Futurists Predict Six Major Issues Facing IT in Higher Education in 2012
Posted on January 24, 2012 by Patrick.Masson
Well, it’s that time of the year again–the beginning–so the predictions are out and David Raths of Campus Technology has submitted a few IT Trends to Watch in 2012. The subhead of his article is actually more descriptive of what you will find in it: Four eminent futurists predict the trend lines for 6 major issues facing IT in higher education in 2012. The six trends/issues covered in the report include information technology’s responsibility for helping to foster alternatives to current library and text issues, working within flat or declining budget parameters, generating innovations in gamification for teaching and learning, evolving social media options for better results, and helping to work out what constitutes plagiarism in the Internet world and how to monitor it. It’s interesting stuff. But one opportunity discussed by these futurists intrigued me the most: the development of augmented reality (AR) products which they seem to agree will take virtual reality to the next level.
What is augmented reality? PC Magazine provides the following definition: A type of virtual reality that combines real and imagined images in a real-time session. In augmented reality, most of the images are real. Huh? But the magazine goes on to give this further explanation: For example, Sportvision’s 1st and Ten graphics system superimposes a yellow line onto the football field showing TV viewers where the yard line for a first down is located.
While at UCLA I worked on a variety of visualization and modeling projects for both education and research. With these, we focused on rendering “non-visual” data to provide a graphical representation of un-veiwable objects, for example, measuring and mapping Hounsfield units to visualize a skull, without having to dissociate it from the patient’s head, and, running simulations to assess the possible outcomes of an experiment–it’s far faster, cheaper and less painful to induce a stress fracture on a computer generated mandible than a real one. But in all of these cases, the input was again, non-visual.
In addition, the hours of development time required to collect and parse the data, apply the physics and then raster the final image(s) limited the availability, while the restrictions on data types for input limited the applicability. Apparently today (or at least later, sometime in 2012), what once took months can/will happen on the fly and at a much lower cost (as it is with all technology), and with the ease of a point and click camera (embedded in your smart phone and running any one of a variety of new AR apps), anyone can capture enough information to perform a variety of tasks, from enhancing an existing visual reference to provide clarity or detail, to actually extruding additional/emergent data to project possible future states or scenarios.
And now that this is so readily available, I was curious to see how AR might be used in higher education so I went to take a look online at one product mentioned by the futurists: Layar. At that site, you can view a number of videos that show how the product works for a range of applications. Very interesting stuff. I’m not recommending the product, but I do recognize the potential for AR technology in teaching and learning in higher education, especially online. You can access the Layar website home page here. Click on ‘About Layar Vision’ to see the videos. If you do, and if you see ready application in higher education, please feel welcome to share your perspective in a comment on this post. The full Campus Technology future trends article is available here.
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