What's Hot, What's Not

In the article, What’s Hot What’s Not for 2015, by Greg Thompson, 5 ed tech leaders were presented with 10 instructional technology topics and were asked to provide a prediction about what will be hot and what might not. Out of the ten topics, only two were selected as a “hot” topic and only one was “not”. The rest were placed somewhere in between, using a “lukewarm” rating.

All 5 ed tech leaders agreed that student data privacy concerns were a hot topic for the upcoming year. Whether at school or at home, students engaging in a digital life deserve some privacy. BYOD (bring your own device) was also an upcoming, hot topic as it provided non affluent districts with a way to incorporate more technology. The “lukewarm” concepts, or mediocre ones, were using social media as a tool for teaching and learning, digital badges, OERs, e-portfolios, augmented reality, learning analytics, and apps for learning. It seemed like the main reason these concepts were neither hot, nor not, was because each of the 5 ed tech leaders views were different. Ratings were given based off of opinion, experience, or political views, rarely research based facts.  The one “not hot” topic was learning management systems (LMSes). The article discussed that most staff is unsatisfied with where LMSes are and that in their full form, they are too complicated to use. Districts roll them out in large scales, but only small percentages of teachers use them collaboratively or as intended. Thomas C. Murray states, “The potential in this area is vast, but remains generally underutilized in 2014.” From experience, I would have to agree with this.

Overall, I found this article very enlightening. There were a few topics that I didn’t really know much about before hand, like digital badges, augmented reality, and learning analytics. Seeing as this article was published in 2015, the ed tech leaders predicted correctly that these “lukewarm” topics were just that, mediocre.  After reading about them, I could see both the pros and cons to each. I found it interesting though that BYOD was predicted to be “hot” and that there was no mention of 1:1. It seems to me that BYOD has seen some better days and districts are making the jump to 1:1 instead. The most insightful piece of information from this article to me though was the unanimous rating of “hot” to student data privacy concerns, and not for the reason you might think. At first, I thought putting filters on computers and monitoring students on their devices closely was a no-brainer. But, after reading Christopher Harris’s (one of the five ed tech leaders) comments about it being the students without unfiltered access that suffer the most, I sort of changed my mind. On page 7, Harris stated, “there are the real concerns about students who need to search for information to answer questions about their sexuality or find resources to respond to a sexual assault.” The idea that a student might need to research such topics and would be fearful to do so with filters and close monitoring in place, is something that had never crossed my mind and I can see where we may need to back off and respect students’ privacy.

References

Thompson, G. (2014). WHAT'S HOT WHAT'S NOT for 2015. (cover story). T H E Journal, 41(12), 12.