Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning

According to an e-mail message sent to the SLED (Second Life EDucators) listserv this morning, the Sloan Consortium "has embarked on an initiative to help online educators gain a better understanding of how the technologies available today can help make their classrooms better." To accomplish this, Sloan-C has launched a new website. The site was designed to support Sloan-C's upcoming conference on emerging technologies for online education, but the site and its forums are open to anyone interested in this subject, not just people who attend the conference.

Innovation Adoption

Sue Waters' latest post, This Is CRAP!!!, was the first reference I remember seeing to Rogers' "Innovation Adoption Curve." Obviously it takes some people longer than it does others to accept something new. Rogers divided people into five categories from the most to the least eager to adopt an innovation:

1. innovators (2.5 %)
2. early adopters (13.5 %)
3. early majority (34 %)
4. late majority (34 %)
5. laggards (16 %)

Sue has a couple of great graphics in her post.

In a class of 18 students, which is the number I have in my hybrid technical writing class at Red Rocks this fall, that would break down to (rounding, of course, even the .2 student in the innovator category)

1. 1 innovator
2. 2 early adopters
3. 6 early majority
4. 6 late majority
5. 3 laggards

It will be interesting to see how accurate this is.

Read/Write Web Poll on Top Web Technology

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has a poll up today asking with of the following technologies readers "think will have the most impact over the next 10 years":

1. Ajax / browser-based apps
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Attention data
4. Gaming
5. Mobile
6. Online Video / Internet TV
7. Rich Internet Apps
8. Search
9. Semantic Web / structured data
10. Virtual Worlds
11. Web services / APIs
12. Other

As I commented in response to his post: "I voted for 'Virtual Worlds,' but I think the real answer will be a 'mashup' of several of the web technologies. As an educator, I think being able to access web-based applications and search functions from within a virtual world will have a huge impact on education."