eXtending the Web

eXtending the Web - New and Emerging Learning Technologies

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I was up at stupid o'clock yesterday to present a webinar for the ASCILITE organisation - the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. The time zone differences meant that my audience, distributed across Australasia, was listening to me in the evening, while I was sat in my office in jeans and a T-shirt at 7 in the morning, armed with copious quantities of caffeine and a box of matchsticks. While I talked, as if by magic, the sun removed itself from Australia and New Zealand and reappeared outside my window. I was actually up an hour earlier at 6 am finalising and uploading my slides onto ASCILITE's Wimba platform, and then making sure the technical details were all in order. But I enjoyed it. The audience were very knowledgeable, and asked some pertinent questions.

My subject was "The eXtended Web - New and Emerging Learning Technologies" - it was essentially a gaze into the future of e-learning where smart mobile technologies create a ubiquitous learning context, and where semantic software predicts your needs even before you ask the computer. It's not too hard to envisage this, including 3D manipulation of virtual objects and natural gesture driven learning, and of course the use of augmented reality for learning and context awareness while on the move. The technology is already here, in both handheld and wearable versions - as I try to depict in my slides above - but it may take some time before everyone who wants access to them can have it. We shall see - it's hazardous predicting the future, especially where technology is concerned, but we can watch the trends and see where the road is leading. We live in exciting and challenging times, and we can expect to see a lot of changes taking place in the next few years in the world of education.


eXtending the Web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.