XplanaZine

In one of his recent presentations, Stephen Downes talked about reading the artifacts,” or sorting through the signs of the time and trying to determine what trends in technology matter. This “reading” is both science and art, guesswork and calculation.

Whether we are right or wrong in our estimates, however, is less important than sharing ideas as a global community and actually attempting to understand where we are and where we are going (should be going).

In that spirit, I offer a few interesting artifacts that, I believe, merit our attention.

• Kazaa partners with Skype: Kazaa is trying to pull off a Houdini act by partnering with Skype. The partnership extends Kazaa’s technology by bundling Skype’s voice-over-IP (VoIP) and also adds some legitimacy to an embattled company (Kazaa) known mostly for piracy. Skype benefits by adding millions of users to its portfolio. It would be easy to shrug off this merger by saying that it’s just a bad case of a porn star trying to get a real acting job. But there is much more at stake here. What shouldn’t be missed is that the merging of P2P and VoIP is an important iteration milestone and this partnership heralds an important chapter in the future of learning technologies.
• Speech Recognition circa 2004: Jon Udell had a great update on speech recognition technology recently. He points out, correctly, that speech recognition technology is better than ever before. It is reaching a legitimate 95% out-of-the-box accuracy and the various programs are getting smarter and adapting to individual users faster than ever. Admittedly, speech recognition has been one of those long-promised technologies but we are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. This could have an impact for learning systems well beyond dictation and disability compliance.
• New Things to Do with Cell Phones:
  “Keitai Watch reports that as part of a renewal of their site, Amazon Japan has introduced a flattering new feature called “Amazon Scan Search.” After users download an application to their cell phone free of charge, they can scan barcodes of ordinary products, which in turn enables them to search the cell phone version of Amazon.co.jp for the respective product. Once they get a result on their search, they can then choose to purchase the item right from their phone.” Cell phones are the most easily forgotten disruptive technology in education but they will have a dramatic impact on the way we communicate, collaborate, and learn. In the next few years we will see an increasing number of efforts to integrate cell phones into networks of blogs, wikis, and assessment engines as we continue expanding the boundaries of the classroom.
• Games to Go: Video games represent a $7 billion dollar industry and are becoming increasingly mobile and distributed. New handheld platforms are the rage and multi-player online gaming is here to stay. Increasingly, what happens in these multiplayer games looks an awful lot like what might be happening in a classroom. There’s lots of learning going on here.