Last year I wrote a post about trends and hot topics for the coming year. It has turned out to be one of the posts most people have read. Below I write about what I believe is trends and hot topics for 2011.
The teaching and learning revolution
Higher education is both a dynamic and conservative sector. Many areas is changing fast but some not. The most significant trend for the coming year(s) is the forthcoming revolution (or is it evolution) in teaching and learning. This area is one of the more conservative areas within HighEd. Many teachers teach in the same way as teachers did over 100 years ago. However, the students are starting to learn differently, and they are getting other expectations than a simple teaching scenario. An interesting example I have heard was from a university where they have started to capture lectures, the students still took notes but instead of writing what was being said they simply wrote the time where the interesting bits took place.
Higher Education is also getting less and less funds, this is a global trend, however Sweden has so for far done well with increasing government budget allocations, but it might change and regardless the amount of students available for HighEd in Sweden will decrease in the coming years. With depleting funds the only way to survive is to increase revenue or decrease costs. In Sweden tuition fees for non EES students will become a reality autumn 2011. But I guess that won't really increase funds (rather decrease it). So for the educational side of the house a long term decrease of costs might be more plausible. However, education has gotten less and less funds over the years and eventually the funds will reach some point were the result is either in a significant worse situation than today or it reaches a paradigm shift in teaching and learning.
Most industries seem to have passed through several phases from an immature resource intensive phase to a more mature less resource intensive phase (automation). Some argue that HighEd has not yet evolved beyond
the first immature resource intensive phase. In some aspects this seem valid, like the teaching example above, other areas are at least adopting new technology and paradigms (like some research projects). With this reasoning we will continue to see new ways of delivering education to both campus students and online students. I do believe the solution is not in "classical" learning management tools/systems but rather something new, not yet fully seen. Perhaps it is an evolution of the personal virtual environment, but more likely I guess the solution is within an "apps approach to learning" where the future will be social, on demand, online, time shifted and place shifted. See my
blog post from August.
Next to some predictions about IT and especially IT in Higher education.
Apps
Apps are generally interesting… With an App in this context I mean "a program that is delivered over internet and runs in its own virtual/separate space". Ie the App can't easily contaminate the device on which it is executed on. An App can naturally be either local or hosted online (and accessed over the internet). Just to put my neck out (and likely be proven wrong) I claim that in a not distant future the computer as we know it is dead as a stone. There will be no such devices, there will be more or less advanced devices on which you access Apps. There will be sleek nice looking devices like the iPad, there will be tiny ones like clocks or smartphones, there will be specialized computers like the
Chrome notebook Cr-48, there will be solutions that works offline (on airplanes (until they will get reliable internet), and on trains (that do often have internet
but are not very reliable)), there will be huge ones in the shape of tables (like a
Microsoft Surface) or even covering a wall . Now you say, "what is the difference with programs?". And well, the change is not necessary a technical one but rather a packaging one, the underlying OS is gone (no more talk about Windows vs MacOS vs Linux etc), the delivery of Apps is either strictly done over the internet (using things like HTML5 etc etc) or is installed on the device using a good App Store (like Apples App Store). The days were you walked in to a store and purchased a program will be gone, gone will be the days were you phone a software company (like an ERP solution provider) and asks for the CD media to install their product on your own servers. In the future the ERP solution provider will provide a solution with your organizations data on your organizations devices (any type of them) and they will do it for a fee (perhaps X dollars per month per user, or Y €uro per year). The access to the ERP system will be via one or more Apps. And the ERP solution provider provides the service in a cloud computing setting.
Look at the coming "Mac store" where Mac OS users will be able to buy and install Apps from Apple in the same way as users do on their iPhones (etc). With this type of solution in place for Mac OS there will not take long before we will see a similar solution from Microsoft (for Windows) and Google (for Android and perhaps Linux as well). The ramification for the IT industry is huge, if the underlying OS is gone the need for support , servers, data centers etc decreases.
There are many problems, the real technical potential show stopper is Integration. Integration between different Apps, your data, your files etc. Without it this prediction will fail, but given the rate of innovation and the business incentives out there I wager that it will be solved. Most other problems or perceived problems will be solved, legal aspects will be dealt with as will integration aspects, security aspects, migrating into a service and out from it and so on.
Cloud computing and especially Cloud Storage
Given the evolution above, cloud computing is a already here or is coming soon. The interesting thing will be to solve storage. There seem to be a massive need for storage. The saying goes something like "either a hard drive is new (and empty) or it is full". But what is storage? Storage is simply the need to access your own data (in the shape of documents, media files (like music, films etc), data (within systems or databases) etc. The access to the needed information must be sufficiently fast and reliable. I do believe the big paradigm shift needed is the realization that each user should not store individual copies of everything and start acting to make this happen. Common examples of copies are music files, recorded TV-shows etc. Services like Spotify and Voddler will eventually allow people to decrease that type of duplicate storage needs.
So in the ideal future the need of storage should be limited to unique data, master copies (and backup of those). Even within an organization the need for duplicate data must decrease, ie each member in a workgroup must be able to access the master copy and not store a local (or server based individual) copy of it. I guess the problem with storage is two aspects, both accessing the information and retrieving it (finding it when the need arise).
In any case, during 2011 I expect to see more offerings for cloud based storage. I also expect to see different solutions to issues like latency (perhaps memory/ssd cache-servers close to end users).
Input problem
If we will see more different types of devices, that are specialized on different tasks the need for better and faster input solutions need to be created. I have used smartphones for 10 years and the input solution is basically the same (T9 and keyboards), for computers the keyboard has basically looked the same for ages (the only change I can recall is the addition of the €-uro symbol in the keyboard, and some special keys for sound or something like that). The evolution of speech recognition has not
picked up a lot of momentum, besides speech is slow and perhaps not the best solution on a train. Gestures like on the Xbox 360 Kinect might be something, but the Kinect is not very fast (yet?). During 2011 I expect to see experiments trying to address the input problem, likely things like combination of adaptive keyboards, like the ones from
Microsoft or
perhaps projections on a surface.
The Social media hype is over
During 2011 we will see stabilization of the social media hype. It will simply mature into yet another channel of communication. Organization will use Social media just like they are using email, phones and the web. Consumers have already started to adapt to the existence of social media. That said, the importance of Social media will not diminish just mature.
