IoT Opportunities in Education

The Internet of Things

When we think of the Internet of Things, that is objects in the real world being enhanced with smart-chips that enable them to send data over the internet, a few of us might recall Skynet from The Terminator franchise. If you have not had the pleasure, this is the story where a cloud-based internet system was leveraged by intelligent machines to overthrow the humans. Although this is a potential outcome of the IoT, it is not very likely. Well, not according to the AI FaceBook chatbots of 2017 anyway.

IoT, What Could Go Wrong?

Well, a lot could go wrong actually. In keeping with the skepticism of the opening statement of the blog post I would like to share a short clip from the recent Internet TV success Mr. Robot.

It is at this point in the story that the hackers involved appropriate the “Smart Home” and use it for a landing spot for a party. Although this scene is a bit dark, it does get us all onto the same page around what the Internet of Things encompasses.

It is important to remember that technology is not inherently good or evil in nature but it is the user that makes it so. This scene also reminds us of the potential safety and privacy risks inherent with implanting the internet into the objects around us.

It Can’t Be All Bad

The IoT revolution is not certainly all bad and there is no reason to assume that it will only end in disaster. In fact, in his his article for Business Insider, Andrew Meola makes a few very strong arguments on why the IoT is going to be extremely beneficial to the area of education. Depending on when and where you went to school the world of education might not be the first place you think of when you think of smart objects. However, as Meola points out in his article, there is a lot that the internet is already doing for the classroom. (Meola 2016)

Higher Education

Meola writes that the majority of the forthwith “disruptions” in the education system are happening in the area of higher education. It is useful to highlight here that I received my undergraduate just after the start of P2P file sharing. What we now refer to as WEB 1.0 was in full swing and we had yet to see any disturbances of social media as we know it today in these final days of WEB 2.0.

 

At that time (2001) a majority of students went to the on-campus book store to purchase their books. If you were thrifty or taking a class you were not all that excited about you would simply purchase a used book. Amazon.com was certainly around but a majority of students didn’t think of purchasing books online. Sure it happened but not many of us had the idea of shopping online in the forefront of our minds. As I started my masters degree in 2016 I found a much different environment.

Online Learning

For starters the classes were completely online, I haven’t even had to go to campus. I have gone a few times because I am nostalgic and want to see the place that I am getting my degree from, but let’s be clear, I didn’t have to. The Schoology platform has really been all that I have needed to get my work done. It is a Learning Management System that also functions as a communication platform. If I have my laptop and WiFi I can get to work.

To Books or Not to Books?

In my first few Higher Ed. classes, in 2017, I have found that purchasing books is an optional task. Most of the courses have simply leveraged portions of digital resources owned by the school library. In my second class I did purchase books at the school bookstore. However, I shared this with a friend at work who happened to be a young millennial and he scoffed at my apparent lack of understanding. You know there are sites online that just let you rent the PDF, right?

As I have moved through this paradigm shift I have found that the library at my University has really embraced this brave new world. The biggest difference that I have benefitted from has not only been finding digital copies of needed texts online but in a number of cases the library had audio recordings of the readings I needed to complete. I downloaded them all in MP3 and loaded them onto my smartphone. I queued them all up and played them via bluetooth connectivity over my car’s audio system. In this way I had my homework read to me as I drove to work. Solid move Improvement Dave.

Research and Sources

Having legitimate support in your writings is now also much easier than it was back in the not-so-long-ago days before the internet. If you need data to support your ideas, it is now remarkably easy to locate a legitimate source. You simply search through a database with very a comprehensive search engine that allows many ways of searching, including multiple topics at once, to find the perfect article. (Example: EBSCOhost) Sourcing academic journals has never been easier.

 

It is going to be Great

So, although we have our share of television shows and movies that paint a picture of doom around connecting our things to the net, there really is plenty to be excited about. At this point there is no real threat of them becoming sentient beings that crave our destruction. This revolution has just started and we have really only scratched the surface. I can’t wait to see where this all takes us and what higher ground we find.

 

 

Work Cited

Meola, Andrew (2016). How IoT in Education is Changing the Way We Learn, 1.
Retrieved from: http://nordic.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-education-2016-9