As I look through the entries of the Learning Technologies Timeline, I come to two conclusions on the impact of emerging technologies on learning: the frequency of new discoveries and the ease of use in the new innovations. I found that enhanced literacy was spawned because of enhanced communication capabilities.
I find that with each new emergence of technology, there seems to heighten the frequency of new technologies. In the early years, where technology didn’t play as prominent a role as it does today, there was not much potential for advancement given the previous technology. Nowadays, technologies feed off each other and gives way to more advanced and exciting innovations. For example, the development of the phone in 1876 became a catalyst to later inventions that included first recorded radio signal in 1901 and the first electronic television transmission in 1927. Now information is more readily available; that is people have much more access through today’s means then having to ride a camel through the desert to send along a message in the early ages. Means of communication today can range from talking on the phone to videoconferencing 10,000 miles away.
There is also a trend as we go along the past dates onto the present and future. In the past, there was a lot more concentration in the development of actual languages. As we move on to later ages, we find less development of languages and information, and more efforts in building technologies that will transmit the information to various places. Now the only languages being made ever so often are programming languages for computers. This why experts say a language dies everyday. The seemingly demise of language development has, however, given way to the increase in how information is distributed. With the advent of the World Wide Web, people are immersed in a field of information. Lesser languages have given way to more dominantly spoken languages (case in point: English is now mandatory in schools in the Philippines). There are tutorials online that can teach you a specific language if you wanted. There are so many possibilities for information retrieval on the Internet. So one must ask, do the benefits of increased communication of information outweigh the implications of dying languages? This can definitely be arguable.
Another conclusion I came to as I looked through the timeline is the ease of use of innovations the closer to present day it became. As I earlier stated, we no longer have to send a messenger across desert to deliver information to the intended person. Information distribution has been revolutionized by advancements in communication technology.
I found the timeline very thorough and interesting. It gave a lot of insights about past and modern times and allowed me to come to conclusions based on developments in learning technologies. The future entries were also quite interesting and quite feasible given the rate learning technologies development has progressed. The outcomes of these technologies, whether beneficial or detrimental, are not yet fathomable. Entries that talk about technology that reads your mind or about having no body can be quite controversial. However, developments in information distribution can be equally as uplifting.