The future of learning

What we have done this week, what we will do next week, and the evolution of the process.

This week we decided to take the thoughts and discussion points which we had with Daniel and Malin into our own process. The main theme of our week has therefore been to narrow down the project due to the sprawling aspect of our initial thoughts. We moved away from our gamification/education idea which was based around making the education system more motivational, interactive and collaborative. Now we have a different perspective in mind, that is separated from education. Learning isn’t just done by the school bench, but also in our everyday lives through the information we partake in. This shift has been instrumental in how our project will be formed. We have started on an idea to immerse people in information, that is relevant. Big data mining is not only a trend but a reality for tailoring media content today, why not tailor information? With the emergence of “wearables” as one of the major things that large actors in media/IT sectors focus one we have decided to have this as one of the main aspects of our project. A future where big data mining and wearables are more advanced and built in to our daily lives is the starting point of our idea; information immersion for people to make them more knowledgeable, without them wanting to be more knowledgable. The concept is based also around Serendipity, i.e. gaining knowledge (learning) as a bi-effect of our daily lives. Imagine using a Google Glass-esque product that is more advanced that can, not only see what you are seeing but also being connected to all others using it to create a knowledge bank based on different users knowledge and experience. In the same way that Wikipedia is pooling our knowledge on different subjects, we see that this would pool so much information and render it to you as relevant information when you are passing by, let’s say Cologne Cathedral and give you relevant information such as its height (157 meters) and what year the building of it commenced (1248). It doesn’t end there however. With advanced voice recognition you can ask questions, like: how does the inside look? and you will get photos and videos from people using this product on the inside so you might not have to go in if you’re in a hurry. This real time collaboration is key. We think that this is a very interesting and perhaps promising idea, and we are going to explore it more in the weeks to come.

The next step of the project is to look into what kinds of technologies exist today and what is needed to make this vision possible. Have there been tries to get something like this? What were the challenges?

We haven’t had any major challenges internally yet (I hope that I didn’t jinx that..) or with any external entities, if you don’t call the feedback given from Daniel and Malin at the group meeting as a challenge really.

All in all, it feel that we have some ground to stand on in the project at the moment. We face some challenges in keeping the scope intact and not letting the project entail every thought that is good. There is perhaps a risk of “going too far” and letting this vision become too large to be plausible in a 10-20 year time frame. The time frame is really defining of what the project becomes. It would be easy to say “in the future you connect a cable to your brain and download all the information in the world”.. Without a time frame of when this would happen. So keeping it in the timeframe and realizable is key.