At the end of the day, Johnson said, students must be adept at using technology. “And I don’t mean they’re able to use spreadsheets; I mean they really understand it and use technology like air,” he added.
Cloud computing and mobile devices have a “time-to-adoption” period of one year or sooner.
“Mobile learning is an interesting category because it’s so ever-present,” Johnson said. “For the last several years conversations have focused on why we shouldn’t have them,” including the potential for students to become distracted or use the devices to cheat.
“As phones have become more capable and we have access to hundreds of thousands of applications, including cameras, audio recorders, accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses, and GPS, they’re starting to get too capable to ignore.”
Coming in two to three years on the NMC’s “time-to-adoption” horizon are game-based learning and open content.
Game-based learning still presents challenges, but they are mainly related to what it takes to produce good, high-quality games, said Johnson. The military uses and produces a large quantity of game-based learning.
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