A few days ago I wrote a post about the Extended Mind. This is a concept where having an internet devices always with you means you don’t have to remember as much about the world because you can just look it up when you need it.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google agrees with me. Well, let’s be honest he doesn’t know who I am but he agrees with the concept! lol In a speech he gave at IFA 2010 Berlin ( a consumer electronics show ) he spoke about the amazing capabilities that are just around the corner. His team gave a demo of a cell phone that translated the language of the person on the other end in real time. This is so important. Once you can translate languages in realtime, you connect the world together in a way that has never happened before.
What this means for education
There are two conclusions I can draw from this.
1. Teaching rote facts is going to be even more useless and pointless.
2. Online teaching will be able to be outsourced to any country. We are rapidly reaching a point where it will be possible to take classes from teachers on every continent, speaking dissimilar languages, all in one day. Wow.
This is coming. I think it will take less than 10 years to totally revolutionize learning as we know it. This is just one cloud in the coming stormfront.
Annotations after the jump
-
Eric Schmidt: Welcome to “Age of Augmented Humanity” « – Annotated
Good article about a keynote speech talking about Extended Mind kind of things.
-
Internet-connected devices will soon “just work” and understand autonomously, automatically and quickly what a user wants to know, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a speech today.
-
Schmidt calls these converging phenomena the “age of augmented humanity.” He spoke of the growth of broadband, connected devices and computing power to envision what’s next after search
-
You can watch full video of the keynote here.
-
Google Product Management Director Hugo Barra demonstrated an upcoming feature called “conversation mode” in Google Translate, where a user can interact with someone in a different language by speaking into a mobile phone and having software on the phone itself translate and speak on the fly.
-
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Education Stormfront 
Translate real time? Now that would be cool! I think a lot of changes are just around the corner, it is just a matter of time before these technologies are readily available and breaking down the barriers of communication.
By: ktenkely on September 8, 2010
at 11:49 am
Yeah that’s just one technology that hugely changes things in ways we can’t really imagine! Such an exciting time in our history.
Thanks for commenting!
By: crudbasher on September 8, 2010
at 2:54 pm