This week our class looked at WTS 2.4: Adapt to Change (Technology fluency): Transfer current knowledge to new and emerging technologies. The topic and tag of the week was change. Andy Warhol said,
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself”
The Passage of Time
Those of us who are not digital natives(me!) have had to embrace countless technological changes and it only makes sense that there will be many more to come. Even the natives are forced to adapt to frequent change; from the somewhat mundane in the form of new operating systems and software upgrades, to a myriad of exciting new web 2.0 tools.
The Future of the Internet III (2008) discusses the key findings from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020. This survey of internet leaders, activists, and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves. They disagree about whether these advances will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives (pretty heady expectations for technology, if you ask me). Here are the key findings:
- The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
- The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
- Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
- The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
- Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.
As a vehicle to facilitate our Ethernet discussion, we watched a 12 minute video on 6th Sense Technology that gives an amazing glimpse of the wonders we can expect in the near future. Pranav Mistry, the brilliant inventor, based his work on the idea of taking the digital world out into the physical world. I immediately thought of the benefits this technology could offer in the realm of healthcare and nursing education. We are always reminding students to “look at the patient, not just the monitor” and with 6th sense technology, the patient could become the monitor. Wow! Pranav says he will open-source the technology behind 6th sense, making its possibilities available for everyone.
web 2.0 world
Reference
Anderson, J. Q., & Raine, L. (2008). The future of the internet III. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2008/PIP_FutureInternet3.pdf.pdf
