Future Technology
in Unexpected Places

Today, educational technology is synonymous with computers, usually the personal computer. Educational technology in the future may be very different. To get a perspective of where we might be going, let's start by turning the clock back a decade.

It's hard to realize that in 1995, handheld computers were rare and almost no one had considered that they might have any educational value. That year, we co-founded the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) and decided that one theme of the Center would be to create an educational role for palm-sized computers (see "Will Ubiquitous Computing Improve Education?," page 3). We created a sample application, held a software contest, built prototype probeware and eventually goaded Palm into funding a major research program: the Palm Education Pioneers grants. As a direct result of early CILT activity, handheld computers are now increasingly used in education. In the next decade it is possible that even more unlikely technologies will find an educational role. Motes, smart pens, and digital cameras are possible candidates.

Motes

Motes (short for "remotes") are some of the newest and smallest advances in extremely low-power wireless networking and computing. Motes are tiny circuits that have sensors for measuring the environment around them and low-power wireless network capabilities for communications. In addition, motes have output capabilities for electronically controlling larger devices in which they may be embedded. A number of research groups are creating the hardware and software infrastructures to support wirelessly interconnected swarms of these inexpensive tiny computers.

Data traveling in a wireless mesh network is routed from one mote to a nearby mote where it is re-transmitted to the next mote. This process continues until the data reach their destination. Using only enough power to reach the closest motes, the energy needed for wireless data transmission is minimized. By integrating the micro-controller, wireless network, sensors, and I/O onto a single integrated circuit, motes can be as small as 1 cm square and 1 mm thick. A team at Berkeley coined the term Smart Dust to describe their vision of this miniscule sensing and communications platform.

Innovations in software will be necessary to create practical applications on networks of motes. Motes should be able to find other nearby motes and set up a communications mesh, even as they are being moved. Software should be able to run in parallel on many tiny computers, so that even if each one has limited capacity, a thousand hundred of them would have tremendous power. Berkeley has developed an open source operating system, TinyOS, that can support distributed motes.

Military, health, agriculture and a variety of commercial product applications for motes are currently in development. Educational applications are also possible, such as the scenario in the sidebar (p. 14).

Today, motes have practical applications-from non-intrusive habitat monitoring at Great Duck Island to measuring water usage in multi-unit housing complexes. The water monitoring system, created by H2Options, Inc., is designed to enable apartment managers to plan and schedule maintenance to maximize water conservation.

Other Unexpected Technologies

What could be more ubiquitous than a pen? Purses, backpacks, and briefcases everywhere carry one or more. A complete computer could be put in a pen, together with voice recognition, and the kind of motion sensing that is used in an optical mouse. The FLY pentop computer from LeapFrog (see image, p. 14) is the first educational application of these technologies. Due out in the fall, the pen is able to translate foreign languages, do math calculations, provide spelling prompts, and more.

The digital camera is a consumer success, but underutilized in education. Perhaps that is because we think of cameras as taking pictures. Instead, we should think of them as collecting data that can be processed. We have a prototype system consisting of a $30 Web camera and software that can track the motion of a colored ball. Alberti's Window markets a two-camera system that can track a ball in three dimensions.

But this only scratches the surface of what a camera can do. Software could let students automate all kinds of data collection tasks. A smart camera could grab a picture of every bird visiting a feeder, or every car at a busy intersection, or every fish migrating through a weir. The software could estimate the kind of bird, the speed of the car, or the weight of the fish. There is a kind of liquid crystal used in place of thermometers that changes color as it is heated. Use a camera to log the color and convert it to temperature. The liquid crystal could be on anything: an incubating egg, rotating shaft, or a test tube holding a reaction. All kinds of chemical indicators could be logged with a camera to measure pH, glucose levels, or trace pollutants.

It is hard to imagine all the educational possibilities when smart motes, pens, badges, GPS, eyeglass displays, cameras, phones, and music players are combined in various ways and able to network wirelessly. Data, information, and collaborators will be much more easily available. The challenge for educators is how to turn all these resources into meaningful and efficient learning opportunities.