Elearning Prediction / Hope 2010 – Next 10 Years

My prediction and hope for 2010 are tempered by what I learnt and gathered in 2009 and before that. However, my hope does not match my prediction.

I suspect that what I hope happens will not come to pass.

I’ll not dwell on the particular. That is too narrow for the future. Instead, I’ll attempt to look to the bigger picture of where a Nirvana in elearning might lie.

Surmise

Commercialism and consumerism will rise with renewed vigour, despite the recent and global economic collapse that many experts say was brought about through, among other things, flagrant practices of commercialism and consumerism.

Rather than learn from past errors and misguided pathways, society will resume its hazardous journey and continue to career along a wavering and obstacle-strewn path to uncertain success.

Why do I feel this way? There are many reasons. I will cite only one elearning example here.

At the beginning of last decade (2000 – 2003) I watched the rise and fall of what might have been a brilliant concept in learning resource development – that of the learning object.

I may be wrong here – I don’t think I am. But my feeling is that financially pushy commercial factors, far larger than the budgets for learning itself, launched into the sky and eventually nosedived to destruction what could have been a worthwhile elearning concept, in the form of the learning object.

Pandora relic

I have one hope for this year and for the rest of time.

Sheryl McCoy’s recent post, Another Balkanized Technology Rip-Off, puts into words exactly how I feel about the way commercialism and consumerism have continued to hinder the betterment of society.

The drive to sell, through a strategy of planned obsolescence despite genuine need, continues to come in the way of establishing real expertise in the use of technology. It stymies creativity. It comes in the way of progressing to better things, while purporting to advance and progress towards improvement. It wastes time, resources and money.

I have worked through a decade of watching incompatibles, non-connectables, lack of connectivity and even incompatibility between different versions of the same commercial devices/applications/appliances.

I’ve wracked my senses, grappling with upgrades to versions of machines, computers and their applications. All in an attempt to continue to use these for the purposes that I had worked to acquire consummate ease in and reasonable expertise in.

What I discovered was that I was grounded, once again, when the latest version (of whatever) was released. It made me consider seriously and review any further dubious opportunities for ‘upgrading’.

Valuable opportunity

I hope that we can learn from the mistakes of the last decade, and of last century. Let’s not push mistakes into the past as history to be forgotten. Let’s not claim we are assured success by simply ‘moving right along’.

Let’s start putting to good use what can be salvaged in learning from our past mistakes and successes, and move to a richer and prosperous future.

Change - A Possible Barrier to Progress

Change has come up a lot in the blogosphere recently.

Andrea Hernandez prompted me to write one of my post-type comments against her recent post on agents of change:

Seeds, Serendipity, Sustainability.

I thank her for the opportunity for that reflection. Part of my comment to her ran something like this:

Always, when I learn about change being brought about, I ask questions. I ask why we are changing and I listen. The reply I get allows me to decide whether the change that's proposed is something I'd support.

If I am confronted with the question, "Don't you support change?" my knee-jerk reaction is always to ask again, "What change or changes am I being asked to support?"

If I get back nothing but an argument on change, I become suspicious that the goal of the agent for change is simply to change, without recourse to why, how, or if a proposed change is for a real benefit.

There is always the possibility that change could mean a retrograde shift - moving back to what was - or moving to situations that are of no real benefit or worse. Yet it is always assumed that 'change' is good and that it means moving forward.

Why do I think like this?

Much of the change that I have been coerced into accepting in education over many years has not been thought through beforehand. It is only years, months or even weeks later, when in hindsight, it's seen that the enacted change was not needed, or was falsely initiated, or that there was a political agenda.

So it was for me with the introduction of unit standards to New Zealand secondary education in the mid-90s and with the introduction of NCEA this century.

When I heard of the proposed introduction of national standards to primary education in New Zealand, I experienced powerful déjà vu.
I had a dizzy sinking feeling, and something inside my head shouted, “Here we go again!”

When I hear John Hattie speak about the introduction of national standards, I think, “John! You’ve got it right mate!”

Video - John Hattie, Education Leaders Forum, Rotorua, October 2009

Expert by Appointment – media and ICT

We live in an age where ‘becoming an expert’ is just another turn of phrase. Despite research and the embracing of the results of this in several chapters of Gladwell’s Outliers, and in other similar books, expertise is looked on as being easily achievable.

You’ll be an expert in no time. You can pick it up as you go along.
In March 2007, MediaSnackers promoted these options in an advert, posted on YouTube, for a ‘research genius’ among other guru-types.
It indicates distinctly that “experience and qualifications are not essential” for any of the job offers.



I fit with the ideas that creativity, right attitude, an inspiring nature and professional mentality go a long way to assisting the activities of young up-and-coming pioneers. Certainly conformists and pessimists have their drawbacks, if innovation is where the job aspirations are at. I have no problem with all of those aspects of the brief.

The advertised positions are important to, and influential in contributing to the success of a new and growing organisation. The effectiveness of the training gurus and marketing managers in particular is key to this success. Yet there is nothing more likely to engender contempt in admirers or followers than the so-called expert who clearly demonstrates that he or she isn’t expert.

Or is this point of view outdated?

I support the youth of today. However, I wonder at the culture and attitude they may have picked up associated with the worth of experience and knowledge, and that they will carry these attitudes with them as they follow their careers. Is there something that I’m missing here?

Am I carrying the values and ideas of a bygone age?

The critical players certainly need technical know-how, marketing expertise, other skills and a basket of essential knowledge. Is it really the best way to launch our ships into future business space, building them as we go, having had no real experience in shipbuilding, resourcing or navigating? Am I so old-fashioned that I can’t see the potential that these new and innovative approaches have in reaching desired destinations?

Is it simply enough to sit back and marvel at the apparent successes of these approaches? I appeal for your assistance here, for I have been puzzled by these phenomena, and for many years now. It seems that they have become so numerous that I have no time to catch breath between instances of their occurrence.

What are your thoughts?

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A School of the Future?

I believe that education in the future may not be best achieved in schools. However, this post summarises what I think should be the components of an ideal school of the future. It is not a summary of my idea of where education should be going, or how it should be obtained.

Tania Sheko is hosting the 'Green Pen Society' (GPS) writers' club over at Brave New World, for Paul Cornies at quoteflections.

Her topic for October is:

What would your ideal school look like?
Design the school of the future – but do it now!

How could I resist a topic like that?

Having taught in many different schools, and in different countries, I’ve gathered hunches, likes, dislikes and theories that can help me with ideas for the design of the ideal school of the future. It is a difficult task.

A secondary school

The ‘ideal school’ is forever a mythical artefact, for by definition a school has to meet the needs of many. No school can serve completely all learners all of the time.

As well, its situational constraints must necessarily govern the functions that it can deliver and needs to provide.

My ideal school would be a secondary school with a roll of learners from say, ages 12 to 18 years. It will prepare all learners for further learning. It will provide pathways to employment for those learners who, for whatever reason, leave the school to seek employment before having completed all available education levels within the school.

School providers and authorities

Assuming that the school is capable of serving all situational needs of its learners, the first requisite must be that it is affordable.

Fine education costs. We should all know that by now. If it results in overspending, however, then ultimately the future availability of good education within the school will suffer.

For as much as the ideal resources, pedagogies and learning environments are important, and to whatever specification these may adhere to, if they cannot be sustained, or are not seen to be sustainable by the providing authority, they cannot form the components of my ideal school.

Governance

My school will have experienced governance, administered by a necessary board of trustees who genuinely have the future situational needs of the learners at heart. To do this, the governance must have a vision for the big picture of what education should bring to learners in the 21^st century.

Management

Counterpart to governance, the school’s management will likewise have an eagerness to use such teaching structures within the school. There will be commitment to use resources, pedagogies and learning environments that foster teaching and learning that best suit the future needs of learners.

The whole picture

As boring as all of the above may seem, without them no ideal school will succeed. They are integral parts of the whole picture.

The school will have classrooms, workshops, laboratories, a library, recreational areas and halls as fit the needs of its composition. If at all possible, it will have a roll of about 550 learners. From experience this size appears to find the optimum fit when it comes to timetabling and managing resources and courses, especially for the senior learners within the school.

Allocation of classes should aim at an optimum size of 24 learners and a ceiling of 28, with some flexibility within reason. This is an ideal school, so depending on the needs of individual learners there may be a call for smaller class sizes for some groups.

The best fit

I use the term ‘best fit’ on purpose here. Education is a complex thing.
I believe it is impossible to provide every factor that makes for good education, simply because of its complexity. Like other complex systems, however, it should be possible to make a best fit for ongoing situations, within and external to the school, that will be neither static nor exist in a state of equilibrium.

To this end, the learning resources provided in the school must also be capable of adapting rapidly to current changes. Methods used for delivering resources to teachers and learners must likewise be capable of evolving and adapting to suit emergent themes that will trace and follow the development of the immediate society.

A blended learning approach that best utilises the appropriate methods for teaching and learning to fit the learner and topic will be recognised by teachers and teacher management.

Elearning platforms

If an elearning platform must be established within the school, it should be open source. The expense of any commercial elearning platform can so easily preclude further development in platforms other than open source ones, so it is best to adopt open source from the beginning. This frees up finance, much needed within the school, for non-negotiable expenses and specific resources that may have no alternatives.

A stable, generic learner management system should embrace any learning content management system chosen to meet the needs of the school’s resource requirements. Too easily, the maintenance expenses on such systems can get out of hand, ending up like the tail wagging the dog. This is why good governance working closely with good management within the school is so important.

I’m talking in ideal big picture stuff here and purposely not mentioning commercial brands of hardware or software. A school that’s capable of adapting through emerging requirements should not be tied to any specific commercial provider or commodity brand.

And this brings me to a conclusion. The ideal school will need to be mobile, as the movement of a flock of birds. It will shift with the elements, yet remain intact as it moves bodily to meet the varying needs of the ever-changing learners within it.


A Green Pen Society contribution

Frugality

Without frugality, none can be rich,
and with it very few would be poor.
- Samuel Johnson -

Last week the New Zealand Lotteries Commission handed out over $36,000,000 to the winning ticket held by a syndicate of four people. Before the draw, there was speculation in discussion on radio and television, on the Internet and elsewhere as to what the winners might do with the money during the rest of their lives.

Evidence on the life and history of past multimillion winners suggested that an amazingly large proportion of them managed to spend the lot within less than two years. The adage, “penny wise, pound foolish”, seems to ring true.

Frugal return?

I was brought up in the 50s and 60s. In those years I acquired education enough to understand what was meant by the ‘use-once-throw-away society’. I was a bit of a handyman in my teens. My mother called me Tinkerer. I took apart broken appliances that people had discarded, primarily to see how they’d worked and to establish why they didn’t.

If I managed to fix something, and curiously that happened on occasion, I usually gave it back to its previous owner. There were two reasons for this. One was that my mother disliked me hoarding ‘stuff’. The other was that often I got some small reward for my effort. I still possess an oddly hand-painted vase given to me 50 years ago by a grateful neighbour whose clock I'd mended.

Planned obsolescence?

There came a time when fixing things was more difficult. Clusters of individual components of manufactured goods were gradually replaced with sealed ‘black boxes’ hard to dismantle, difficult to repair and even more challenging to reassemble. They were key to the functionality of the contraption to which they belonged. Apparently they were selected to malfunction one after the other, with perhaps only a few weeks between each carefully planned event.

Replacing a ‘black box’ was unbelievably costly. Most faulty ‘black boxes’ ended up in the landfill still intimately connected to their associated appliances. When considering repair, buying a brand-new version of the appliance was often an attractive option in view of the expense-free term of use guaranteed to the owner.

As more of the componentry in gadgets became modularised, the day-to-day maintenance of the material world I lived in continued to become costlier. There came a need for greater incomes at a time of plenty, when meeting that need was moderately easy to achieve.

Environment of plenty?

Variety became a feature of the available range of manufactured goods. It was essential to meet the demand of every whim of fashion, style, functionality, design and cost. Just take a look at any stretch of motorway during the rush hour. Notice the plethora of brand, shape, size and colour of cars, burning their slow petroleum trails to their destinations.

Society has inherited a legacy – a way of life that’s going to be difficult to maintain. And there’s more. The discarded products of the bygone boom-times are already impinging on the environment of plenty, so the experts say. Embedded in that legacy-way-of-life are philosophies and cultures that are seemingly reflected in what we see on the Internet.

Where did efficiency go?

I tinkered around with computers in the early 80s. One of the golden rules I learnt while writing computer programs in basic, was to do with brevity and efficient use of code. A computer with a random access memory of 640 kilobytes was a luxurious acquisition in those days – and it wasn’t cheap.

Today I upload optimised pix of about 4 Mb each from my digital camera, to an app in the clouds that I didn’t pay for, at least not directly.

We have hand-held devices that boast hundreds of gigabyte memory capacity accessed with a stroke of a finger. We’re told of the coming Graphene chip that promises 100 to 1000 times the speed and capacity of present-day microchips.

The last time I scoured cyberspace for data on the abundance of (free) web2.0 applications, I gathered handfuls of sites. Each of them boasted several dozen to a hundred links to web2.0 applications. Most recently, in my fevered attempt to find a single alternative to PhotoShop, I found dozens of free download offers for applications that claimed most if not all of the functionality I needed.

Time of plenty?

People everywhere celebrate a time of plenty. Most of us find comfort in abundance. In particular, we feel that limited choice is too restrictive,
a way of thinking that, for some, has been tuned by MS apps providing numerous different routes and methods to do exactly the same thing. The principle seems to be, ‘why offer a hundred ways to do something when you can offer it in a hundred and one?’

I wonder about this aspect of the culture that exists in western society. We know that we cannot continue to pursue the abundance that’s invariably presented, recognised, consumed and discarded. We know that continuing to do this returns a series of unwelcome consequences, some of which are perhaps yet to be revealed.

Maybe we should give more thought to frugality?


A Green Pen Society contribution

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Winter Solstice

Today is the shortest day.
Despite the post date, the time of publishing is Sunday 21 June 2009, New Zealand.

This time of year, some creatures hibernate. Many travel to the equator. Others consume what they’d hoarded in time of abundance. The last reserves begin to fade, like dying embers in a cooling fireplace.

My thoughts move to a phase of reflection. Hibernation becomes more understandable. Resourcefulness is a priority.

My skin puckers in a light wind. I begin to look out warm thoughts with the thick socks and woolly singlets.

Memories of spring mature with age. I look for jonquils in the scrub.
A few nod for me to accept their friendly arrival and shake out their piquant scent.

I write haiku, and chide myself for still thinking of winter.

The chill that's winter
blows a hole in the wood-pile
I stacked in summer.

Ah! Summer! Do you think the birds will come when it’s here?
They’re silent now. Will the sweet blackbird sing for us again?
Will grey warblers warble at noon? Will fantails twitter at sunset?

Radiating possibility. That’s it.
Perish a notion of winter.
Cherish warm thought till spring.

Of all the pleasure gardens bring,
The handsome pied Red Admiral
Must touch the zenith of the spring
With form and grace ephemeral;

To see these patterned wings full spread
In all but a fleeting glance,
Fine lace veil in feathered thread,
Enraptured eyes in trance

Will follow with a languid gaze
The soft hypnotic flutter,
Through the soporific haze,

Near honey scented bower,
Gliding with a liquid ease
Above the blood-red wallflower.

Countdown. Nearly two months to go.

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More Crystal Ball Gazing

Said to be a landmark in computer entertainment, the creation of
Peter Molyneux, Milo, is a young boy who enjoys football, drawing and playing around his fish pond.

Molyneux's ingenuity uses Microsoft's new full-body controller for
Xbox 360, in Project Natal.

Check out the video:

Video

A Giant Programmable Computer

"The web is becoming a giant programmable computer,

and that means that people can now collaborate.”

– Don Tapscott

In the year 2000, I was scouring the web for engaging sites to help me teach my online Science students, when I happened to get a hit on
The Periodic Table of Comic Books. This award winning site is a 20^th century mashup.


It involves a close collaboration between the celebrated content sitting on the site at Web Elements in collaboration with the Chemistry Department of the University of Sheffield, UK, and a splendid 60s style comic book periodic table on the site at the Chemistry Department of the University of Kentucky. This amazing resource has not only engaging colour comic strips but also provides a full complement of data on each of the elements of the periodic table.

A giant programmable computer

When I listened to Don Tapscott’s lines about the web becoming a giant programmable computer in one of his recent video interviews,
I was reminded of Fred Brown’s famous Sci Fi short story, Answer.

The web is changing "the way that we innovate, the way that we orchestrate capability to create goods and services in society". It is "changing the deep structure and architecture of the corporation" and this is likely to bring about "profound changes to every institution in society".

I wondered if it would just be people who would collaborate though. Clearly, there is scope for much, where computational collaboration, far more than is already taking place, could become common.

Compelling style

Tapscott’s visionary manner is compelling. He comes across as a plausible sage. While I have no doubt about his observational skill and his business acumen, I wonder at the implied imbalance and the scale of some of his predicted web transformations.

He speaks of web changes, with most of his forecasts suggesting absolute transformations. “Social networking is becoming social production. This is no longer about hooking up online or creating a gardening community and putting videos on YouTube.” His tone suggests that these will become things of the past - they will simply not happen anymore.

He similarly describes it “changing from being a platform for the presentation of content to becoming a platform for computation”.

I doubt the totality of the web transformations that the pitch of Tapscott’s delivery suggests. There is plenty of space and scope for the web to be “a global platform for collaboration” as well as all the other uses it is likely to be put to and that will include cloud computing and all its developments. As long as humankind is confined to this earth, the capacity of the web to accommodate all of this and more is the nearest we’re ever likely to see of an infinite network.

Clearly there are transformations occurring in the nature of the web, and there always will be. While many of the new avenues that he describes are conceivable, I am sceptical of the exclusive nature of the things the web is supposed to become, according to Tapscott.

Ideas Project

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."

"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."

He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

"Yes, now there is a God."

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

Fredric Brown - 1954, Answer

The Definitive Investigation - Don Tapscott

Today I listened to a presentation by Andrew Churches. One of the highlights of his talk was a video by Don Tapscott launching his book, "Grown Up Digital - The Net Generation is Changing YOUR World".

I just have to post his vid, but it's a tad ironic that Tapscott has to write about the use of all this technology and the Internet in a book!

Workplace Learning in 10 Years

Tony Karrer asks the BIG question,

If you peer inside an organization in 10 years time and you look at how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see?

In answering this, I’m going to be brief and pragmatic.

Ten years is a long time to project when making such a prediction. We have to forget about the current global economic crisis that’s putting everything, including workplace learning, into a tight spin. I’m assuming that we will have well recovered from this trauma by 2019.

We also have to shut our minds to the time warps that technology and its uses seem to have experienced in the past 10 years. Technology will experience its own ‘crash’ that we will have to contend with. This is already starting to happen with technowhelm, and I estimate that such a trough is not far off. My prediction is that the crazy technological frenzy that appears to be peaking at the moment will tend to moderate tolerably.

Drawing from the past:

Ten years ago, we might have been forgiven for thinking that the future of workplace learning in 2009 lay in computer assisted learning. Advancing a further five years and we could have been excused for believing that training databases were going to be action packed with animated instruction kits and video assisted training tools.

None of these predictions became general features of workplace learning and for a number of differing reasons. A few components of these found their way into specialist programs, limited in their extent by budgetary factors.

Learning must be accessible:

Accessibility of any information is the main limitation on its effective application. With the sheer volume of digital data that is likely to be associated with any organisation, access will become a major feature of any support system providing useful learning. It’s my best guess of the most efficient way for it to be brought about. The likelihood is that accessibility will become a major issue well before the year 2019 and will have to be dealt with or bust.

Over the past few years resourcefulness and conservation have been features of many societal practices. This cultural trait will find its way into the processes to do with how knowledge is stored, and disseminated.

Knowledge management will have swept a wide orbit and will return along a familiar but digitally oriented groove. Filtering and replenishing will be based on practice and resultant success, rather than theoretical principles governing what’s deemed to be useful.

Data retrieval will have become a fine art, almost an algorithmic feature of the technology of an organisation, rather than a problematic process within it. Already we have successful examples of data being managed on the Internet in Wikipedia and examples like this will serve as practicing models for the design of accessible data systems.

The networks:

Digital networking may well have found a niche by 2019. The study of how online groups behave and operate, tackled from the standpoint of best optimised rather than random mixes, will develop some of its own fundamental principles.

Sharing skills and knowledge, and working collaboratively in doing this, using refined technologies and their developments and appropriate techniques, will be lean and more efficient. Partnerships within and between organisations will be mutual organisational strengths, rather than organisational threats in a competitive environment.

Taxonomies for learning:

Training and learning in the workplace will become principled studies. Practical taxonomies will evolve. Technologies and associated learning techniques are selected for particular learning needs.

For this learning need, use this learning practice, is a pithy summary of how it will work out for most workplace learning needs in 2019.

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Hopes and Predictions for 2009

Ranginui Door, Te Papa Museum, Wellington

My hopes and predictions for 2009 are few and simple.

I predict that the solid-state memory chip will be the biggest most influential factor in developments in 2009. It will pave the way for the revolution yet to come with the introduction of the graphene chip in the years before 2012. What broadband did for Internet use, the graphene chip will do for the proliferation of hand-held devices, but that is a year or so off yet.

Connectivity will be better that ever before simply because of the extra memory space permitting the whole caboodle, platform/operating system, to be downloaded with the software. Mash-ups will be the way to go, and used more than ever before and for similar reasons.

The ebook will further develop, expanded by the possibilities unleashed by the extra memory space permitted by the new and developing massive memory chips that are now available.

Social networking will continue to become more popular and the increasing popularity of the hand-held device to access the Internet will permit the use of social networking to burgeon. I suspect that the cellular networks and associated services will require major upgrading to cope with the huge increases in the use of the hand-held device.

Hopes for 2009:

Malcolm Gladwell’s 'Outliers' points the finger clearly at the worth and origin of the real expert. My hopes are that society will embrace the recent studies and understandings that have come to light about the worth of expertise – true expertise, not so-called expertise that’s adopted on a whim.

The skills and knowledge that come with true expertise will once again be recognised as an essential attribute for societal progress. The usefulness of content, that has been shaken almost off its foundation in the past decade, will once again be recognised in education.

There will be less sabre rattling about what is learnt from printed books and the like. Digitising text from existing printed books will continue and there will be (more) digital books written that will remain digital - those will not be available in bound printed form.

The digital novel will write the introduction of a new era.

( 2 ) <<- related posts

This post was published (NZ time) before Tony Karrer's Big Question for 2009

Experience is reality

I have always believed that the imagination is closer to reality than reality itself. As a child, I looked up at the sky and saw things in the clouds that didn’t exist here on earth.

But as I grew into an adult, I became quite naive. The sky is reality. What I saw really does exist. But it is through my imagination that I can see things in cloud patterns that may not appear to be at my level here on the surface of the earth.

Giuliana Guazzaroni, on Verso 3.0, has posted a video that takes me back to my childhood. The strangely accented voice of the narrator brings a matter-of-factness, almost ho-hum-ness to an unfolding digital future.

Take a look for yourself at who you are - the prosumer. Who will be the CEO of Prometeus?

Loosen the reins of your imagination; sit back; peek at a snapshot of the 50 years span of time that we are in; identify where you might be in 10, 20 or 40 years; enjoy!

The Media Revolution

The Media Revolution Part 2

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Mobiles in 2020

The earliest I recall watching a mobile phone in action was in 1991.
Rob Carter, then CEO of the Housing Corporation of New Zealand, addressed a conference of company trainers at a campus in Nelson. He'd been communicating directly by phone through most of his introduction by the presiding manager.

Carter’s mobile phone was the size of a slender builder's brick. It had an antenna that could have doubled as a child’s fishing rod and was heavy enough to inflict a painful injury if dropped on someone's foot.

By the end of the 90s the mobile phone, more commonly known as the cell phone or cell, was small enough to get lost in a handbag.

Customary usage:

One morning, while I was travelling to work in an almost full bus, a mobile phone went off in a woman's handbag. I could hear the device honking even though I sat several seats away. The woman searched frantically through her handbag as the honking got louder, the sound having been muffled by a copious collection of accoutrements.

She eventually found the phone and slapped it to her ear, shouting as if to communicate with a pedestrian in the street. Several passengers jumped in unison at the abruptness of her bellow.

Everyone, including the bus driver, was soon giggling as they listened in on one half of an intimate conversation. An elderly gent, sitting a few seats in front, turned and scowled in the direction of the banshee-like screeching, blinking at the ear-shattering outbursts.

When the conversation was over, she snapped shut her mobile, leaned forward and shouted, “Are you alright sir?” By this time the whole bus was well captivated by the commotion.

The gent turned very slowly, stared matter-of-factly at the woman for a few seconds, then spoke in a low, exquisitely clear voice.
“I didn’t think you’d need a phone with a voice like that!”

The whole bus erupted uproariously. I could feel the glow from her ears as the poor, hapless woman cowered in embarrassment.

Robust as:

At the beginning of this century, mobiles weren’t quite as sleek as they are now, but they could still fit in your pocket. My first mobile was a Christmas present from my son, Jack. It was a Philips, a bit bulkier than most, but remarkably robust.

One day I was running for a bus in town when my mobile dropped from my pocket, bounced off the kerb and cascaded its contents into the gutter. Instantly, a bus ran over the battery and halted at the bus-stop.

In desperation I collected all the bits I could see, including the battery, and grudgingly mounted the bus. After a few minutes spent squeezing the device back together again, I pushed home the battery. Immediately the display prompted me to reset the digital clock and the mobile made contact with the nearest cellular transmitter. I used that device for several years before it died.

So what for the future?

Ten years earlier, if I had suggested to someone that one day we’d have devices slightly bigger than a box of matches, that could be used to send text messages across the globe, I’d have been told that I was out of my tree.

Yet in 2001, while travelling by bus to work in Wellington, New Zealand, I was able to have regular text conversations with my daughter, Gemma, who lived in Harpenden in England. Today I can access the Internet with a mobile and update my blog.

It is predicted in The Future Of The Internet III that mobile devices will be commonly used to access the Internet in 2020. With the recent development towards a graphene chip, it is reasonable to think that future mobile devices will offer far more computing power and flexibility, enabling Internet access with a wide range of applications.

The predictions are that voice recognition will also be a standard capability of the mobile. With any luck, my computer dream might become a reality - before 2020 I hope!

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Need More Memory? Graphene's The Answer

Memory chips have been increasing in size since they were first made. Each new development meant that larger chips could be manufactured.

But there’s a limit to the useful size of a standard silicon chip. In recent years, big chips just haven’t been able to keep up with demands as far as speed and a few other properties are concerned.

Electrical resistance:

The reason for these limitations is because of a significant resistance to the flow of electrical current in a large chip, putting a limit on the speed at which signals can be transmitted within a chip. But this physical restriction may well be lifted through the use of thin layers of carbon known as graphene.

Astonishing properties:

Towards the end of last century, nanotubes and buckyballs - tiny structures made out of arrays of carbon atoms - were well known to have astonishing properties of strength, flexibility and ability to conduct electrical current. The single layers of carbon atoms that make graphene have similar properties to these nanostructures.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have discovered a way to make best use of the amazing properties of this form of carbon. The recent breakthrough, using a chemical process, permits sheets of graphene to be made, far larger than ever before.

Graphene sheets so produced have a lower resistance, by several orders of magnitude, than similar sheets produced by other methods.

Memory chips of the future could well have huge storage capacity. It’s all to do with the property of carbon in thin layers to conduct an electrical current extremely easily. This permits individual parts of a chip to be made far more compact.

On-off power ratio:

Power consumption is a key feature of this future technology. The on-off power ratio of a graphene chip is huge – a million to one. Graphene has other useful advantages of being able to operate at extremes of temperature.

In the near future, mobile phones, cameras and laptops could have unbelievable memory capacity using the graphene chip.

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Who Dares to Dream Beyond the Paradigm?

The Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic particle accelerator beneath the ground, near Geneva. Very soon it may provide information that could throw light on the fundamental structure of matter.

The project aims to provide colliding particles with huge amounts of energy never before observed on earth. Information gathered may explain some of the unanswered questions surrounding the so-called Big Bang Theory of the origin and evolution of the Universe.

Fermi's paradox

Enrico Fermi was a famous Italian physicist who lived in the first half of the 20^th century. He built the first nuclear reactor. Known for his contribution to Quantum Theory, Nuclear and Particle Physics and Statistical Mechanics, he was awarded a Noble Prize in 1938.

At a luncheon in 1950, Fermi asked the question, "Where is everybody?" when considering the compelling evidence, available at that time, that intelligent life was likely to exist throughout the Universe.

Fermi had already deduced that millions of civilisations could be far in advance of those on Earth. Some of them could have found solutions to many problems we have not yet solved, such as intergalactic communication and intergalactic travel.

Despite the SETI projects, conceived in 1971, and pursued even to this day, the ubiquitous absence of evidence for civilization, other than those on our planet, remains a mystery. It posed a conundrum known as the Fermi Paradox, that is still being debated.

Technology Good Or Bad - Who Decides In Future?

Secondary Futures, New Zealand is writing a paper on how will we decide, in future, what technology is good or bad for kids. YOUR opinion is important.

Check out the video. Then go to the Secondary Futures Post to leave your opinion there in a comment.

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