What exactly is an emerging technology? It's hard to define. Cormac told us of one idea of it as in terms of a product life cycle the point at which a technology starts to be accepted into the mainstream (I think I got that right), just at that jumping point at which it becomes actually useful.
There has been a few things I wonder about whether they fall into this category in t&l. Take podcasting; did it ever really take off? Even with entertainment spheres self-produced 'Podcast shows' I wonder whether it was a dot.com bubble, people flooding to it it for a time and then perhaps finding something else to do with their time. One man Adam Curry was a proponent of podcasting and eventually bought out a lot of the popular tech broadcasts himself an 80's MTV DJ. However people use it for different things - a major benefit of podcasts are that they allow you to listen (or watch) things in new ways - media that has found a new distribution, such as the Beeb and it's radio shows that have found wider audiences listening on the move. In eduction how has it faired? We now have thinks like iTunes U Berkley (I guess so-called open education), but in uni's I've been at it doesn't seem to be massively popular or continued.
There has been a few things I wonder about whether they fall into this category in t&l. Take podcasting; did it ever really take off? Even with entertainment spheres self-produced 'Podcast shows' I wonder whether it was a dot.com bubble, people flooding to it it for a time and then perhaps finding something else to do with their time. One man Adam Curry was a proponent of podcasting and eventually bought out a lot of the popular tech broadcasts himself an 80's MTV DJ. However people use it for different things - a major benefit of podcasts are that they allow you to listen (or watch) things in new ways - media that has found a new distribution, such as the Beeb and it's radio shows that have found wider audiences listening on the move. In eduction how has it faired? We now have thinks like iTunes U Berkley (I guess so-called open education), but in uni's I've been at it doesn't seem to be massively popular or continued.
One of the other students drew attention to the inception of emerging ideas, inherent creativity often in the fusion of existing objects to do something new. I think that's a good idea. Take something like all the applications outthere that use Google Maps API to do new things or Clink that maps something new onto something old in Wikipedia.
But once we have identified what Emerging means we also need to apply afilter to define those that have an impact upon Teaching & Learning, and at the point a technology is grasped for those reasons, and I think that this practical subject may pose interesting questions.
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