What the Future is Bringing Us (2012)





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 * (2004) Information and Communication Technology (ICT) planning document developed by David Moursund. The goal was to facilitate the development of a sequence of 1-credit (quarter hour system) graduate-level joint preservice and inservice courses to be taught at the University of Oregon.


 * (2000 to 2003) Golden Oldie News Oct-December 2000 up through Jan-March 2003. These materials were moved from an old Oregon Technology Education Council (OTEC) site developed by David Moursund). Most of the links in the referenced articles no longer work.


 * (1987 Futuristic Math Education Scenarios).


 * (1974 to 2001) All of David Moursund's editorials published in Learning and Leading with Technology from its inception in 1974 until he retired from ISTE in 2001.

This IAE-pedia page is protected against changes by readers.

BigDog is a rough-terrain robot built by Boston Dynamics that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by an engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog has four legs that are articulated like an animal’s, with compliant elements to absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule; about 3 feet long, 2.5 feet tall and weighs 240 lbs. See more pictures of social robots at http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=pictures+social+robots&qpvt=pictures+social+robots&qpvt=pictures+social+robots&FORM=IQFRML.



See MIT's Electric Cheetah Robot video at http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/15/mit-darpa-cheetah-robot/.



The Cray-2 supercomputer was the world's fastest supercomputer until 1990. But even with a performance of up to 1.9 GFLOPS, the liquid-cooled, 200-kilowatt machine ranks behind a number of "modern" portable, battery-powered Smart phones when it comes to GFLOPS ratings.

Year 2012 Table of Contents



 * "All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth." (Alvin Toffler; American writer and futurist; born October 3, 1928.)


 * "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" (Alan Kay; American computer scientist and educator; born May 17, 1940.)

Introduction
All of education is future oriented. Through informal and formal education, students are being prepared for their futures. Of course, a major goal of education is to preserve and pass on the culture, values, history, and so on from the past. Ideally, this is done in a manner that helps to prepare students for their futures as members of local, regional, national, and world societies.

Special Message for Teachers. Consider establishing a "futures" time period each week, in which you engage your students in an exploration of possible futures they will live in and how the subject(s) you are teaching are helping to prepare them for these possible futures. One way to do this is to select a topic from the (growing) list given below. Engage students in a discussion of what they know about the topic. Perhaps point them to some material to read. Engage them in a discussion of how the content you are teaching fits in with preparing them for life in a world in which the forecasts may well come true.

Another approach is to encourage your students to bring in hard copy materials and Web links that contain forecasts of the future. Each week a different small team of students could assume responsibility for leading the weekly "futures" session.

Still another approach is to raise the following question with your students near the beginning of any new unit of study: What changes are going on around the world that are having a major impact on this unit of study? The idea is to emphasize change and that you are helping your students get an education that prepares them for a changing world.

Teachers working with students may also be interested in having the students research and report on a "futures prediction" from five or ten years ago, or perhaps from when they were in first grade, the year they were born, or so on. They can find out which predictions have become part of our world today and which ones failed, and why or why not in each case.

A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education
The following book is available free on the Web in both PDF and Microsoft Word formats.


 * Moursund, D.G. (2005). Planning, Forecasting, and Inventing Your Computers-in-Education Future. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Retrieved 11/20/2010 from http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/23-planning-forecasting-and-inventing-your-computers-in-education-future.html.

Quoting from the Preface:


 * I strongly believe that our education system can be a lot better than it currently is. Indeed, I predict that during the next two decades we will substantially improve our educational system. In this book, I enlist your help in making this prediction come true.


 * The focus in this book is on two aspects of improving our educational system:


 * Improving the quality of education that K-12 students are receiving.
 * Improving the professional lives of teachers and other educators.


 * This book is mainly designed for preservice and inservice teachers and other educators. If you fall into this category, you will find that this book focuses on your possible futures of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education. It will do this by:


 * Helping you make and implement some ICT-related decisions that will likely prove very important to you during your professional career in education.
 * Helping you to increase your productivity and effectiveness as you work to improve the quality of education being received by your students.

Some Forecasts
This section contains relatively recent forecasts of future technology that are important to our current and future educational systems. For the most part, the most recent entries are at the top of this section.

Supercomputing
Sandia Lab News Release (12/20/2012). Supercomputing on the XPRESS track. Sandia National Laboratory. Retrieved 12/22/2012 from https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/supercomputing_xpress/. Quoting from the article:


 * In the stratosphere of high-performance supercomputing, a team led by Sandia National Laboratories is designing an operating system that can handle the million trillion mathematical operations per second of future exascale computers, and then create prototypes of several programming components.


 * “The project’s goal is to devise an innovative operating system and associated components that will enable exascale computing by 2020, making contributions along the way to improve current petaflop (a million billion operations a second) systems,” said Sandia program lead Ron Brightwell.


 * Scientists in industry and in research institutions believe that exascale computing speeds will more accurately simulate the most complex reactions in such fields as nuclear weapons, atmospheric science and chemistry and biology, but enormous preparation is necessary before the next generation of supercomputers can achieve such speeds.

The Future of Knowledge Work
Hansen, T. (October 2012). The future of knowledge work. Intel Corporation. Retrieved 12/19/2012 from http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/research/2012/pdfs/The_Future_of_Knowledge_Work-Intel_WhitePaper.pdf. Quoting from the paper:


 * By 2025 the explosion in world population, automobile ownership, and urbanization trends will make physical travel more complex and time consuming. In contrast, technology will continue to shrink, disappearing into the fabric of our life, eventually becoming so small that it will be embedded in our clothes and environment… The intent of this paper is to identify trends likely to shape the Future of Work, and seed the reader with information and ideas to imagine the future that is rushing towards us.

Forecasts from Intel
Maisto, M. (12/16/2012). Intel offers an image of the workplace of the future. eweek.com. Retrieved 12/19/2012 from http://www.eweek.com/mobile/intel-offers-an-image-of-the-workplace-of-the-future/. Quoting from the article:


 * Intel staff began to give some thought about where the company should be headed, and in coming to conclusions about how workers and workplaces will change over the next 10 to 20 years, the giant chip maker thought other businesses might find the data useful as well.


 * "Most people work 9 to 5 jobs, are self employed or employed by one company but not both, and most have colleagues who are human. That's going to change," Intel Chief Evangelist Steve Brown said during a Dec. 14 webinar. Brown, with Tim Hansen, an Intel technology strategist who has authored a whitepaper on the data, covered five major points of interest.

Access the Whitepaper written by Tim Hansen at http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/research/2012/pdfs/The_Future_of_Knowledge_Work-Intel_WhitePaper.pdf.

Forecasts from IBM
Cooney, M. (12/17/2012). IBM: In the next 5 years computers will learn, mimic the human senses. Network World. Retrieved 12/19/2012 from http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/121712-ibm-5in5-265171.html. Quoting from the article:


 * IBM today issued its seventh annual look at what Big Blue researchers think will be the five biggest technologies for the next five years. In past prediction packages known as "IBM 5 in 5" the company has had some success in predicting the future of password protection, telemedicine and nanotechnology.


 * "Just as the human brain relies on interacting with the world using multiple senses, by bringing combinations of these breakthroughs together, cognitive systems will bring even greater value and insights, helping us solve some of the most complicated challenges," writes Bernie Meyerson, IBM fellow and VP of innovation.

Storing Video as Vectors Instead of Pixels
University of Bath (12/11/2012). Is the pixel about to die? Retrieved 12/12/2012 from http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2012/12/11/pixel-die/. Quoting from the article:


 * Researchers launching a new vector-based video codec are claiming their work will lead to the death of the pixel within the next five years.


 * Digital pictures are built from a rectangular grid of coloured cells, or pixels. The smaller and closer the pixels are together, the better the quality of the image. So pixel-based movies need huge amounts of data and have to be compressed, losing visual quality. They are also difficult to process.


 * The alternative, a vector-based format, presents the image using contoured colours. Until now there has not been a way to fill in between the colours at the quality needed for professional use. The Bath team has finally solved this problem.

Intel Tech Chief Peers Into the Future
Dou, Eva (12/4/2012). Intel Tech Chief Rattner peers into the future. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12/7/2012 from http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/04/qa-intel-tech-chief-rattner-peers-into-the-future/.

Justin Rattner is director of research at Intel, the world's largest chip manufacturer and a firm with a very large research budget. Quoting from the article:


 * Interviewer. What is the future of computing?


 * Mr. Rattner: One thing we think is going to be very important in the future is this notion of having information devices that are contextually aware. These devices will have the ability to know you as an individual and then anticipate your needs. One day, you’ll get in your car and your car will know your calendar, it will know whether you’re going shopping, or to work, or to a sporting event, or a music event, and it will have chosen the best route. And it will know because it will use its hard sensors — geopositioning, time, temperature, compass, elevation — as well as soft sensors — your calendar, your social network, your favorites, and your likes and your dislikes — and when you fuse the soft sensing with the hard sensing, that’s where the magic happens.


 * I believe fundamentally that when we make this transition to these contextually aware devices, we will have taken a quantum step in human interface technology. And fundamentally we will change how people think about humans and machines. That line will begin to blur. If you think you’re fond of your smartphone today, then imagine when it’s your best friend, your personal assistant, your guide through life.

Future of Non-volatile Memory
Mearian, L. (10/25/2012). Non-volatile memory's future is in software. Computerworld. Retrieved 11/7/2012 from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232845/Non_volatile_memory_s_future_is_in_software. Quoting from the article:


 * There will be a sea change in the non-volatile memory (NVM) market over the next five years, with more dense and reliable technologies challenging dominant NAND flash memory now used in solid-state drives (SSD) and embedded in mobile products.


 * "What is happening across the industry with multiple competing technologies to NAND flash is the memory that goes into SSDs today will be replaced by something very close to the performance of system memory," Pappas said. "So now, it's the approximate speed as system memory, but yet it's also non-volatile. So it's a big change in computing architecture."


 * For example, last year IBM announced a breakthrough in phase-change memory that could lead to the development of solid-state chips that can store as much data as NAND flash technology but with 100 times the performance, better data integrity and vastly longer life spans.

Nanotube Chip Breakthrough
Markoff, J. (10/28/2012). I.B.M. reports nanotube chip breakthrough. NY Times. Retrieved 11/7/2012 from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/i-b-m-reports-nanotube-chip-breakthrough/. Quoting from the article:


 * I.B.M. scientists are reporting progress in a chip-making technology that is likely to ensure that the basic digital switch at the heart of modern microchips will continue to shrink for more than a decade.
 * “This is terrific. I’m really excited about this,” said Subhasish Mitra, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford who specializes in carbon nanotube materials.


 * The promise of the new materials is twofold, he said: carbon nanotubes will allow chip makers to build smaller transistors while also probably increasing the speed at which they can be turned on and off.

More on Moore's Law
Shankland, S. (10/15/2012). Moore's Law: The rue that really matters in tech. CNET. Retrieved 10/15/2012 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57526581-76/moores-law-the-rule-that-really-matters-in-tech/. Quoting from the article:


 * In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore foresaw an inexorable rise in chip power that eventually delivered the computer to your pocket. While long in the tooth, Moore's prediction still has plenty of life in it.

The article contains a nice summary of chip technology since 1965 and provides some forecasts of what Intel hopes to accomplish in their next few years of chip development.

Rise of the Machines
Moses, A. (7/18/2012). Rise of the machines. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 01/13/2012 from http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/rise-of-the-machines-20120718-229ev.html.

The article is about Jaan Tallinn, an Australian technologist and futurist. Quoting from the article:


 * One of the founding engineers of Skype and Kazaa is in Australia to sound a warning to the human race: fasten your seat belts, as machines are becoming so intelligent that they could pose an existential threat.


 * Jaan Tallinn argues human-driven technological progress has largely replaced evolution as the dominant force shaping our future. Machines are becoming smarter than we are, but Tallinn warns that if we are not careful this could lead to a "sudden global ecological catastrophe".

Here is a quote from Tallinn:


 * "It really sucks to be the number two intelligent species on this planet; you can just ask gorillas."

Tallin believes the singularity (when computers surpass humans in intelligence) will occur in about 50 years.

AT&T Trials Text-Message Translation
Simonite, T. (9/26/2012). AT&T trials text-message translation, Technology Review. Retrieved 10/6/2012 from http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429375/att-trials-text-message-translation/. Quoting from the article:


 * Just because you can't speak another language doesn't mean you can't text in it. Mobile network AT&T is trialing technology that lets customers send and receive text messages that are automatically translated from English to Spanish and back. A person simply registers a phone number as having a preferred language. Messages sent to that number in a different language are then automatically translated before being relayed to the person's phone.


 * The current version of the technology only handles translation between English and Spanish, but AT&T has already deployed technology capable of handling six more languages in existing products, says Gilbert, so they could easily be added to the text message translation system.


 * Gilbert and his colleagues are rolling out a "working pilot" that will have AT&T employees try out the technology, which works on any cell phone and doesn't require any software to be added to a handset.

Of course, this does not represent a major step forward in translation of text. Such facilities have been available for a number of years. For example, see http://www.worldlingo.com/microsoft/computer_translation.html and http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?category=languages%7Cfree+translation.

Machine Learning to Save Babies
NSF(9/24/2012)/ Machine Learning Saves Babies!. CS Bits & Bites. Retrieved 9/26/2012 from http://www.nsf.gov/cise/csbytes/newsletter/vol2/vol2i2.html.

IN the U.S., there are about 500,000 premature births per year. Machine learning is being used to diagnose the specific problems a baby may have. Here are two paragraphs from the document:


 * Computer scientists are now using machine learning tools to look at the massive amounts of data to find common patterns among babies, creating new measures for predicting decline in the babies’ health, and forming treatment plans. Machine learning is a discipline of computer science devoted to the development of algorithms that take raw data as input and find patterns or make predictions based on features of the underlying data. Machine learning has many applications, including finding volcanoes on the surface of Mars and determining defects on the surface of semiconductor chips.


 * The PhysiScore uses non-invasively measured data from the first few hours of life and produces a probability score for each baby that represents the babies overall illness severity and likelihood of developing major complications downstream. This score is like the APGAR (Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration) score administered minutes after a baby is born in that it helps doctors and nurses evaluate the health of newborn babies. However, the PhysiScore is significantly more accurate, and since it can be easily automated on existing monitoring devices, it makes the incorporation of such a score easy within the clinical workflow. It is also more accurate without being invasive (no need for blood draws, spinal taps, etc.). The doctors can use this information to plan for infant transport and plan patient management, thereby providing them with greater chances for future healthy living

Self-driving Cars in Five Years
Niccolai, J. (9/25/2012). Self-driving cars a reality for 'ordinary people' within 5 years, says Google's Sergey Brin. Computerworld. Retrieved 9/26/2012 from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231707/Self_driving_cars_a_reality_for_39_ordinary_people_39_within_5_years_says_Google_39_s_Sergey_Brin. Quoting from the article:


 * Google is known for setting ambitious targets for itself, and it's apparently making no exception for self-driving cars. Such "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less than five years, Google CEO Sergey Brin said on Tuesday.


 * He also said he thinks autonomous cars will be "far safer" than those driven by humans, and he envisioned a world in which office parking lots become a thing of the past, with cars instead dropping off their owners and driving off to park themselves somewhere else.


 * Brin spoke at a press conference at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, where California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law state legislation that is designed to accelerate the testing and development of self-driving vehicles.

Advanced Robotics Project
Taylor, Dan (9/19/2012). NASA funds 8 advanced robotics projects. InformationWeek Government. Retrieved 9/22/2012 from http://www.informationweek.com/government/information-management/nasa-funds-8-advanced-robotics-projects/240007615. Quoting from the article:


 * NASA is investing $2.7 million to kick off eight advanced robotics projects aimed at improving robot technology as part of its long-term goal of putting a human on Mars.

The projects, part of the White House's National Robotics Initiative, are tied to NASA's plans for an asteroid mission in 2025 and human exploration of Mars around 2035. The National Science Foundation managed the solicitation for the project proposals, each of which will receive between $150,000 and $1 million in funding.


 * The purpose of NASA's latest robotics initiative is to encourage research that combines computer and systems science with mechanical, electrical, and materials engineering and social, behavioral, and economic sciences, NASA said in a statement on the project awards. In addition to helping with space exploration, the robotics advances may have applications in manufacturing and business.

For more about robots, see http://www.informationweek.com/government/security/us-military-robots-of-the-future-visual/232900886.

Developing Software to Pass College Entrance Math Exam
Alabaster, J. (9/10/2012). Fujitsu to build software robot to pass college entrance exams. NetworkWorld. Retrieved 9/13/2012 from http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/091012-fujitsu-to-build-software-robot-262283.html. Quoting from the article:


 * Fujitsu said Monday it will lead a project to create artificial intelligence capable of passing the math portion of the entrance exams to one of Japan's top universities.


 * The company's research division said its goal is to make software by 2021 that can complete exactly the same math test that hopeful teenagers take when applying to Tokyo University, or "Todai," known for its grueling entrance requirements. The project will need to process text and formulas meant for human eyes, extract the math problems and convert them into a form meant for computers, and then solve the problems at the level of Japan's top high school students.

Just for the fun of it, suppose that this project is successfully completed in the next ten years. How might it affect math education? How might this affect precollege math education? Over the years, precollege math education has managed to integrate the use of graphing and equation-solving calculators, but remain largely untouched by computer capabilities. As the article notes:


 * Currently, only about half of the problems on some such tests can be solved by computers alone, even using advanced algorithms, the company said.

Universal Speech Translator and 2012 Olympics
Aron, J. (6/27/2012). Universal speech translator app ready for Olympics. NewScientist. Retrieved 7/5/2012 from http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/universal-speech-translator-ap.html. Quoting from the article:


 * In one month's time, millions of tourists from across the world will descend on London for the 2012 Olympics, creating the perfect test bed for a new speech translation iPhone app.


 * The app, dubbed VoiceTra4U-M, is a bit of a mouthful to say, but lets people converse with foreigners in their own language. It was developed by the Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium (U-STAR), which is made up of researchers from 23 different countries, and supports full voice translation for 13 different languages, with text translation for a further 10.


 * Users can share a single iPhone to speak face-to-face or make phone calls to anyone else using the app. In both cases the translation takes place on remote servers, introducing a slight delay to the conversation.

Internet Traffic Continues Its Rapid Increase
Gross, G. (5/30/2012). Cisco: Global 'net traffic to surpass 1 zetabyte in 2016. IDG News. Retrieved 6/24/2012 from http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/256522/cisco_global_net_traffic_to_surpass_1_zettabyte_in_2016.html. Quoting from the article:


 * Global Internet Protocol traffic will reach an annual rate of 1.3 zettabytes in 2016 as more people connect more devices and download more video over the Internet, Cisco Systems predicted Wednesday.


 * With global IP traffic surpassing the zettabyte (1 billion terabyte) threshold, there will be more Internet traffic in 2016 than in all years up to 2012, said Doug Webster, senior director for service provider marketing at Cisco.


 * By 2016, there will be nearly 18.9 billion devices connected to the Internet -- 2.5 devices for every person on earth -- up from 10.3 billion connected devices in 2011. Part of the growth will come from devices like television sets and electric meters that haven't traditionally connected to the Internet, Webster said.

The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning

 * Chandler, D. (4/24/2012). The robot revolution is just beginning. MIT News Office. Retrieved 4/25/2012 from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/rodney-brooks-event-0424.html. While the use of robots has been growing rapidly for many years, Rodney Brooks believes that we are just getting started on what is to come. Quoting from the article:


 * When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s — initially on automobile assembly lines — computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. Despite a half-century of exponential growth in computational power, that’s pretty much still the state of industrial robotics. But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT’s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer.




 * Brooks’ latest concept for next-generation robots could, he thinks, revolutionize manufacturing. Instead of huge machines that need to be kept inside protective cages so they won’t injure nearby workers, he envisions smaller, nimbler, more responsive robots that could work alongside people, helping them with tasks. The new robots, he says, will compare to today’s lumbering industrial robots in much the way that an iPhone compares to an earlier, room-sized mainframe computer.

Funding Research on Future Microprocessors
Montablano, E. (3/21/2012). Feds Fund Research For Breakthrough Microprocessors, InformationWeek. Retrieved 3/28/2012 from http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/enterprise-architecture/232700013. Quoting from the article:


 * The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)--the Department of Commerce component that creates federal technology standards--is offering the grant money for new ideas in chips beyond existing complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which the feds as well as the industry expect to outlive its usefulness in 10 to 15 years, according to documents posted about the funding opportunity on Grants.gov.


 * In the next decade or so, components will shrink to the atomic scale, making it more difficult to use CMOS technology to increase the density of components on a chip and achieve low-power operation, according to NIST.

The Popularity of Microcomputers
Some of the literature I read forecasts the decline of sales of microcomputers. The argument is that they are being replaced by tablet computers. Here is an article that does some forecasting on this topic:

Nagel, D. (3/20/20120). Tablets haven't killed the PC yet. THE Journal. Retrieved 3/22/2012 from http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/03/20/tablets-havent-killed-the-pc-yet.aspx. Here are the first two paragraphs of this article:


 * Despite the substantial growth of mobile handheld and tablet devices, traditional PC desktop and laptop systems aren't going away anytime soon. Just the opposite, according to a report released this week: Annual PC shipments could grow by nearly 50 percent worldwide between now and 2016.


 * According to market research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), total PC shipments worldwide and across all segments grew a modest 1.8 percent in 2011, reaching 353.3 million units. That growth was driven by traditional portable computers (laptops, netbooks, etc.), which increased 4.2 percent overall to 209.4 million units. Desktop PCs actually declined in 2011 worldwide by 1.6 percent from 2010, reaching 144 million units.

Crossword Puzzles
Lohr, S. (3/18/2012). In crosswords, it's man over machine. The New York Times. Retrieved 3/19/2012 from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/in-crosswords-man-over-machine-for-now/.

The field of Artificial Intelligence has a long history in its development of computer programs to play chess. Eventually computers bested humans in chess playing. More recently, a computer bested humans in the TV game Jeopardy. The article cited above discusses computers versus humans in Crossword Puzzle solving. Quoting from the article:


 * Score one for humans and their subtle, quirky, pattern-matching brains.


 * Over the weekend, an impressive crossword-solving computer program, called Dr. Fill, which I wrote about earlier, matched its digital wits against the wetware of 600 of the nation’s best human solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn.

In the tournament, the computer placed 141st. The creator of the computer program, Mathew Ginsberg, expects his program will do better next year.

Ray Kurzweil Forecasts
Griggs, B. (3/12/2012). Futurist: We'll someday accept computers as human. CNN Tech. Retrieved 3/16/2012 from http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-12/tech/tech_innovation_ray-kurzweil-sxsw_1_computers-humans-inventor-and-futurist?_s=PM:TECH. Here are some forecasts from the short article:


 * *"It's an amazing threshold that people are talking to computers [in natural language]," he said, when asked about Apple's Siri. "Siri is only going to get better." [To learn about Siri, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_(software).]


 * *Moore's Law, the rule of thumb that the pace of innovation in computer technology doubles every 18 months to two years, will come to an end by 2020.[To learn more about Moore's law, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law.]


 * *"As we go through this decade, search engines aren't going to wait to be asked. They'll be listening [to humans] in the background. And [the search results] will just pop up."

MIT's Free Courses
Parry, M. (2/13/2012). MITx opens eenrollment for first interactive online course; Pilot certificates will be free. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2/13/2012 from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment-for-first-interactive-online-course-pilot-certificates-will-be-free/35396?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Moursund, D. (1/28/2012). A game changer in higher education. IAE Blog. Retrieved 2/13/2012 from http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/a-game-changer-in-higher-education.html.

Both articles discuss MIT's new initiative to make their courses available online and free. Their early publicity on this effort indicates that a certificate of completion will be made available, but does not discuss the cost. The first of the two articles given above indicates that in these early experiments the certificate will be free.

We are at the beginning of a very major change in higher education. Stanford University, MIT, and others believe it is possible to automate the delivery, interaction with students, and grading to such a level that it can be done by (artificially intelligent) computer systems and, at the same time, maintain high academic standards.

Faster Mobile Connectivity
Heilprin, J. (1/19/2012). UN sets stage for blazing fast mobile devices. R&D. Retrieved 1/23/2012 from http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/01/Information-Tech-Telecommunications-UN-sets-stage-for-blazing-fast-mobile-devices/. Quoting from the article:


 * A United Nations telecom meeting has approved the next generation of mobile technology, which experts say will make devices 500 times faster than 3G smartphones and eliminate the wait time between the tap of a finger and the appearance of a Web page.


 * The technology will be used immediately for planning changes to equipment but it could take two years to show up on consumers smartphone, tablets and other devices because of the time it takes to get to production, International Telecommunication Union spokesman Sanjay Acharya said Thursday.

A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education
The following book is available free on the Web in both PDF and Microsoft Word formats.


 * Moursund, D.G. (2005). Planning, Forecasting, and Inventing Your Computers-in-Education Future. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Retrieved 11/20/2010 from http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/23-planning-forecasting-and-inventing-your-computers-in-education-future.html.

Quoting from the Preface:


 * I strongly believe that our education system can be a lot better than it currently is. Indeed, I predict that during the next two decades we will substantially improve our educational system. In this book, I enlist your help in making this prediction come true.


 * The focus in this book is on two aspects of improving our educational system:


 * Improving the quality of education that K-12 students are receiving.
 * Improving the professional lives of teachers and other educators.


 * This book is mainly designed for preservice and inservice teachers and other educators. If you fall into this category, you will find that this book focuses on your possible futures of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education. It will do this by:


 * Helping you make and implement some ICT-related decisions that will likely prove very important to you during your professional career in education.
 * Helping you to increase your productivity and effectiveness as you work to improve the quality of education being received by your students.

Links to Other IAE Resources
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IAE Blog
All IAE Blog Entries.

Popular IAE Blog Entries.

Possible futures of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education.

Forecasting the future: good education helps prepare students for their possible futures.

IAE Newsletter
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IAE-pedia (IAE's Wiki)
Home Page of the IAE Wiki.

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I-A-E Books and Miscellaneous Other
David Moursund's Free Books.

David Moursund' Learning and Leading with Technology Editorials.

Author
This page was created by and is maintained by David Moursund.