Better connected education – The future classroom & campus
Sue Bryant (Huawei)

Education, its role, and its delivery is changing especially with respect to ICT (as is everything else in the world). It’s starting to become more like a business. [This is my sadface: 🙁 ] Rise in number of foreign students, and increase in offshore branches [especially for Australia]. “Technology is the equaliser” [for those that have the technology].

How we learn is changing: passive learning vs proactive learning.
Learning pyramid from lower to higher retention rates: lecture, reading, av, demo, discussion, practice, teaching others.

Virtual interactive campus – need to think about pre-class preparation; in-class teaching; after-class coaching; extracurricular learning.
Collaborative learning platforms to support interactive classrooms: primary classroom but also remote classroom; learning at home; mobile technology [learning on the bus, in the waiting room, etc]
Envisaging everything cloud-based so teacher can create lesson or preview and send to class before / during. Different teaching aids. Homework / discussion forums post-class. Students can go to portal to see schedule, who’s in class, tools to manage education.

[Slides reference “ICT in education in New Zealand, agenda for the future” but I only find ICT in schools.] China has an “ICT in Education” 10-year plan.

[Vast amount of data on slides here; everyone’s frantically taking photos; I’m assuming the slides will go up somewhere sometime.]

Internet of Things may not be huge at universities, but many looking at smart cities. Hi-def video not currently developing over a network but in future could do so over 5G. Students expect to BYOD and use these so need to accommodate them as we move forward (and work out there are security mechanisms in place!) eBooks and ereaders/”ebook tablets”. Community clouds – virtual private clouds, an ‘ecosystem’ of people. Image / data management – enabling the digital library. SDN (software defined networking) – creating a network that’s application-aware – eg when there’s requirements around latency.

Back to 5G: currently we’re limited to thousands of connections per cellsite; on 5G we’re talking millions. Lagency is 50 times lower. Transfer speed 60 timex quicker.

“[technology] is the pen and paper of our time” – David Warlick

Changing times, emerging generations: a snapshot of the megatrends affecting higher education
Mark McCrindle

[More details on changing demographics which tends to be of little interest to me because so abstracted from personal reality – it’s hard for me to get beyond “Yeah so?” especially because any “And so”s developed from this tend to be such vast generalisations about Generation [letter] that I’m automatically sceptical. When you talk about the “Facebook Generation” – not that Mark does but to follow my chain of thought – you miss out all the people who didn’t grow up with computers in the home which is really dangerous in terms of equality. However I did like the saying he quoted that “If you’re leading and no-one’s following, you’re just out for a walk.”]

Waves of the Future: Possibilities for Higher Education (abstract)
Bryan Alexander @bryanalexander

• Now always need to assume possibility for a backchannel – need to be prepared to take advantage of this.
• Battle of the brands – the i-devices, Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s… But humans like to cut across vertical stacks (giving IT departments many challenges)
• Post-Snowden: “Humanity has awoken to an Orwellian nightmare with a great ‘…Meh.'”
• Smaller trends: digital video, cloud wars (a few years ago a frenzy of “What is it, what does it mean, is it dangerous” and then we all just moved there), augmented reality, automation and artificial intelligence. Social media (vs ‘anti-social media’)
• More: crowdfunding/crowdsourcing; copyright battles; Moore’s law continues to work; office vs web office
• Design for mobile first. PCs getting crowded out. Mouse and keyboard use declining. 3D printing enormous – may cause decline of shipping containers.
• Neat image of computing being broken into little pieces that we “smear around our bodies” – devices clipped on shoes, around wrists, in earbuds, glasses, ….
• Ebooks and print books existing side-by-side – don’t know if this is a plateau (e-textbooks haven’t taken over) or ebooks will continue to dominate
• Demographics shifting from pyramid (more young, few old) to stack (about the same number in each five-year slice). Economy changing from one job/career to a series of gigs. Inequality on the rise again — huge impact on education.
• How do we respond to this? What do we prepare students for (other than student debt)?
• Teaching and learning and tech: blended classroom, gamification, companies starting up to make money in education (“which seems crazy but there it is”), growth of digital humanities research, MOOCs – gone through a media crash but still grow though we don’t know how to assess them or pay for them but we keep making them and people keep taking them. How much reading is being done; (how) are literacies changing?

Which of these trends are most reliable? Which are most unpredictable?

• What if Open wins? -> rise of the sharing mindset; gig economy, sharing labour as well as content; global conversations increase, more creativity, information cheap, academic content unleashed on the world, industries collapse, authorship mysterious. Some higher costs, tech challenges, outsourcing and offshoring
• What if Closed wins? (eg if user preference for simplicity and convenience; failure of open business models, closed source outperforms open) -> huge content industries; ferocious IP policies; surveillance and intrusion protection; simpler computational hardware; anti-hacking policies; elaborate identity mechanisms; widespread micropayments; on campus publishers are locked in and powerful, security protocols in place, large role of business
• What if automation wins? -> tutoring software, commodity AI, boom in CS/robotics departments. News articles are being written by bots – what happens when they’re writing books?
• What if a renaissance? -> boom in creativity through storytelling, gaming, mobile devices. Games for teaching, game studies as academic field, libraries archive games, ‘gamification’ is taken for granted