I’ve decided to start a new regular feature called “Quick Bits.” You see, there are often small stories that popup that are somewhat interesting but not really worth a whole blog post. To deal with that, I’m going to collect them over time and periodically throw them all at you at once! So here we are – Quick Bits #1.
- Kia, cooperating with Microsoft, is bringing more online technology to cars than ever before: get RSS feeds, weather reports, twitter and Facebook updates and more right from the driver’s seat. Perhaps this will spark a manufacturer battle to stuff as much social tech into a car as possible. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
- The BBC reports that as people’s online lives become increasingly public, this could have an effect on the interpretation of privacy law in Britain, which is based on “reasonable expectations of privacy.” As younger generations have increasingly lax expectations of privacy, it may affect the legal protections afforded to all.
- The APA evidently released a report several months ago aimed at improving undergraduate psychology major instruction, to which apparently no one has paid any attention.
- The technology is improving enough that doctors are increasingly able to conduct virtual visits, but there’s a problem – not all of the doctors are on board.
- Textbook rental programs are becoming increasingly common, so common in fact that major bookstores like Barnes and Noble are entering the textbook rental market. Paradigm shift that will crack the market or only a short step toward a market with only online texts?
- Current American high school and college students have five times as many mental health issued as their 1938 counterparts as indicated by extreme scores on the MMPI. Two areas were even worse: a 700% increase in hypomania (a combination of anxiety and unrealistic optimism) and a 600% increase in depression.
- The US Navy is planning to implement real-time brain scanning devices in order to diagnose brain trauma and various other neural problems to soldiers in the field. Next stop: employees!
- Soon, you’ll be able to upload any type of document to Google Docs as long as it’s under 250MB.
A recent article in the New York Times discusses a new situation with technology – increasingly short generations in terms of familiarity with technology. For the first time, even relatively close siblings are having entirely different experiences:
“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”
I think this foreshadows a larger problem facing technology-enhanced training and education; as the technology skills that trainees and college students come in with become increasingly heterogeneous, it will be more difficult for instructors to design courses in line with those students’ expectations.
Personally, I think this is the most troubling part, as stated by Dr. Larry Rosen:
“They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up.”
A recent article on PC Pro discusses the return of journalist Barry Collins to Second Life after a three-year hiatus. It is a remarkably clear and frank discussion of how the virtual world has been changing. The quite enthusiastically “adult” areas of the game have been relocated to their own virtual continent, effectively segregating them from the rest of the game world. And as a result, it seems, the rest of the game world is quite empty, which Collins seems to view as a negative.
So what is wrong with Second Life? Have businesses stopped taking interest? Companies are still moving into Second Life, although certainly not as readily as they did a few years ago. Based on my own conference experience, education seems to be increasingly interested in Second Life, and my own research on the topic has just begun.
I think, perhaps, the confusion and uneasy feeling comes from a simple fact: the hype is gone. No one is touting Second Life as “the next best thing” or “an Internet revolution.” Instead, it is simply another technology that could be used for a variety of purposes. The problem is identifying just what those purposes should be; as Collins reveals, if you don’t have your own personal goals for Second Life, it’s pretty damn boring.
Given that, why is it still gaining momentum in education and perhaps in business? Also simple – it’s easy. With Second Life, relatively unskilled (from a technical perspective) educators can, with little or no formal training, create an immersive learning environment, custom-designed to their needs. Before Second Life, the only way to do this would be to construct such an environment physically. Stephanie Henderson-Begg’s presentation at E-Learn comes to mind when considering this point – if you want to teach how to operate a chemistry lab, you can either procure chemicals, test tubes, lab coats and other expensive equipment and run a handful of people through a physical class, or you can click and drag to build a persistent, near-zero-cost-per-student virtual lab. The advantage is obvious.
So in conclusion, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Second Life. Instead, the problem is that people believe hype is necessary for a technology to flourish, and that simply isn’t the case. The continuing value of Second Life is obvious when we treat the technology as it should be treated – as a tool to be used when it is needed, not as a cure-all for the Internet.