what skills will likely be needed to navigate the work + learn ecosystem over the next 10–15 years—and their suggested steps for better serving the nation’s future needs.
In a new world of work, driven especially by AI, institutionally-sanctioned curricula could give way to AI-personalized learning. This would drastically change the nature of existing social contracts between employers and employees, teachers and students, and governments and citizens. Traditional social contracts would need to be renegotiated or revamped entirely. In the process, institutional assessment and evaluation could well shift from top-down to new bottom-up tools and processes for developing capacities, valuing skills, and managing performance through new kinds of reputation or accomplishment scores.
…
In October 2017, Chris Wanstrath, CEO of Github, the foremost code-sharing and social networking resource for programmers today, made a bold statement: “The future of coding is no coding at all.” He believes that the writing of code will be automated in the near future, leaving humans to focus on “higher-level strategy and design of software.” Many of the experts at the convenings agreed. Even creating the AI systems of tomorrow, they asserted, will likely require less human coding than is needed today, with graphic interfaces turning AI programming into a drag-and-drop operation.
Digital fluency does not mean knowing coding languages. Experts at both convenings contended that effectively “befriending the machine” will be less about teaching people to code and more about being able to empathize with AIs and machines, understanding how they “see the world” and “think” and “make decisions.” Machines will create languages to talk to one another.
…
Here’s a list of many skills the experts do not expect to see much of—if at all—in the future:
Coding. Systems will be self-programming.
Building AI systems. Graphic interfaces will turn AI programming into drag-and-drop operations.
Calendaring, scheduling, and organizing. There won’t be need for email triage.
Planning and even decision-making. AI assistants will pick this up.
Creating more personalized curricula. Learners may design more of their own personalized learning adventure.
Writing and reviewing resumes. Digital portfolios, personal branding, and performance reputation will replace resumes.
Language translation and localization. This will happen in real time using translator apps.
Legal research and writing. Many of our legal systems will be automated.
Validation skills. Machines will check people’s work to validate their skills.
Driving. Driverless vehicles will replace the need to learn how to drive.
Here’s a list of the most essential skills needed for the future:
Quantitative and algorithmic thinking.
Managing reputation.
Storytelling and interpretive skills.
First principles thinking.
Communicating with machines as machines.
Augmenting high-skilled physical tasks with AI.
Optimization and debugging frame of mind.
Creativity and growth mindset.
Adaptability.
Emotional intelligence.
Truth seeking.
Cybersecurity.
The rise of machine intelligence is just one of the many powerful social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces that are rapidly and disruptively changing the way everyone will work and learn in the future. Because this largely tech-driven force is so interconnected with other drivers of change, it is nearly impossible to understand the impact of intelligent agents on how we will work and learn without also imagining the ways in which these new tools will reshape how we live.
Benchmarking Higher Ed AV Staffing Levels— Revisited — from campustechnology.com by Mike Tomei As AV-equipped classrooms on campus increase in both numbers and complexity, have AV departments staffed up accordingly? A recent survey sheds some light on how AV is managed in higher education.
Excerpt:
I think we can all agree that new AV system installs have a much higher degree of complexity compared to AV systems five or 10 years ago. The obvious culprits are active learning classrooms that employ multiple displays and matrix switching backends, and conferencing systems of varying complexity being installed in big and small rooms all over campus. But even if today’s standard basic classrooms are offering the same presentation functionality as they were five years ago, the backend AV technology running those systems has still increased in complexity. We’re trying to push very high resolution video signals around the room; copyright-protected digital content is coming into play; there are myriad BYOD devices and connectors that need to be supported; and we’re making a strong push to connect our AV devices to the enterprise network for monitoring and troubleshooting. This increase in AV system complexity just adds to the system design, installation and support burdens placed upon an AV department. Without an increase in FTE staff beyond what we’re seeing, there’s just no way that AV support can truly flourish on campuses.
Today we’re reopening the survey to continue to gather data about AV staffing levels, and we’ll periodically tabulate and publish the results for those that participate. Visit www.AV-Survey.com to take the survey. If you would like to request the full 2018 AV staffing survey results, including average AV department budgets, staffing levels by position, breakouts by public/private/community colleges and small/medium/large schools, please send an e-mail to me (mike@tomeiav.com) and to Craig Park from The Sextant Group (cpark@thesextantgroup.com).
These seven suggested actions—common to all scenarios—especially resonated with Lumina:
Focus on learning: All learners will need a range of competencies and skills, most critically: learning how to learn; having a foundation in math, science, IT and cross-disciplines; and developing the behaviors of grit, empathy and effective communication.
Prepare all “systems”: Schools will continue to be important places to teach competencies and skills. Parents will be important teachers for children. Workplaces will also be important places for learning, and many learners will need instruction on how to work effectively as part of human/machine teams.
Integrate education and work: Education systems will need to be integrated with work in an education/work ecosystem. To enable movement within the ecosystem, credentials will be useful, but only if they are transparent and portable. The competencies and skills that stand behind credentials will need to be identifiable, using a common language to enable (a) credential providers to educate/train for an integrated education/work system; (b) employers to hire people and upgrade their skills; and (c) governments (federal/state/local) to incentivize and regulate programs and policies that support the education/work system.
Assess learning: Assessing competencies and skills acquired in multiple settings and modes (including artificial reality and virtual reality tools), will be essential. AI will enable powerful new assessment tools to collect and analyze data about what humans know and can do.
Build fair, moral AI: There will be a high priority on ensuring that AI has built-in checks and balances that reflect moral values and honor different cultural perspectives.
Prepare for human/machine futures: Machines will join humans in homes, schools and workplaces. Machines will likely be viewed as citizens with rights. Humans must prepare for side-by-side “relationships” with machines, especially in situations in which machines will be managing aspects of education, work and life formerly managed by humans. Major questions will also arise about the ownership of AI structures—what ownership looks like, and who profits from ubiquitous AI structures.
Build networks for readiness/innovation: Open and innovative partnerships will be needed for whatever future scenarios emerge. In a data-rich world, we won’t solve problems alone; networks, partnerships and communities will be key.
This open letter is my modest contribution to the unfolding of this new partnership. Data is the new oil – which now makes your companies the most powerful entities on the globe, way beyond oil companies and banks. The rise of ‘AI everywhere’ is certain to only accelerate this trend. Yet unlike the giants of the fossil-fuel era, there is little oversight on what exactly you can and will do with this new data-oil, and what rules you’ll need to follow once you have built that AI-in-the-sky. There appears to be very little public stewardship, while accepting responsibility for the consequences of your inventions is rather slow in surfacing.
In a world where machines may have an IQ of 50,000 and the Internet of Things may encompass 500 billion devices, what will happen with those important social contracts, values and ethics that underpin crucial issues such as privacy, anonymity and free will?
My book identifies what I call the “Megashifts”. They are changing society at warp speed, and your organisations are in the eye of the storm: digitization, mobilisation and screenification, automation, intelligisation, disintermediation, virtualisation and robotisation, to name the most prominent. Megashifts are not simply trends or paradigm shifts, they are complete game changers transforming multiple domains simultaneously.
If the question is no longer about if technology can do something, but why…who decides this?
Gerd Leonhard
From DSC: Though this letter was written 2 years ago back in October of 2016, the messages, reflections, and questions that Gerd puts on the table are very much still relevant today. The leaders of these powerful companies have enormous power — power to do good, or to do evil. Power to help or power to hurt. Power to be a positive force for societies throughout the globe and to help create dreams, or power to create dystopian societies while developing a future filled with nightmares. The state of the human heart is extremely key here — though many will hate me saying that. But it’s true. At the end of the day, we need to very much care about — and be extremely aware of — the characters and values of the leaders of these powerful companies.
Also relevant/see:
Spray-on antennas will revolutionize the Internet of Things— from networkworld.com by Patrick Nelson Researchers at Drexel University have developed a method to spray on antennas that outperform traditional metal antennas, opening the door to faster and easier IoT deployments.
From DSC: Again, it’s not too hard to imagine in this arena that technologies can be used for good or for ill.
Alphabet ’s Google has sold millions of voice-enabled speakers, but it inched toward the future at a Tuesday launch event when it introduced the Home Hub smart screen.
Google isn’t the first company to roll out a screen-enabled home device with voice-assistant technology— Amazon.com released its Echo Show in July 2017. Meanwhile, Lenovo has gotten good reviews for its Smart Display, and Facebook introduced the Portal on Monday.
For the most part, though, consumers have stuck to voice-only devices, and it will be up to Google and its rivals to convince them that an added screen is worth paying for. They’ll also have to reassure consumers that they can trust big tech to maintain their privacy, an admittedly harder task these days after recent security issues at Google and Facebook.
Amazon was right to realize early on that consumers aren’t always comfortable buying items they can’t even see pictures of, and that it’s hard to remember directions you’ve heard but not seen.
Google has announced the Google Hub, its first smart home speaker with a screen. It’s available for pre-order at Best Buy, Target, and Walmart for $149. The Hub will be released on October 22.
The Hub has a 7″ touchscreen and sits on a base with a built-in speaker and microphones, which you can use to play music, watch videos, get directions, and control smart home accessories with your voice.
Its biggest advantage is its ability to hook into Google’s first-party services, like YouTube and Google Maps, which none of its competitors can use.
If you’re an Android or Chromecast user, trust Google more than Amazon, or want a smaller smart home speaker with a screen, the Google Hub is now your best bet.
Google is going to shut down the consumer version of Google+ over the next 10 months, the company writes in a blog post today. The decision follows the revelation of a previously undisclosed security flaw that exposed users’ profile data that was remedied in March 2018.