Breaking down the walled garden will still leave us contained in the garden if that is still where the “learning” is supposed to happen. Many LMS providers make it easier to import content from services like WordPress and YouTube – so in many ways the walls are gone or at least have more openings. Or maybe it is more accurate to call them one-way passages – you can bring more content in (or at least easier than it used to be). But you can’t as easily get that learning out into the wild for others (your PLN) to join with you in exploring and expanding it.

A recent article on ExtremeTech made a case for Firefox to create their own OS. Reading that article makes me realize how radically different the online world will be in just a few years. Will the LMS/PLE/VLE/etc be there in this strange new world, or will it be sitting along side MySpace as a nostalgic relic of a bygone era?

But some things are still on the list from 2010 – like cloud computing. How many years will they let cloud computing be listed as emerging in one year or less? As others have noted, the word “cloud” is becoming an overused cliche (like “social” and “___2.0″ before it) – so we may not even be able to tell if or when this one actually emerges. After all, some people still debate whether Web2.0 is old news or still around the corner.

In many ways, K-12 kind of serves as a litmus test for whether trends have substance or not. I used to be a junior high teacher, and I found that most teachers don’t get overly excited about new technology just for the heck of it. Those of us that do (like me) tend to go into different lines of work.  The rest just want to know “will this work?” If you can’t prove that it will help students learn better/faster/easier/etc, they won’t touch it. Sometimes this suspicion keeps grade schools lagging behind, and other times it saves them from wasting time on pointless hype.

But it also means that if anything catches on, it probably has some merit. K-12 teachers usually don’t have the time to experiment on their students like (some) college professors do.

So some of these predictions I see as wishful thinking. Yes, I too wish they would emerge – but I don’t see it happening in five years or less.  Mobile devices and educational games? I love them myself, but too many educators are still suspicious of them… and they still cost money (money that many states don’t have for the next few years at least).  Open content? Love the idea, but content still rakes in big money for some companies – so expect push back against that one. Learning analytics? Sounds too much like administrative-ese to many, so expect a hard road on that one. Cloud computing? I do a lot of it myself, but how many IT Directors do you know that love releasing that much control.? Anyone? Anyone? Yep.

The problem with most of these emerging technologies is that so many of them rely on administrative decisions – districts have to decide to allow cellphones, or to switch to cloud computing, or to fork over money for games, etc.  The main one that actual teachers have the most control over is the Personal Learning Environment – assuming they can choose tools that their school fire wall allows that is.  But even with restrictive firewalls, you can always use them after hours from home to extend student learning. If the idea catches on, then we will possibly see this one emerge.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to see all of these emerge as soon as possible (used properly, that is). But we need to be aware of the obstacles for their emergence as much as we are of their existence.

What the hell?! First Facebook and now Yahoo! have screwed me (us) over. Two really simple, very functional, extremely valuable web2.0 tools that I’ve been preaching and pushing all year b/c they are/were incredibly useful — delicious and drop.io — and the parent companies pulled/are about to pull the plug.

• October brought us the announcement that Facebook bought drop.io and that free accounts were to quickly disappear and paid accounts discontinued Dec.15.
• Yesterday brought us even more shocking news that Yahoo has decided to sunset their very popular social tagging tool delicious.

Damn them.

Now what do I tell faculty? What are you going to tell your faculty? How are you going to sell them on some really amazing online tool that does something incredibly useful for their class and yet runs the serious risk of being acquired by [huge company name here] and very quickly wiped out?

Yes! I’ve found this great tool that helps you meet that learning objective, keeps your students engaged, encourages active learning … but just an fyi — don’t get too dependent on it, b/c it’s very possible someday you’ll suddenly have to export everything, find a new tool, and figure out how to migrate from one to another.

[Update: Now Yahoo! Says Delicious Will Live On ... Somewhere Else]

Is Google planning on creating its own Learning Management Systems? Old news! (See Matt’s post from earlier this year.) Over a year ago, the Wall Street Journal hypothesized on the Five Companies Google Might Buy Next, but as I look through new features and those that Google says are “keeping us busy”, I wonder if Google would even consider acquiring a company like Bb. Why would they? They already have (or are working on) manyof the pieces that come together to make an LMS, and with Google’s tendency to gobble up companies, they could easily acquire the missing pieces.

LMS features and how they relate to existing Google technologies

Collaboration

• wikis (Sites)
• blogs (Blogger)
• collaborative documents (Docs)

Communication

• discussion boards/listservs (Groups)
• email (Gmail)
• IM/chat/audio conferencing (Talk)
• annoucnements (Alerts)
• web-based calling, voicemail (Voice)

Class Management

• tracking (Analytics)
• calendar (Calendar)
• rss feed aggregator/notifications (Reader)
• online content (Scholar, Maps, Earth, Finance, Translate, News, Updates/Realtime, Videos/YouTube), Images, Books, Photos/Picasa, Patent Search, Trends)
• development tools (Code, SketchUp)
• online file sharing (Docs)

Recent tweeks Google is making that seem more “education-friendly”

• Improved view of revision history in documents (gradable collaborative documents)
• Upload several different file types and either convert to google docs format or view in google docs viewer (universal file type – instructor can view document submission whether created in Word, Word Perfect, PDF, Google Docs, etc.)
• Upload different versions of a file (assignment submissions, including rough drafts)

Google Labs, acquisitions, “keeping us busy” items and New Features! and how they could eventually effect education

• Breadcrumbs (learning object development)
• Scribe (writing assistance)
• Aardvark (connect with subject matter experts)
• Public Data Explorer (content, research)
• News Timeline (history, current events, news custom timeline)
• Google Moderator (collaborative Q&A for group events)
• Google SMS (recent labs graduate; SMS notification)
• SocialDeck, Inc. (educational social gaming)
• picnik (image editing)

Future Google Conquests Predictions

• Prezi (mind-mapping)
• TechSmith (testing) – however…
  Google could create a secure testing browser by modifying Chrome
  Google already is working on Breadcrumb, which could eventually become an alternative to StudyMate
• Epsilen (learning outcomes measurement and portfolios)
• Survey Monkey (advanced survey functionality)

Future Educational Google Site Name Predicitons

• Google Edu – Google’s LMS, including all of the above
• Google Meeting – Google’s web conferencing system that combines Talk (chat, private messaging, audio conferencing) with Docs (live document sharing/collaborating, collaborative drawing and whiteboard, file sharing) and Moderator (event moderating)

It’s only a matter of time.

In the workshop, we basically we cover three main areas in this workshop: instructional design (the basics), learning objectives (and using the Goals tool in Bb Vista), and structuring your content (and using Learning Modules, Folders, and Selective Release in Vista). We spent a full hour (out of the two-hour session) on learning objectives, and I knew I’d made an impression when one of the participants came up to me afterwards and said, “This really goes against the ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ mentality that we’re all tempted to take, where we don’t work on our class until a week before we meet.”

Click to view prezi.

Lessons learned after using Prezi:

• Limited design options (fonts, shapes, colors), but this keeps it simply and easy to use
• I zoomed/focused a bit too much on each individual point. Useful sometimes, but other times it’s too much.
• I like the ability to easily zoom out and focus on a topic discussed earlier, rather than having to find it in my sequence of slides then later trying to find where I am.
• Definitely a time suck. Not on the scale of the Sims or Second Life, but set aside a couple of hours for you to explore.
• This “non-traditional” presentation is definitely impressive. … At least to those who are not overly-tech-savvy.

Online learning has its pros and cons, just like face-to-face learning does.  So, it is not suprising that some studies are finding that hybrid approaches work best.  That should not surprise anyone – you take the best of both worlds and the results are bound to be awesome.  Peanut butter and chocolate – need I say more?

We need to realize that sometimes the online option is chosen not because it is superior, but because it is most convenient.  People want a certain degree, for example, but it is not offered near them.  So the compromise to not getting the degree at all is to take it online.  Whether it is better than getting the degree face-to-face is irrelevant – it is the only option they have.  Or maybe even the person lives near a college with the degree, but has such a crazy work schedule that asynchronous learning is the only option.

Or it may even be that they can go get the face-to-face degree, but opt for the online one because some bad article some where convinced them that online learning is “better.”  They might be the type of person that doesn’t do so well online, and end up dropping out before completion.

All that these crazy studies are going to do is discourage people from getting a degree or training or education of some kind because they will be fearful of getting a lesser education.  We need to quit proving to people that one or the other is better and just present them with the facts and let them chose the option that best suits them.

Wow… why does that concept sound so… familiar… ? It is almost like…. some other industry out there uses it or something….

We dream of higher education that embraces its role as a guardian of knowledge, that energetically creates and zealously protects publicly-minded spaces promoting enlightenment and the exchange of ideas. We need green spaces for conviviality on the web.

• Why do we have to turn in assignments any more? Why can’t technology be used to detect our work on class projects on other sites and automatically submit these for us?
• Why are class discussion so hard to grade? Why can’t we make them easier to grade?
• In fact – why do class discussions have to be so contained? Why can’t they happen anywhere we want them to online? Why can’t the SLE just pull it in for us?

I’ve been pondering many of the ideas of Jim Groom that they use at UMW Blogs… and I might have come up with a pretty wicked way to combine those ideas with the New Vision SLE.

But I need to bounce these off of my partner in crime Harriet first – she always comes up with good ideas to sort out the problems with my ideas.