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May 2012

The View from Here

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“Audacity is easily written off as naïveté, as overshooting your resources or talents. And that’s a danger. […] But you can’t make the future without imagining what it might look like.”

And I think all of us in the field of instructional technology at least aim to walk the fine line between dreaming up a future for our faculty, staff and student clients…and overstepping the (sometimes scant) resources we have to help shape it.

Wired has pulled together 7 fantastic steps that they themselves employ for helping to predict what’s coming next. Ranging from “explore the willful inefficiency” to “look for deep design”, the list has lots to learn from – and lots to apply to our day to day. 20 years of experience can’t be too wrong, right?

Unholy hereafter

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Like some sort of terrible combination of Portal, a medical form and copyright law, “Welcome to Life” greets a new resident of a  future digital consciousness.  If this is the singularity, would I still be in?

Absolutely.

Getting Gestural with TeleHuman

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“Communication breaks down even with a subtle little thing,” Vertegaal said. “When you think about preserving human communication, it’s more about what you leave out rather than what you add. With this system, we’re trying to leave out as little as possible.”

Roel Vertegaal of the Queen’s University Human Media Lab discusses the benefit of making remote communication more natural with the TeleHuman projection system.  The device allows for a 3D image to be projected at life size into an environment and further allows users to glean subtle information about a presenter that would have been lost by transmission in 2D.  While this device isn’t perfect (yet), the technology already has clear classroom implications.  Imagine sending yourself to any campus in the Commonwealth without going anywhere at all.  Certainly much less jarring for the learner than the alternate, “Big Brother” on TV approach.

Check out the video for a few previews of how the TeleHuman system works:

There’s more about the TeleHuman and its sister, BodiPod at Wired‘s site.