On the Horizon

by John Doherty and Lorraine B. Elder

The annual Horizon Report, published by the New Media Consortium (NMC), describes educational technologies that are ripe for adoption in the coming year, the next 2 to 3 years, and 4 to 5 years out. The 2011 Horizon Report is now out. The full report (.pdf) is available on the NMC site. The work that went into the report is documented in NMC’s Horizon Report wiki.

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2011 Horizon Report Predictions for
Educational Technology Adoptions During the Next One to Five Years

1 year or less	2 to 3 years	4 to 5 years
Electronic books Mobile devices	Augmented reality Game-based learning	Gesture-based computing Learning analytics

Dead on or dead wrong?

Past Horizon Reports have included some notable hits and misses, perhaps stemming from the biases and interests of the researchers, many of whom inhabit the leading edge of educational technology and are removed from the laggard community. For example, the 2005 Horizon Report said social networks would be adopted within education in four to five years. Social networks went mainstream long before that but have seen less adoption in education than expected, perhaps partly because until recently they weren’t well integrated with learning management systems, and partly because many educators often viewed—and still view—social networks with suspicion.

Another element of the 2005 report suggested that educational gaming would be widespread by 2008. The 2011 report says that game-based learning is still two to three years away, evidence that prognostication is an inexact business.

Still, it’s worth contemplating some of this year’s predictions.

Electronic books and mobile devices

These two technologies do seem to be obvious choices, and they’re not unrelated. For example, Amazon Kindles and Apple iPads are good devices for displaying ebooks, and both are popular with consumers (the National Federation of the Blind’s lawsuit against Arizona State University for its Kindle use notwithstanding). Last July, Amazon’s ebook sales outpaced hardcover sales, with 143 ebooks sold for every 100 hardcover books.

However, digital rights management still acts as a bottleneck for adoption of ebooks in education, especially for books published outside the U.S. For example, the Kindle edition of Jerusalem: The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is receiving very good reviews in British publications but is not yet published in the United States and won’t be available here until at least November 2011, a year after its British publication. Fortunately, some publishers realize the value ebooks can bring to teaching and learning, and they are decoupling the purchases of ebooks and printed books. McGraw-Hill now allows students to buy or rent—for much lower cost—an ebook without forcing purchase of its physical counterpart.

A new report by Rob Reynolds of Xplana indicates projections for the digital textbook market over the next five years. Their projections agree with the Horizon Report regarding coming adoption of ebooks, but their time frame is more conservative.

The 2011 Horizon Report notes that some tablet devices, such as the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab offer enough compelling additional features to make ebooks “a potentially transformative technology” because they can now include rich media and supplemental material not possible in a printed book. Inkling’s edition of Raven Biology is cited as one example of a title that “brings the study of this science to life with detailed illustrations and animations, in-line keyword definitions, and interactive quizzes embedded in each chapter.”

On the mobile device front, the 2011 Horizon Report notes three converging points:

• Within the next year, Internet-capable devices will outnumber computers.
• In Japan, 75% of Internet users already choose mobile devices as their primary means of access.
• By 2015, 80% of people accessing the Internet will do so from a mobile device.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has an interesting infographic showing rates of ownership of several types of mobile devices by age group. Tablets and ebook readers show comparatively low rates of ownership, but laptops, MP3 players, and cell phones show high rates of ownership across age groups. Only 9% of adults don’t own any of the devices, and 63% of those non-owners are age 66 or older. Take a look at the full-sized graphic for details.

Many educators are already challenged by the presence of mobile devices in classrooms, with some instructors issuing blanket bans on phones and tablets. We think that’s the wrong reaction. Instead, instructors should capitalize on the devices. Have students use mobiles to search for, create, and present content and to collaborate and interact with each other and with the instructor. For example, envision students examining 3D models of chemical structures while they work on lab experiments, or consider getting feedback from students by polling them and letting them respond from their mobile devices. Instructors who object to mobile devices in the classroom are missing a golden opportunity.

Augmented reality & game-based learning

Think about the benefit of using augmented reality applications on anthropology or geology field trips. Star Walk, a popular astronomy app by Vito Technology, puts a virtual planetarium on your phone or tablet, showing you a real-time view of the night sky with informative overlays. These kinds of applications have obvious potential in higher education, and their cost is often low, once you discount the initial expense of purchasing devices capable of using them. Many developers have already jumped on this bandwagon, so the choices should increase rapidly.

Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library augmented an exhibit, Route 66 in Arizona: Don’t Forget Winona!, with a Google Maps add-on that lets users look at photo archives of towns highlighted along the route. The map works in web browsers and on smartphones.

Game-based learning has spawned several conferences and studies (.pdf), a sure sign that the topic is gaining traction among educators. However, given the time and cost of developing high-quality games across the many academic disciplines, as well as possible bias against games among faculty, we suspect widespread adoption of this technology will take more than three years. Pioneering educators are gaming already, but the masses will follow more slowly.

Analytics

At the 2011 ELI Annual Meeting, David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, defined learning analytics as a way “to harness the power of advances in data mining, interpretation, and modeling to improve understandings of teaching and learning, and to tailor education to individual students more effectively.” As an example, he described the development of strategic tutoring, which relies on data to help predict the need for proactive student support. You can view a video or download his slides for that presentation and others on analytics and openness in education.

Businesses have already capitalized on analytics. Think of the recommendations you get from Amazon or Netflix or the coupons you receive when you pay for your groceries. Given the current budget-slashing climate for higher education, analytics are a no-brainer, and savvy institutions are getting on board now, using the data they already have and not waiting five years. Any university seeking funding or even tuition dollars is going to have to rely on data to demonstrate the effectiveness of its programs. No convincing numbers? No dollars.

Northern Arizona University has already started using analytics in its Grade Performance Status (GPS) tool, which uses data on students’ academic performance, grades, attendance, and positive feedback to identify students who might be headed for trouble in their courses, and to prompt instructors to reach out to those students to assist them.

So what’s the immediate message of all this for educators? We think it’s get moving on getting mobile, look toward ebooks, and start analyzing your data now.

Pedagogy and the iPad

by John J. Doherty and Kevin Ketchner

Perhaps the hardest part of owning an iPad is trying to avoid the addictive world of Angry Birds, the favorite game app of the new British Prime Minister. For just $5 you, too, can attack pigs with hard-headed flying birds.

That kind of distraction is exactly what many faculty worry about when we ponder the place of tools such as the iPad in the classroom. We fear that our students will be more engaged with their games or Twitter feeds than with our lectures. But the iPad, the iPhone, the Droid, and the flood of other new tablets and smart phones finding their way into our classrooms are not the cause of student inattention. These gadgets are just tools, and student engagement depends on good teaching whether or not a cool gadget is present. In Technological and Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge (.pdf), Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler note that we need to understand not only various technologies but also how the technologies affect our pedagogy.

The iPad is a good case in point. Since the iPad’s launch in April 2010 some educators have begun to examine its place in education. Our experience in using the iPad for teaching is that it is useful in two distinct ways, consumption and production, although it currently is more useful for the former than the latter.

Consumption

The iPad is very obviously a tool for consuming information and media. Reading publications such as the New York Times or watching movies through the Netflix app seems to be a natural fit for the device. In the classroom, we have been using iPads as a way to deliver information to our students.

For example, in a course on Reinventing King Arthur, John used the Kindle app on his iPad to give his students access to some of the course readings. In fact, he chose the course readings based on their availability in ebook format, and in one instance, John was able to bring back into his course a text that had been out of print for almost 20 years! In another case, students who chose to download the Kindle version of a new book were able to do so several days before others were able to order the printed version (although this might have been an error on Amazon’s part). The students used their own devices, mobile or otherwise, to read the ebooks, which was possible because the Kindle app is no longer limited to the Kindle device. The app can be used on PCs or Macs, desktops or laptops, iPads, iPhones, Droids, and iPod Touches. One of its best features is that you can read the same book on various devices, and the app will remember where you left off. You can start reading a book on your laptop and then later switch to reading on your phone without losing your place.

Kevin has been using the iPad for an Honors course on the cultural impact of comic books. Marvel, DC, and other publishers have iPad apps (iTunes link) that present comics in sharp, HD-like quality. When you can zoom in on details of comics in high definition, the panels take on an immersive quality.

The following panel is a screen capture of the Iron Man (2004) #1 book, available in the Marvel app.

Students in the course can download the movies Iron Man (2008) and V for Vendetta (2006) via the iTunes Store or other media sources. By examining both the comic serial and the movie versions of these stories, students see how the superhero movie genre has reinvented the comic.

Students can also use reference apps such as Wikipanion (Wikipedia) to find out details about characters in these stories (such as Guy Fawkes, the original fundamentalist terrorist who is burned in effigy in the UK every November 5th).

The ebooks John uses in his course include built-in dictionaries that make it convenient for students to look up unusual words, which is invaluable for texts based on older versions of the English language. The iPad apps can also read the texts aloud.

Here are some other apps that we’ve experimented with and have found useful for teaching.

App	Description
iAnnotate PDF ($9.99)	Syncs PDF documents between your desktop and your iPad. It also lets you highlight and underline and add commentary, which is great for our e-reserve readings.
CineXPlayer ($3.99)	Delivers Xvid movies to the iPad through iTunes. Includes subtitles and TV/VGA output. The advantage to this app is that it supports more than just iTunes native formats.
Netflix (Free)	The app is free, but you need a Netflix subscription to use it. You get access to the Netflix streaming library. John has had his students view the BBC TV series Merlin (2008) and the movies Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981).

Accessibility

The iPad is opening doors for some differently abled users. Its built-in text reader can give voice to anything downloaded to iBooks. Dragon Dictation is a free iPad app that uses voice recognition to create text email messages and even Facebook and Twitter updates. The iPad’s magnification and closed-captioning features also make content available for a wide range of people. The New York Times recently reported on how an iPad elicited reactions from a 7-year-old boy who has a severe motor neuron disease. The same article noted that autistic children are also engaging more with this tool than a regular computer.

Production

As a production tool—that is, for generating rather than just consuming content—the iPad has plenty of potential, but it still has lots of room for improvement. Much of this post was written in the Pages app on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard. Or at least it was until we started getting annoyed when we typed too many extra n‘s and m‘s because those keys are uncomfortably close to the space bar for our not-so-nimble digits. So we just synced the iPads to our desktops and continued typing from there, using real keyboards.

The on-screen keyboard works well enough for some things: browsing the web, searching the App Store, typing things into Wikipedia. In our opinion, though, an external keyboard is an essential add-on if you want to use the iPad for serious writing.

In addition to Pages, the other two iWork apps—Numbers and Keynote— for the iPad are useful production tools . Each costs $9.99 from the iTunes Store. iWork will soon be available to the NAU campus through a site license, and it is a decent alternative to the MS Office applications. John developed some of his course documentation in Pages and Numbers.

Drawbacks

Some of the drawbacks to using these apps include lack of easy cloud syncing and inability to print directly from the iPad. That said, the MobileMe iDisk app does provide some access to the MobileMe cloud (which requires a subscription) or the beta of iWork.com. There are rumors of an about-to-be-released Google Apps app for the iPad and Android that will allow for editing of Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Apple is undoubtedly working on updates to their products to fix these and other shortcomings, and they are also exploring cloud-based computing, but if you want to take the iPad plunge now, you should be aware of these limitations. Syncing the iPad to your computer also leaves a lot to be desired, because you need to go through iTunes to make it work at all. The advantages of using the iPad over a netbook as a mobile production tool are currently few.

Recently, we discovered two note-taking apps for the iPad that let you use your finger or a stylus. We tested Penultimate and WhiteNote in meetings and in the classroom. The former is pretty slick but simple. The latter needs some work, especially in how it uses the screen and the writing space. But it offers the bonus of letting you browse and import from the web, PDFs, and other formats, and it also uses cloud-based resources for saving and sharing PDFs via Google Docs.

The iPad and some smart phones are beginning to offer access to learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle. Mobile apps are available for both of these LMS, but their functionality is quite limited, although the Blackboard Mobile Learn app syndicates content from that LMS quite well. For the moment, though, both Blackboard Learn and Moodle are best accessed on the iPad through a browser.

Lessons Learned and In Progress

The iPad holds much promise for education, but it is still in its infancy. Missing but available soon with the impending release of iOS 4.2 release are the ability to multitask (that is, to run more than one app at a time), print from the iPad, and even output information to other devices through AirPlay. The ability to easily display the content of your iPad on an overhead projector is essential for educators, and we hope Apple addresses that shortcoming quickly. Apple’s prohibition of Adobe’s Flash on the iPad means that some of our preferred media sources, such as streaming films available through our university library, are not viewable on the device. However, the Skyfire browser, which converts Flash video to a format that works on Apple’s mobile devices, might soon solve that problem.

The most obvious lesson we learned is that students like using the iPads for classes. It wasn’t at all hard to get the students to use the iPads. It was hard to get the students to give them back.

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John J. Doherty is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center and an instructor in NAU’s First Year Seminar and Honors programs. He has been studying the Arthurian Legend formally since 1989, but has been reading and writing about it much longer. Kevin Ketchner is a librarian with NAU’s Cline Library and also teaches in Honors. His love of comic books has generated a strong interest in visual literacy and narrative.