Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

1 – Emerging Technologies in E-learning
Some librarians have noticed that students are not
learning how to use journal databases and other sources
of materials because of their over-reliance on Google.
Search engines will evolve to provide more concept- and
context-sensitive searching. Currently these have emerged
in specific content areas such as Google Maps, Google
Scholar, a self-adapting community system using
Gnooks, video and audio using Blinx and StumbleUpon,
which uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on
website quality.
Intelligent searching will use such tools as vision
technology (for images), natural language processing,
and personalization by users to make them more usable
and useful. Ask.com uses what it calls ExpertRank
(Ask.com, 2006). This technology ranks pages based on
the number of links that point to it rather than by how
popular it is. Known as subject-specific popularity, this
technology identifies topics as well as experts on those
topics. Search engines will also become learning and
content management systems that will help us organize,
catalogue, and retrieve our own important information
more easily.
Webcams and video from cell phones
Digital cameras, video cameras, webcams, and video
from cell phones have become almost ubiquitous as
ways to capture personal history. But they have gone far
beyond that and have become a means of communication.
People have captured events like weather, subway
bombings, and funny incidents that have become part of
television entertainment and news. Thanks to sites like
Flickr and YouTube, online videos have become a pervasive
online feature.
Examples of educational uses include: a source of
data for student projects, a way to practise skills, document
events, record interviews, and add video to
videoblogs (vlogs). Instructors might use them to emphasize
or explain important or difficult-to-understand
concepts. The use of video provides learners with an
alternative medium for grasping concepts when text or
images alone don’t convey the necessary information.
Mashups
(Lightweight, tactical integration of multi-sourced applications.)
“A mashup is a website or web application
that seamlessly combines content from more than one
source into an integrated experience” (Wikipedia, 2006a,
para. 1). Mashups take advantage of public interfaces or
application programming interfaces (APIs) to gather content
together in one place.
Tracking the Avian Flu, which tracks global outbreaks,
is an example of how content is integrated with
Google Maps. Top City Books is another example; this
site shows the top 10 books in a city for eight subjects.
SecretPrices.com is a comparison-shopping site with
customer reviews, information on deals, and more. It
uses APIs from Amazon.com, Shopping.com, and A9
and gathers information from Amazon.com and Epinions.com.
Cookin’ with Google aggregates several databases.
Type in a few ingredients you have on hand and Google
searches databases with recipes containing those ingredients
and presents a list of recipes you can consider
cooking for dinner tonight.
Social computing
Social computing is the essence of Web 2.0. It is the use
of technologies such as wikis, blogs, and podcasting by
individuals and groups to create content, instead of simply
being content recipients. Web 1.0 was about downloading;
Web 2.0 is about uploading.
Forrester Research describes social computing as
“[e]asy connections brought about by cheap devices,
modular content, and shared computing resources
[that] are having a profound impact on our global economy
and social structure. Individuals increasingly take
cues from one another rather than from institutional
sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and
political bodies. To thrive in an era of social computing,
companies must abandon top-down management and
communication tactics, weave communities into their
products and services, use employees and partners as
marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand
loyalists” (Charron, Favier & Li, 2006, para. 1).
In an e-learning context, social computing is about
students becoming the creators as well as the consumers
of content. In a formal setting, students can be encouraged
to use social computing technologies to share their experiences
and collaborate on assignments and projects. In
informal situations, people will be able to find great
treasuries of information on almost any imaginable
topic and contribute their own knowledge to it.
A new category of software has emerged called social
networking software. This web-based software assists
people to connect with one another. Examples of social
networking software include Flickr, MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Plaxo, and LinkedIn.
Peer-to-peer file sharing
In a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, files are shared directly
between computers without going through a server. P2P
applications are usually web-based and use peer-to-peer
file sharing. Some examples include online meeting
(web conferencing), instant messaging, Skype, Groove,
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