This is a concept that has been recurring in my research over the past few years, getting a little clearer each time but still not quite in focus for me. The role of the teacher, in some places, is changing. A whole set of factors are contributing to the change, including ready access to experts and source material through the great communications medium of the Internet; open content; electronic, searchable, taggable resources that make it easier to draw (and keep track of) connections between things; and a growing recognition of the fact that not only is it often better for students to participate in constructing their own understanding, it’s actually possible to facilitate that process on a classroom-sized scale.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Bossanostra

The 2010 Horizon Report returns to this theme, too, both in the topics (open content and electronic books in particular) and in the trends and challenges noted by the Advisory Board. Classrooms are changing. Students are changing. The role of the academy is changing. It’s very easy to say that different equals bad, and that the anecdotal inability of today’s students to sit still and receive instruction is a symptom of the moral decay of our great society, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think, instead, that we stand at the edge of an opportunity to transform education into something that truly addresses the interests and the strengths of each student, rather than measuring each against an abstract ideal. I don’t know what it looks like. I know it’s more challenging to work individually with 25 or 30 different kids, or 60 or 120 different undergrads, to help them figure out interesting ways to learn what you want them to know instead of presenting material to them as a group and expecting them to master it. But I also feel so strongly that it’s the right way to go, because learning should be more than something that’s fed to you in school. It’s part of what makes us human and it goes on all throughout our lives, and it’s not right that so many students just can’t wait for it to be over so they can get on with other things.

I think we’re poised on the brink of figuring this out — how to really do it well, I mean. I think technology has a lot to do with it, not for its own sake but because of what it enables students to do. We’re still working out how to provide access, manage workflow, protect students’ privacy while opening opportunities to reach out to peers and experts around the world; we don’t yet understand how to assign, supervise, and evaluate the unusual kinds of work that contribute to individual learning; and there are many other obstacles, or puzzles, to get around or solve. Still, I think we’re on the way there, and it’s inspiring and exciting.

I’ve spent a lot of time now with the six topics in the report, but I haven’t forgotten that those six came from a list of twelve, and those twelve, from a list of (this year) 111 different possible topics. One of the topics that made the short list (the list of 12) but not the final cut is location-based services:

Location-based services provide content that is dynamically customized according to the user’s location. These services are commonly delivered to mobile devices, but can also be accessed from other portable computers, handhelds, or any Internet-capable device. Current common applications for location-based services include advertising, news, social networking, and similar services. (2010 Horizon Report: Short List)

My iPhone is loaded with location-based services. I have one whole screen devoted to apps I use when I travel, to give me local information about whatever city I happen to be in. Admittedly, I can’t use most of them at home, since I don’t live near a major urban center, but they’re extremely helpful when I travel.

A sampling of some of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Where – Indicates where to find cheap gas, Starbucks coffee, or the thing I use it for the most: drugstores that carry Nyquil and saline solution, two things I seem to run out of while in strange cities.


• WikiMe – Shows wikipedia articles related to wherever you happen to be. Useful for those spare moments when you want to know something, anything, about wherever you find yourself.


• Come Here – Send your coordinates and a map to another mobile user so they can find you. Very helpful when most of your group has already walked to the bar down the street and the last few folks text you from the hotel asking where you went. (Look this one up in the App Store; the website is not really functional.)


• Layar – Launch the app and pick from a list of layers, such as World Peaks (mountains near you), H1N1 flu shot locations, In & Out Burger locations, and so on. Layar overlays the information on the image from your camera’s screen, showing the name of and distance to nearby features. One tap gets you a Google map from here to there.


• Foursquare – Foursquare’s fun, though maybe not as fun as it could be; I have to agree with some of the criticisms that have been voiced about its bizarre reward system and limited applicability outside of large urban areas. I mostly check in from airports. The idea has potential, though. Essentially, you and your network of friends “check in” from different locations, earning points for doing so. Some merchants offer incentives for people who check in repeatedly from their location, which is an interesting idea because it combines the game with real-life things that people do anyway, like going to bookstores or coffee shops (or airports, I suppose).

Personally, I love the kinds of services and games that are possible with location-awareness on my phone. It’s very empowering to have a BART map that knows not only where all the stations and lines are, but where I am in relation to them: I suffer from public transit anxiety and am always certain I will miss my stop and wind up lost. iBART goes a long way toward reassuring me that I’m on the right track, so to speak. I don’t have a lot of occasion to use BART, since I don’t actually live in San Francisco, but it has come in handy once or twice.

Although it didn’t make the cut for the 2010 report, location-based services *did* make it into two editions in 2009 — the Australia-New Zealand Edition (as Location-Based Learning) and the Economic Development Edition. Interestingly, it appeared on a nearer horizon in the Economic Development edition (mid-term; it’s on the far-term horizon for Australia-New Zealand). It’s much easier to find commercial applications than educational ones at this stage. There are several schools that are experimenting with ways to use location-based services for fieldwork and campus information, and a few that are developing augmented-reality games that have location-based aspects to them.

Based on the amount of development that’s going into apps like these, location-based services are going to be big in the coming year. TechCrunch’s Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010 lists geo as an essential ingredient for killer apps, and I think they’re right. I can’t wait to see where we go from here.

I’m prompted to make this plea because at the moment I’m working on the Short List for the Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition. The Short List has a formula. It contains 12 topics — four on each horizon — and each topic is one page long. That one page has to include a description of what the topic is, why it’s relevant for education, examples of projects or programs that use it, and two or three sources of additional information. And it’s ONE PAGE. (Hence the name, Short List.)

I’d really like to include this review of JOYity, a location-based game for Android phones, in the examples list for the topic I’m working on right now. Since the Short List is distributed and used in all kinds of ways, I can’t rely on an embedded link — I need to state it explicitly. But I have about two lines per example, which is barely enough to describe whatever it is AND include the link. So it’s really frustrating to get a URL like this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/27/the-joy-of-joyity-bringing-massive-multiplayer-trans-reality-games-to-android-phones/

Go read the article, it’s great. The game looks really cool. I just need to find a way to shoehorn that ugly URL into half a line. I tried using a URL shortener on a previous Short List, but it didn’t fly; we like to see the source (the “TechCrunch” in the URL is actually important). If only the URL had been shortened when the post was made. Alas!

Please, take just a second and chop the extra nine words off your long URLs. Please. Maybe you’ll make it into the Horizon Report!
</rant>

These are the voyages of the ed tech speaker. Her continuing mission: to explore strange new presentation tools; to seek out new ways to keep her audiences awake; to boldly go where no PowerPoint has gone before.

I just finished putting together the presentation on the 2009 Horizon Report that I will be delivering tomorrow at Sonoma State University, where they are kind enough to ask me back every year around this time. Last year, I crammed at least 90 minutes of information into about 55 minutes, accompanying my speed talking performance with a respectable, if uninteresting, PowerPoint. Those poor people.

Later in the year, I gave a keynote at the Midwest Library Technology Conference 2008 along with my colleague Alan Levine. Spurred by a mutual desire not to use PowerPoint, we created the presentation in the beta version of VuVox, which was fun but a little frustrating because of a couple of bugs. (You can see that preso here.)

THIS year, what should drop into my lap but Prezi, a Flash-based presentation tool that I can only say is yummy. It’s also in beta, but Alan had a log in and said I could use it. (Thanks, Alan!) So, having prepared the back up PowerPoint just in case (I’m adventuresome, not stupid), I went in and started messing around.

Prezi gives you an endless (well, not really, but near enough) artboard, like Illustrator. There’s a lovable little menu, with a limited (but not really limiting) set of choices, that takes about twenty seconds to get the hang of. You drop your content on the artboard, and move it around; Prezi takes images and videos (flash only), and you can add text blocks. You group the content using “frames,” which helps with navigation. And that’s about all you have to master, except for the underlying concept that scale doesn’t matter.

Prezi will zoom in on objects or content groups when you click them, so your presentation can have a huge range of scales. I LOVED this once I actually got the hang of it. My first instinct was to lay everything out as though I were going to print it as a poster, with only the range of sizes that are visible all at once. But that doesn’t really take advantage of what makes Prezi so interesting. You can nest content areas, so one frame can contain multiple sections that are too small to see at first.

A finished Prezi can be used two ways: either you step through using the forward and back arrows (you set the path as you create the content, so you zoom where you want in the order you want), or you just click frames and objects that interest you. Either way, whenever you go from one thing to something that’s a different scale, Prezi zooms in or out, centers, and tilts whatever you are seeing so that you can read it.

What I really liked:

• It was incredibly easy to make something that looks really good.
• It was fun to use!
• It autosaves. You can save manually too.
• The zebra wheel lets you tilt, size, and move any object just by clicking it.
• The zooming and tilting looks really cool when you step through a presentation.
• Almost everything I wanted to do was do-able, and the stuff that wasn’t, wasn’t really necessary.

What I didn’t like so much:

• I could not find a way to attach a URL to an object. The only way I found was to type out the whole URL, and then that text becomes a link. But I wanted to link pictures and things.
• There are not many design schemes to pick from (yet?). I like the basic one, but I wanted a white background so I could hide the white background on some of my images. I had issues with transparent backgrounds (i.e. they didn’t work).
• I wanted to be able to choose my own set of fonts. You get three per design, which is perfect, but I wanted to change just one of the three in the design I used.
• Although there’s an option to download your presentation so you can play it without the Internet, it doesn’t seem to be working.
• Prezi spawns windows at an alarming rate. When I saved & closed my presentation, there were three Prezi parent windows open. I have no idea where they all came from.

On the whole, I have to say that I like it a lot. I used it for hours and was having fun the whole time. No angry frustration, no puzzled pauses, no “is-it-this-software-or-am-I-just-stupid?” moments. My professional, unbiased opinion is YAY-I-LOVE-PREZI!!

Take a look at the presentation. It’s text heavy, but I did that on purpose so that it can be used without me standing there talking.

You can try Prezi yourself, even without a beta account, by playing with their demo at www.Prezi.com. Go on. It’s fun. And work should be fun.

Now, if my iPhone could only do Flash, I could carry this around with me. I’d be the life of the party!

You can follow some of my progress by peeking at my 2007 Horizon link list on del.icio.us. It’s not comprehensive, but I’m adding to it as I work my way through the topics. Many of the links in there were supplied by our Advisory Board. Some were found via search or serendipity (which is my favorite aspect of this part of the project).