E-learning Predictions for 2012

Dr. Nick Morris, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University in the U.K., believes that mobile learning will continue to be on the rise in this calendar year.

Some of his other “top 10” e-learning predictions for 2012:

>> The continued rise of cloud computing and the death of the computer cluster.

“People will stop using clusters (large collections of computers in one room for students to use),” Morris bloviates, “so much for ‘just working’ and instead use their mobile devices and cloud-based systems to move work and files around — basically, ‘working on the go.’”

>> Increased use of HTML5 in teaching Websites (and the death of Flash).

>> The introduction of an email killer.

>> The death of Twitter.

“Twitter needs to make money from the site,” Morris notes. “It needs some way of making cash, but nothing has really worked. My guess is that Twitter may come up with something in 2012 that inadvertently causes users to leave the site.”

>> The rise of the e-textbook.

>> The rise of voice activated system/dictation.

“For example,” notes Morris, “Siri on the Apple iPhone 4s is an amazing piece of technology and surprisingly good. In fact, I use the voice recognition system underlying Siri for dictation, and I now ‘write’ most of the first drafts of these blog posts by dictating straight to Evernote on the phone (and as Evernote is cloud based, this means everything syncs up automatically between my various computers and phones).”

Morris further believes that Siri and Wolfram Alpha make a particularly useful and powerful learning tool.

—Source: www.nature.com/scitable/blog/bioscience-elearning

 

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