My dad and I always send each other things to check out on the Web: new sites, new ideas, articles, etc.
Last week dad sent me this link about THE HORIZON PROJECT to check out - someone has been keeping track of upcoming trends on the Web and has been ranking them for several years... and this is what they came up with this year (go ahead and check each one of them out - it's worth your time):
Time-to-Adoption: One year or Less
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
The one topic that intrigued me the most wasThe Personal Web (two to three years out). As the website states,
Online publishing tools like blogs, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and the like have become mainstream – certainly in terms of who reads them, and increasingly in terms of who writes to them. The ability to instantly publish, tag, and categorize work online, without the need to understand or even touch the underlying technologies provides a host of opportunities for faculty and students. Online publishing tools are being employed in the process of education as a means for personal and professional reflection, collaborative work, research, and the development of a public voice.
The same set of technologies is being harnessed to create highly flexible, unique personal learning environments: collections of tools individually selected to suit a learner’s style and preferences. Open source learning tools that foster personal and social forms of learning and expression, though technically unrelated, work together seamlessly without any need for complicated setup.
That makes sense, doesn't it? After all, what am I doing right now? I am using easily accessible tools to create "my personal web"...
There are many neat ideas discussed here. You can spend hours and hours dwelving into each one....
One of the more intriguing ones is the idea of Personal Learning Environment Diagrams. The idea appears simple - apply the concept of a mind diagram to your daily computer habits and voila!
I was checking out a few of the examples, and I saw this one, and I thought: "one of these days I will sit down and create one of these! It should be a fun to see what I come up with." Martin Weller, the author of this website, makes an interesting note at the end of his post:
It would be good to find an easy means of sharing these, with clouds so we could see which tools are used regularly. I'm sure someone must have an idea for doing this (Cohere, the soon to be released web 2.0 extension to Compendium might be an idea).
Maybe the reason why the idea of Personal Learning Environments intrigues me so much is because it is a "core" future trend of eLearning / web enabled learning. That is a topic for a whole different post, one that my dad and I enjoy very much.