Excerpts from Future of Learning Technology – 2015 — The Upside Learning Solutions Blog

5. Games (and simulations) will become integral part of workplace learning. Overall the culture of gaming is becoming pervasive and the cost of game development is decreasing. Both these trends are increasing the acceptance of games for workplace learning, an area where cost of development and delivery have always been a concern. As the focus of learning departments change to being facilitators rather than providers of training, engaging solutions like games will become crucial.

6. Birth of new Authoring Tools. We will also see new authoring tools which allow designers to make application scenarios easily and quickly. Tools like thinking worlds are great for quickly creating 3D based decision simulations (or even simple 3D games). Dr. Michael Allen (creator of Authorware) is working on a new tool called Zebra (which he talks about herefrom DSC ID’s should check that video out) that would make engaging eLearning creation easy with drag and drop objects.

Michael Allen describes the future of authoriing

Dr. Michael Allen -- discussing their new authoring tool -- Zebra

7. Emergence of Personal Learning Agents. As the semantic web finally starts to form and common ontologies for various types learning content are developed, intelligent personal learning software agents will emerge as learning content mediators. Having a software agent that runs on a personal computing device such as a mobile phone or tablet and constantly monitors content streams on the internet to provide up-to-date information based on personal preferences, workplace conditions, or for the task at hand will make a good performance support and learning assistance system.

Top ten electronic education trends for the 21st Century — from BigGyan’s blog

Don’t miss this interesting list of the top ten Electronic Education Trends for the 21st Century from James Canton.

Posted on – April 11, 2010

Dr. James Canton is a renowned global futurist, social scientist, keynote presenter, author, and visionary business advisor. For over 30 years, he has been insightfully predicting the key trends that have shaped our world. He is a leading authority on future trends in innovation and The Economist recognizes him as one of the leading futurists, worldwide. He is the author of The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World in the 21st Century, Dutton 2006, and Technofutures: How Leading-Edge Innovations Will Transform Business in the 21st Century, Next Millennium Press, 2004.

The Top Ten Electronic Education Trends for the 21st Century

1. Electronic education via the Net will enable interconnected learning experiences, choices, and opportunities for billions worldwide.
2. Educational content will be delivered by new computer, interactive TV, satellite, and Internet technologies in the new millennium.
3. Interactive online multimedia and multidimensional content will revolutionize learning.
4. Self-paced, self-directed individualized virtual learning will dominate business training.
5. Students and teachers will prefer on-demand virtual learning to traditional school programs
6. Corporations will prefer Net-based training where workers can learn at their own pace.
7. Virtual Reality scenarios that depict real-world and fantasy experiences will increase the learning impact for all types of education.
8. Real-time Net chats with other global learners will make virtual education a satisfying social experience beyond the limits of time and distance.
9. Teachbots-smart agents-will transform education, providing personalized guidance when and where people need it.
10. People will learn to design their own electronic learning programs, which will increase their understanding, skills, creativity, and career choices.

Intelligent Agents
Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, trumps humans (video) – “A fascinating and insightful update on Watson, IBM’s computer being developed to appear on Jeopardy and compete with humans using the same game playing rules.”

From DSC:
This is both exciting and potentially-disturbing to me. At times, I don’t like to cover a lot of things related to artificial intelligence (AI) — as the motivations of those seeking advances in AI are
sometimes suspect to me and at times border on arrogance  — but to turn my head and ignore everything that’s happening in this area is not helpful either.

The disturbing part lies in who uses such technology and for which purposes. The exciting part is how intelligent agents can work for us. In fact, I created the following graphic back in May 2008 (with slight edits on the wording made today):


Also see:
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge – Even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilization runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

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