Noughties ... but nice

The first decade of the 21st Century was highly significant for personal learning. Such a vast array of new personal devices and web applications was introduced that have become so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, many of us would probably feel at a loss if we were suddenly transported back to 1999. If we time jumped from then to 2009, the way we now communicate, learn, search for information, share content and consume entertainment would be unrecognisable. The concept of personal learning environments was also introduced, as a counterpoint to the notion of the VLE. Here are just a few of the personal technological innovations (good or bad) that emerged in the noughties:

Mobile ringtones: OK.... perhaps we could do without ringtones. Those irritating little tunes you hear on the train, in the supermarket queue and even interrupting performances in the theatre have actually grossed over £112 million in sales in the UK alone, and they ain't finished yet. As the next generation of mobile users comes of age, they too will demand that their favourite tunes be made into ringtones. The music industry must be rubbing its hands with glee.

iPods and Podcasts: The Touch, the Nano, the Shuffle, the Classic, you name it, versions of the iPod popped up and grabbed our attention in the noughties. First appearing in 2001, the iPod series is now the most successful digital audio player in history with over 220 million worldwide sales at the time of writing.

The Nintendo DS (Dual Screen) appeared in 2004 and was one of the first handheld games consoles with a built in microphone and wireless connectivity. The dual screen technology was not as smart as we first thought, but never the less, it's a great little device to amuse yourself with for a few hours whilst waiting for a train, on the bus, or in the dentist's chair (eew).

The iPhone: Apple strikes again. For most people who have them they are the best thing since sliced bread. But there are those who absolutely hate this smart, touch surface mobile phone. Battery life sucks, the camera on the first series was naff and they are expensive when you are locked into an O2 contract. But they have revolutionised mobile phones with their pinch gesturing and responsive multi-touch screens, and with several copycat devices available, there really is no going back now.

Social networking sites: Facebook (2006), Myspace (2003), Bebo (2005), LinkedIn (2003) and other sites together have changed the face of social networking for ever. For good or bad, millions of users worldwide flock every day to their favourite social networking sites for their daily fix of pokes, foodfights, online games status updates and live chat. Friends and friends of friends - the race is on to see who can collect the most links to people they will never ever meet. Seriously, social networking has blurred the boundaries between public and private, business and leisure, even good and bad taste. The way you manage your on-line identity is more important than ever. Nothing it seems, is 'yours' anymore - once you have posted personal information or photos to Facebook, they are no longer simply 'your property'. They are there forever, and burying the past may prove to be a problem for many...

YouTube: Freaking out, spoofing, parodies, pirated music videos and plenty of dross - that's YouTube for you. Before Youtube it was very difficult to upload your video clips to the Internet. Youtube made it easy for millions. If you want to know a fact you Google it, but if you want to see a clip, you YouTube it.

Nintendo Wii: This small object of desire appeared in November 2006. If we were cynical, we could surmise that Nintendo worked out if all their games playing customers continued to sit on their backsides, they would get fat and die of heart attacks. So they invented an active sports style handset to get games players up and moving about, thus keeping them alive longer so they could earn more money and spend it on Nintendo games and Wii technology. Clever.

Wikipedia: Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly to become one of the largest reference web sites, attracting approximately 65 million visitors each month. It's the first stop students make when they need to know something, and also the most vilified reference source for many scholars and academics. Where else would most of us go though, for quick information.

Google apps: Streetview, Scholar, Google Earth, Docs, etc - all of these applications appeared in the last decade, and have revolutionised the way we learn, work together, look up information and generally play out our online lives. Augmented reality was introduced as a result of the combination of a number of smart device apps including mashups, global positioning and touch screen technologies. The coming decade will see smart devices, augmented reality and haptic semantic applications coming of age. We will then see how these can be applied to enhance and extend the personal learning environment.

...and of course.... there was Twitter: Forget all the celebrity rubbish and media hype. Twitter is one of the best stripped down social networking tools available to humankind. Don't be deceived by it's simplistic appearance though. It's a powerful tool with plenty of filtering capability and its amplification and connection potential is yet to be fully tapped. Twitter and its third party bolt-on tools will be one to watch in the next few years.

So what are we to make of this truly technological ten years? We have seen radical shifts in our views of identity, relationships, copyright, communication and learning. These are deep changes that will not be recinded, and as we move into an ever more connected society, the changes will increase in their pace and intensity. Personalised learning has never been so easy to establish, and never more contentious. No-one can quite agree on what a personal learning environment is, but that is predictable, because for each of us, it is something different. And what of the future? We don't know what the next decade will hold, but we do know this - it will be increasingly connected. It will also be different - probably more different than we can begin to imagine.

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