What happens when you have to use a computer but don’t like to? Ranida B. Harris, Indiana University Southeast, and Kent Marett, Mississippi State University, investigated what happens to people who have to use computers for more than 20 hours per week for work but don’t like computers.
Certainly not all corporate trainers and academics love computers. David Noble organized strikes at 2 universities in the 1990’s, opposed among other things to some enforced uses of technology. However, this seemed to be an issue with lack of justification to faculty about the anticipated advantages of the proposed uses of technology and providing them with the training and support to not overburdened by the increased workload. And many corporate trainers were told to start developing online courses when the shift started, also in the 1990’s, from instructor-led classrooms to online courses.
But what about the students? Many people are expected to take online courses at work, or they sign up for online programs because of the convenience or other factors; presumably not liking computers would put such people at a disadvantage. Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, in The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, found that “even technologically sophisticated people treat boxes of circuitry as if they were other human beings”. Is not liking your computer the same as not liking your teacher? Does not liking your computer make you skim through course materials that require concentrated attention? Is mediation needed? Please share your insights!

I interviewed Allison Rossett for eLearn Magazine and just came across some notes from the interview. My favorite insight of hers was on the inclusion of experts and peers in education facilitated through technology. She also talked about the role of performance support and gave an example, e-Suds. Remember how in the early days of the Internet people would have a video camera on a coffee pot so you could monitor the status? e-Suds tracks the use of washers and dryers on campus and alerts students about the status of their laundry. Read Allison’s interview to learn more about the implications of e-Suds.

Lisa Gualtieri and Bob Little wrote the following, inspired, in part, by the personalized advertising Tom Cruise’s character received in Minority Report.
Imagine driving down the highway listening to tips on presenting to help you prepare for a talk you’re giving this morning. There are some interruptions with investment advice about the companies you drive past. Then someone almost hits you when they change lanes abruptly and you receive a refresher course on defensive driving. As you approach your desk, you are notified of opportunities to respond to colleagues’ requests for assistance and opportunities to discover what they are working on. Now someone is knocking on your door of your virtual office, where you were before you left home. Welcome to the world of location-based mobile learning.
To the best of our knowledge, this scenario doesn’t exist but it may be imminent.
Last year in the UK, Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute collaborated with Cisco and Giunti Labs to create a learning environment that blends mobile and virtual learning worlds technologies. It uses wireless location services to track real-world positions and movements integrated within a learning content management system.
Earlier this year, a consortium of 13 European organizations, the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project, produced an interim report about the project’s use of grid and cloud computing to provide resources to bring learners together in both the real and virtual worlds. The objectives are to extend “geo-learning” to enable a learner’s avatar to be synchronized with that learner’s movements in the real world and receive location-based learning materials and community services based on relevance and context awareness. The real time system will synch user interactions and information within a virtual reconstruction of the visited premises.
The integration of these technologies is fascinating. However, we already suffer from information overload and increased connectivity, while offering many advantages, seems to make it worse. Or perhaps our problem is really lack of effective personalized learning opportunities.
In the early days of groupware the distinction was made between push and pull technologies. Location tracking blurs this since information is pushed as you move. You are still in control of what you get in the sense that you control where you move.
The most interesting issue here is the balance between seeking relevant learning and having it pushed based on triggers. Personalized learning always sounded good in theory, but what may have missing was location – and that may be changing now.