Stand for people. Not a product or service or metric or number. Stand for real, living, breathing people and we will change the world.
Image credit: http://www.ubertas.co.uk/blog/5-it-predictions-you-need-to-know-about
Tis the start of the season for predictions. At the recent EDUCAUSE conference in Indianapolis in October a panel of leaders came up with a list of 10 IT issues that will be important to address in 2016. The following is a comparisons of the 2016 list with 2015 as one can see many of the issues are despite having different formal labels are very similar:
2015 Optimizing technology in teaching and learning and 2016 Optimizing educational technology
| 2015 | 2016 |
| 1. Evolving staffing models | 1. Information security |
| 2. Optimizing technology in teaching and learning | 2. Optimizing educational technology |
| 3. Funding IT strategically | 3. Student success technologies |
| 4. Improving student outcomes | 4. IT workforce |
| 5. Demonstrating IT’s value | 5. Institutional data management |
| 6. Increasing capacity for change | 6. IT funding models |
| 7. Providing user support | 7. Business intelligence and analytics |
| 8. Developing security policies for the institution | 8. Enterprise application integrations |
| 9. Developing enterprise IT architecture | 9. IT organizational development |
| 10. Balancing information security and openness | 10. E-learning and online education |
Elearning has been a top priority on many lists since the late 1990 so perhaps this year Educational IT will finally get this priority sorted out.
Image credit: successfulworkplace.org
Gartner’s analyst explore digital future and provide the top predictions for 2016 and beyond. The predictions have a ‘robo’ trend focus and deal with the emerging practicality of artificial intelligence and a smart machine-driven world where people and machines must define harmonious relationships.
- By 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines.
- By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support.
- By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions.
- By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “robo-boss.”
- By year-end 2018, 20 percent of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism.
- By 2018, 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.
- By year-end 2018, customer digital assistant will recognize individuals by face and voice across channels and partners.
- By 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.
- By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions, and the postapp era will begin to dominate.
- Through 2020, 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
Many of these predictions raise the question of who is going to be serving who in the future–not an examination or definition of what will constitute harmonious relationships. The notion of a “robo-boss” is particularly sobering considering how cold and impersonal many of our day to day business transactions are becoming. Technology should be used as a tool to serve humanity and to enhance learning and life in general. The privacy issues aside too many of these predictions point to a future where these roles are reversed and humanity may start serving the technology that we originally created to serve us.
