Thanks to Andy Black for highlighting Emerging Technologies for Learning, a new ~50 page Research Report from the British Educational and Communications Technology Agency (Becta). This "covers emerging technologies and some of the future trends that are likely to have an impact on education". With a Foreword by Andrew Pinder, ex-UK-Government e-Envoy, and now Chair of the Becta Board, it has 5 main sections, each written by a different author, each of whom is active in the commercial world in the area their section covers:
- Mobile technologies: transforming the future of learning, by Geoff Stead
- The ambient web, by Bill Sharpe
- The future of human-computer interaction, by Paul Anderson
- Social networks, by Leon Cych
- The broadband home, by Michael Philpott
The different sections stand alone from each other, and, no bad thing, have different structures. The report will become dated quite quickly, though I did make a diary note three years hence to check if Geoff Stead's "in three years time" predictions about mobile technology stand up. One grouse about the report is its 2 column design format, which makes it tiresome in the extreme to read on screen. Becta should have changed its document style guide by now.
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