I placed a pre-publication order for Curtis Bonk’s latest book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, and was not disappointed when it arrived.  Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, identifies ten key trends in technology that are impacting education as we know it.  He has coined an acronym, WE-ALL-LEARN, for those trends that are identified as:

• Web Searching in the World of e-Books
• E-Learning and Blended Learning
• Availability of Open Source and Free Software
• Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
• Learning Object Repositories and Portals
• Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
• Electronic Collaboration
• Alternate Reality Learning
• Real-Time Mobility and Portability
• Networks of Personalized Learning

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In the September 14, 2009 issue of Business Week, Stephen Baker and Arik Hesseldahl pen an interesting article about Lifelogs.  The bulk of the article is about Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old computer science legend who works for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, California (yes, the Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corp and Carnegie Mellon fame, and who as Chair of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cross Agency Committee probably had a lot more to do with the creation of the internet than former Senator and Vice President Al Gore).  Gordon Bell is also the creator of Bell’s Law, a much more esoteric computer science law dealing with classes of computers than Moore’s Law, but which uses Moore’s Law relating to computational power of computer chips to explain how classes of computers are formed every ten years and how former classes of computers evolve and/or die.

For the past ten years, Gordon Bell has been creating a Lifelog of, what else, his life.  He wears a camera called a SenseCam which takes photos every few minutes or whenever the light changes indicating that the wearer has moved into a new area.  Bell also takes pictures himself and records his phone conversations.  He maps the area where he walks and scans all papers that he encounters that are worth saving.  He has recently co-authored a book with Jim Gemmell about his experiences entitled Total Recall:  How the e-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.  Bell argues that with the digitization of phone calls (cell phones), pictures (digital cameras, still and video), the internet, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, that a lot of people are digitizing parts of their life, just not in a collective organized fashion.

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