Gartner’s 2012 Technology Hype Cycle

The reason I have named this site Education Stormfront is because I see a massive wave of impending technologies that will transform the way we learn in the next 5-10 years. If you could graph that stormfront, this is what it would look like.

Every year a research company called Gartner’s releases a report called the Hype Cycle. This is a theory they have about the different levels of societal impact from various technologies. They call it this because it seems every new technology is over hyped before it really becomes useful and impactful. Here is their chart which kind of speaks for itself. I’ll comment afterwards. (click to make it larger)

Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle

The way you read this is technology enters from the left on the curve, it rises in expectations but has limited practicality. After hitting the peak of inflated expectations, it then fades from public view but then becomes mature. You can also see they gave each one an icon that represents how long it will take in their view for the technology to become practical. I tend to disagree with them on some of these in terms of how long, I think they are pessimistic about some.  If anything these things might hit faster than they think. Even so, let’s take the numbers they suggest.

With the advent of BYOD in schools (which at the peak of the chart) some of these technologies will most likely enter schools in some fashion. This then creates two major problems for the education system.

1. How do schools deal with new technologies which no one has previous experience with?

2. How do schools get students ready for careers using these new technologies?

So if you would like, check out the original article for some really interesting reading about these technologies. Then, if you are a teacher and are planning on still teaching in 10 years, think about what sort of lessons you might be teaching in 2022.

Awesome!