6 Hot Trends in Teaching Technology

Teaching Trends

Via Scoop It on Technology and Leadership in Education

Horrible Histories: Announcing A-Book

Envisioning the Future of Technology

Domestic robots by 2026, (just in time for me to really need them), and skin-embedded computer screens by 2030. Michell Zappa of  Envisioning Technology has created this visualization to show his predictions of technological milestones through the next 28 years.

Click the image and then click it again to explore the future.

Via The Long Now Foundation blog

Cultural Anthropologist Mimi Ito on Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media

“Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist and expert in the field of digital media and learning, focusing on children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She recently completed the Digital Youth Project, a landmark study supported by the MacArthur Foundation of the ways youth use new media. In September 2010, she was appointed as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at UC Irvine.”

Via Scoop.it! 21st Century Libraries

Related articles

• Mimi Ito: Kids’ Digital Media Literacy Is Important (wired.com)
• What’s Right With This Picture?: Chicago’s YOUmedia reinvents the public library (schoollibraryjournal.com)

Powering Down to Future Shock?

Image Credit: the generous HikingArtist.com

In ” The Future of Books: A Dystopian Timeline”, John Biggs claims that by “2025…The book is, at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance. Book collections won’t disappear – hold-outs will exist and a subset of readers will still print books – but generally all publishing will exist digitally.”

He writes “a little bit sci-fi” chronologizing the demise of the printed word. It’s a little bit scary and a large bit fascinating. I am no ludite: the cash flow challenge is the only thing that keeps me (and my library) from all the latest technology, but perhaps it was that Mr. Biggs used the terms dystopian and sci-fi that reading his list immediately made me think about possible futures.

I’m not expecting any apocalypse, but I am wondering why I am busting my butt restructuring my library when it will be completely passé before the new shelving wears out. And I have to ask the question: what if, in 2125 the lights go out? Current resources generating all the power we use to fuel the big techno machine are finite. Will we find a sustainable way to keep the servers humming and the batteries charged? Or will one hundred years of recorded history, thoughts and feelings simply disappear into the ether?

Related articles

• The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline (techcrunch.com)