Future Tense. If you use Facebook, you’re probably familiar with the sort of post shown in the image above. It’s called “like-baiting,” and it has run amok on the social network in recent years. That’s because the software that determines what we see at the top of our Facebook news feed is tuned to show us posts that lots of other people have liked, shared, or commented on.
Corporate brands, media outlets, and other "content producers" have learned this, and many now use like-baiting to game the system. People’s responses to like-baiting fall into three categories. The first group resents the blatant manipulation and intentionally avoids clicking. It’s that third group that’s been ruining things for those of us in the first group. In a blog post on Thursday, Facebook announced that it’s tweaking the news feed to crack down on like-baiting, along with other forms of “spammy” content. You’d think those of us in the media would greet these changes with a sigh of relief. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Maker Movement. Part 2 of Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Making I attend a lot of education events — ed-tech conferences, unconferences, camps, workshops, meetups, meetings. But my favorite by a long shot has always been Maker Faire. You can mark your calendars now for the 2013 flagship events (May 18–19 in San Mateo and September 21–22 in New York).
And/or look for one of the Mini Maker Faires near you. Maker Faire, an event created by MAKE Magazine (Disclosure: I have freelanced for MAKE’s parent company O’Reilly Media), is a little bit science fair, a little bit hobbyist and hacker expo, and a whole lot of celebration of the DIY and “Maker” culture. (There were plenty of other science fairs this year — including ones at the White House and at Google — but Maker Faire is fairly unique, I’d argue, in its culture, creativity, and community.)
Why Maker Faire? (Hardware) Hacking A Place to Play and Build and Learn But events like these come and go. Makerspaces in Schools Culture Clashes Caine's Arcade. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: Education Data and Learning Analytics. Part 7 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series I chose “data” as one of the top trends of 2011, and the opening line of that article reads “If data was an important trend for 2011, I predict it will be even more so in 2012.”
Indeed. There’s a great deal that happened in 2012 that’s a continuation of what we saw last year — enough that I could probably just copy-and-paste from the article I wrote back then: More of our activities involve computers and the Internet, whether it’s for work, for school, or for personal purposes. Thus, our interactions and transactions can be tracked. As we click, we leave behind a trail of data–something that’s been dubbed “data exhaust.” It’s information that’s ripe for mining and analysis, and thanks to new technology tools, we can do so in real time and at a massive, Web scale.There’s incredible potential for data analytics to impact education. It’s no wonder that talk about “data” (or its variation “data-driven”) continues to make lots of folks shudder. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Battle to Open Textbooks. Part 6 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Digital Textbooks When I looked at the most significant trends in educational technology last year, I opted to write about the “Digital Library” in lieu of digital textbooks.
And truth be told, it would be quite easy for me to make the same argument again in 2012: despite all the hype about “revolutionizing” the textbook, faculty and students are still slow to adopt digital versions. (Not to mention, sorry, but textbooks, yuck.) In May, the Book Industry Study Group released the results of “a first ever survey of college faculty perceptions toward classroom materials” that found that most professors (88%) still prefer (and assign) the printed versions of textbooks and other class materials. Digital textbook provider Coursesmart issued a press release the same month with (not surprisingly) a sunnier view on adoption and usage.
(Answer: it's Apple.) Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution Open Textbooks Pearson’s Project Blue Sky. Top Ed-Tech Trends: What's Changed from 2011 to 2012? In the next week or so, I plan to kick off my annual review of the year’s major ed-tech developments. I’ve identified the 10 trends that I think have been 2012’s most interesting and important. I’ll string out the posts that cover these over the next 6 weeks — and not just because it’s time for the obligatory-end-of-year-wrap-up-crap posts that we bloggers churn out throughout the month of December.
I find the reflection is useful (although time-consuming), and it’s a good process for me to go through all the news and all my writing to assess what’s innovative and what’s hype and what's changed and why. A Look Back at the Top 10 Trends of 2011 But before reviewing 2012, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit the trends I selected this time last year. 1.
Early last year, I predicted 2011 would be The Year of the Educational Tablet. [Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2011: The iPad] 2. [Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2011: Social Media: Adoption and Crackdown] 3. [Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2011: Text Messaging] Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Business of Ed-Tech. Part 1 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Last year when I wrote about the top 10 trends in ed-tech, I saved “The Business of Ed-Tech” for the penultimate post. I’m starting my series there this time around. There’ll be plenty of opportunity throughout these year-end posts of mine to discuss the ways in which technology has shaped teaching and learning in 2012. But I want to recognize from the outset much of what we’ve seen this year is how technology will shape the business of education. The (Story of the) Business of Ed-Tech It's been a major story this year: broken educational institutions under seige by Silicon Valley.
Last year I noted the uptick in journalistic coverage of ed-tech (most notably with the launch of Edsurge), and the topic appeared in the media with increasing regularity in 2012. Increasing interest in ed-tech was particularly evident in the trade press. And even the general tech press chimed in. Entrepreneurship and Education Startups It’s not surprising. Guess who’s winning the brains race, with 100% of first graders learning to code? It’s Estonia! We’re reading today that Estonia is implementing a new education program that will have 100 percent of publicly educated students learning to write code.
Called ProgeTiiger, the new initiative aims to turn children from avid consumers of technology (which they naturally are; try giving a 5-year-old an iPad sometime) into developers of technology (which they are not; see downward-spiraling computer science university degree program enrollment stats). ProgreTiiger education will start with students in the first grade, which starts around the age of 7 or 8 for Estonians. The compsci education will continue through a student’s final years of public school, around age 16. Teachers are being trained on the new skills, and private sector IT companies are also getting involved, which makes sense, given that these entities will likely end up being the long-term beneficiaries of a technologically literate populace.
Top image courtesy of Kiselev Andrey Valerevich, Shutterstock. Www.nmc.org/pdf/2013-horizon-higher-ed-shortlist.pdf. Roger Schank: "El sistema educatiu s'arreglaria tancant totes les escoles" Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Platforming of Education. Part 8 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series An Introductory Sidenote In late 2007, Web browser pioneer, entrepreneur, and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote a really great blog post about Internet platforms.
When I decided I’d write about education platforms as one of my Top Ed-Tech Trends, I immediately searched for it. I had only a vague recollection of what Andreessen had written. But I figured it’d give a good definition of Internet platforms and be an interesting frame for what I wanted to say about the “platforming of education. " Because, ya know, it’s Marc Andreessen. Slight problem: some time in 2009, Andreessen deleted most of his blog posts, including that one.
So a shout-out of thanks here to the folks who archived much of the site. Defining the Education Platform Marc Andreesen offered a good definition of platforms in a 2007 post titled “The Three Kinds of Platforms You Meet on the Internet”: Education APIs As I wrote about APIs back in April, that means. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: MOOCs.
Part 5 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series The Year of the MOOC Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs. This was, without a doubt, the most important and talked-about trend in education technology this year. And oh man, did we talk about it. MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs ad infinitum. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that 2012 was dominated by MOOCs as the trend started to really pick up in late 2011 with the huge enrollment in the three computer science courses that Stanford offered for free online during the Fall semester, along with the announcement of MITx in December.
Who cares what Cormier thinks and predicts? January: Googler and Stanford professor (and professor for the university’s massive AI class) Sebastian Thrun announces he’s leaving Stanford to launch Udacity, his own online learning startup. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Flipped Classroom. Part 4 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series “Flipping the classroom” is hardly new. But with all the hype surrounding both Khan Academy and MOOCs, it’s hardly surprising that the practice became incredibly popular this year.
Indeed, in his 2011 TED Talk (which has been watched over 2 million times on YouTube), Salman Khan talked about the ways in which his videos are used by teachers to “flip the classroom.” That is, in lieu of teachers lecturing in the classroom, the Khan Academy video lectures are assigned as homework; then students work on exercises in class where the teacher can more easily assist and remediate. “Flipping the classroom” has become a crucial part of the story that Khan repeats in his frequent talks and media appearances. It’s also become part of the argument that Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller makes about how massive open online classes or MOOCs (which, duh, is another huge ed-tech trend of 2012) will change the offline university experience.
Flipping “The Flip” Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: Learning to Code. Part 3 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Code Year It was sheer marketing genius: the announcement on January 1 by the learn-to-program startup Codecademy that 2012 should be “Code Year.” With an initiative timed with the making of New Year’s resolutions (and timed too to coincide with a narrative about a shortage of programmers), Codecademy encouraged people to make this the year they learned to program.
Sign up for an email newsletter, the startup said, and it would send you one a lesson from the Codeacademy site per week for the entire year. And some 400,000 folks took them up on the offer, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Code Year earned Codecademy a lot of press. Despite the excitement from the tech press and investors, many of my concerns about the effectiveness of Codecademy remain.
And if nothing else, traffic to the Codecademy site suggests that, like most New Year’s resolutions, some of the initial excitement about Code Year quickly died off. Indeed.