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Glimpse the High Tech Future

Imagine your students as information nomads, always connected, with "a portable information field." This 21st century vision comes from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where they have had the privilege of experimenting with pervasive networking, shrinking devices, and an explosion of information services to create a wave of change.

The description of their experiences captures the essence of high-tech changes ahead for all of education, and the possibilities for learning clearly extend to K-12. Mike Conway, UNC Systems Specialist, and John Oberlin, Associate Vice Chancellor, discuss their information nomads (students and teachers) in Modeling the 21st Century Student Experience: Ubiquitous Computing in Higher Education. A presentation from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, the 38-minute podcast and a pdf of slides are available online.

A sneak preview of the future (clipped from slides) follows here:

  • Imagine a Campus Where ...Smart spaces proactively adapt to your presence, needs, activities, and preferences. (smart spaces)•You're always connected to your personal private petabyte.•Students have perfect recall, life long memory, and E-portfolios of every academic experience. •Teachers can access, review and analyze their students entire academic experience.•Life long learning is built into every student activity.
  • Recurring Themes that Motivate Grand Challenge Research...Computers have and will continue to amplify human abilities.•Computers are evolving from tools to collaborators. •Computers will have context-awareness and emergent behavior. •Memories for Life, managing information over a human lifetime.•Cognitive partnerships and collaboration between people, software agents, and computers.•Provide a teacher for every learner and a tutor for each individual.
  • New and Emerging Technologies of Interest...Sensors/Actuators, Context-Awareness, Social Computing, Continuous Computing, Digital Memories, Location Awareness (LBS), Agent-based Computing, Proactive Computing, Smart SpacesWeb 2.0, SemanticWeb, Task-orientated Computing, The network of everything, Ultra-Mobile Computing

Augmented memory didn't make that last list of technologies, but the theme is prominent in the presentation.

Source: EDUCAUSE, Modeling the 21st Century Student Experience: Ubiquitous Computing in Higher Education

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Beyond the basics, students will need 21st century competencies to survive and thrive in the future. They will have to know how to think critically, apply knowledge to new situations, analyze information, understand new ideas, communicate effectively, collaborate, solve problems, and make decisions. School districts are looking for ways to help students acquire these new skills while they also address NCLB mandates.

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