The Future of ISE--Full Article

From Media and Informal Science Learning

It is, of course, difficult to make predictions of any kind about the future, let alone about something as highly specific as informal science education. It's also the case that too often we look for and jump to the 'next big thing' (often with implementations that are shallow at best) when there are still much deep, rich work opportunities remaining to be achieved in the media and technologies we already have available. In fact, this is particularly true of the burst of new media forms that have emerged in the last decade or two, which makes the mere inevitable 'maturation' of these forms (much) more a cause for excitement than the mournful rite of passage maturation of an industry usually signifies.

With these caveats in mind, what we've attempted to do below is make some predictions about media and technology, largely leaving open for discussion and addition the potential impacts of these changes on science education. We've also included some background for the benefit of eventual readers who may not be as familiar with the subject as others. Some sections are more fleshed out than others, too; in general, our smaller observations are more fully detailed. More generally, we expect to add more sections/mega-trends and hope that our community of contributors will have ideas on what those sections should be. We've also definitely taken a point of view in many cases, in hopes that it will inspire--or incense--others with more specific knowledge to add to and round out our perspective.

Contents 1 The Impact of Media on Science Itself 2 Convergence 3 Abstraction 4 Maturation 5 The Elephants in the Room? 6 References

The Impact of Media on Science Itself

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A basic fact of the media landscape is that media consumption continues to increase for virtually every demographic around the world.^[1] Most of this article is focused on trends in media and technology that could impact science education, but in our research, we've also been struck by the many ways in which media now seems to be influencing the practice of science itself. For some fields, like ornithology, new media has helped greatly enhance an already long and rich tradition of citizen science. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology stands at the apex of lay participation in generating real scientific data and research, and programs like Project Feederwatch, eBird, The Great Backyard Bird Count, NestCams, the House Finch Disease Survey, and many more can serve as models for other disciplines. New technologies such as flip camcorders and cell phone applications are rapidly expanding the scope of what citizen scientists can achieve. Beyond this, citizen science seems to be moving, as it were, from animal model to human trials in a variety of ways.

Beyond this, citizen science seems to be moving, as it were, from animal model to human trials in a variety of ways. For example:

• Google searches are now being used to predict and track flu outbreaks (local rises in specific search terms have proven accurate in identifying outbreaks earlier than other epidemiological measures^[2])

• Stanford's folding@home project enlists the computers of thousands of volunteers (each of whom has downloaded an applicable piece of software) to create one of the world's largest supercomputers to help solve protein folding problems.^[3]

• Cure Together is gathering personal health data from thousands of volunteers in order to create vast research databases to help scientists find cures from chronic diseases.^[4]

• Other examples?

But in some respects, citizen science is the proverbial 'tip of the iceberg' where the impact of media on scientific practice is concerned, some influences positive, others perhaps not so:

• Press release research: top academic journals appear to be increasingly choosing what articles to publish based on judgments of the newsworthiness of the findings or, more specifically, the likelihood that the research can be converted into a 'story' that significant portions of the consumer news media are likely to report.^[5]

• With universities pushing researchers to commercialize their findings in order to generate additional revenue for their institutions, scientists are increasingly compelled to develop entrepreneurial skills in order to turn their research labs into viable businesses^[6]; many of these skills-such as marketing and public relations-interface directly with, and are influenced by, the media in all forms.

• Scientists are increasingly using video journals at sites like BioAlive and Jove to communicate information-such as complex laboratory procedures-that formerly could only be communicated in person, and more generally making visible wide realms of tacit knowledge.^[7]

• As print subscription prices skyrocket and online self-publishing proliferates (by some estimates, 90% of research findings in some disciplines are available in online pre-publication archives), some of these fields, such as high-energy physics (see the Scoap3 initiative), are looking at new methods of research dissemination such as open access publishing that would make academic research more widely available free of charge.^[8]

• On the flip side, multiple studies have come to the conclusion that the proliferation of information via new media is leading, ironically, to more conventional scientific thinking as scientists are compelled, due to the volume of information available, to limit their literature reviews to top journals and only the most recent issues of same.^[9] Though in fairness, these findings have not gone unchallenged.^[10]

• A group of prominent scientists, including several Nobel Laureates, recently submitted an open letter to the Financial Times arguing that the system of peer review, set up to winnow the growing volume of funding proposals and papers, has come to stifle real scientific advance, which, as they point out, has often occurred at the margins of scientific inquiry.^[11] But as the volume of scientific proposals and submissions and materials purporting to be scientific continues to increase (due to globalization, if nothing else, and thanks to new media as well), it seems likely that peer review will only become more stringent, particularly since, again, new media makes it even easier and more powerful. At least one prominent journal, for example, has begun requiring that all submissions include a peer-reviewed Wikipedia page.^[12]

• Some traditional academic funding sources, such as foundations and social equity funds, are moving from a model of funding top individual academic researchers to solve problems of interest to an open innovation model (based on the open source movement) in which applicants (both inside and outside academia) submit ideas that others can add to (via wikis or other formats) over time. From these collaborations, winning concepts/solutions are chosen and funded.^[13]

Implications for Informal Science Education

Many of these changes and forces impacting scientific practice could have implications for informal science education as well; at a minimum they may redefine-more broadly-what it means to be a scientist. Question to the group: what might other implications be?

Convergence

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For the last twenty years, convergence has been a Holy Grail of media and technology, and there are a number of important ways in which we can predict it will come to fruition, though not necessarily in the same ways many originally expected, which should give us some pause in projecting.

Consolidation vs. fragmentation

For example, as recently as 2002-03, the conventional wisdom was that the Internet specifically, and media in general, were headed down the same path as the automobile industry in the early 20th century, destined to consolidate from hundreds of companies down to three or four major players from whom everything would be integrated and flow.^[14]

But as some saw then^[15], rapidly falling barriers to entry, both on the production side (hosting, open source, diffusion of knowledge, platform development, etc.) and on the marketing/distribution side (viral effects) have resulted in a new paradigm of ever-increasing media fragmentation in which technology and media recapitulate biological dictates of ever-increasing diversity and specialization.^[16] New media, specifically, thrives on a human hunger to get beyond broadcast content; as one researcher in the early part of the decade found, even specialists want more specialization when it comes to new media offerings-cardiologists, for example, don't want a site for cardiologists, they want a site for cardiology students, another for cardiology residents, another for interventional cardiologists, another for electro-physiologists, and so on.^[17]

Even in landscapes like search and personal page media that appear to be dominated by giants today, a new generation of companies (and some old ones) is seeking to gain ground by carving out specific niches-search engines specifically designed for learning, for example^[18] (which, at a minimum, are less likely to find themselves fighting the war of attrition with those gaming the search results of an all-market player like Google), or companies like Marc Andreessen's Ning that allow individuals and organizations to create their own niche-specific Facebook or MySpace-like networks, with design, content, member recruitment, and functionality specific to their needs. Ning's hardly the only creator or enabler of boutiques, but it's instructive that since the site launched, there have been hundreds of thousands of Ning-powered social networks created (30,000 were created in the beta period alone^[19]), some with hundreds of thousands of members. The mainstream generic social networks like Facebook have, at this point, in fact acknowledged the power of the boutique movement by working to strike deals with smaller social networks that enable unified logins and information exchanges.

In the face of ever-growing fragmentation, organizations--including informal science practitioners--that want to achieve widespread mindshare are finding themselves compelled to take up new approaches (beyond traditional methods like slash and burn competition, strategic partnerships, and mergers & acquisitions) such as content syndication (increasingly via RSS feeds) and/or creating widgets and other applications that thousands of sites might find useful to incorporate, but that also provide the originating company with visibility or other benefits. The average widget in Facebook Apps or Open Social is, after all, orders of magnitude more popular than the average Facebook group or MySpace page, and as illustrated below, the most successful widgets far outpace the most successful groups, particularly in the case of applications that have built into them a rationale to involve the user's friends (e.g. a quiz creation widget that encourages the creator to challenge his/her friends to take the quiz).

Rank	Most Popular FB Groups	Most Popular FB Applications
1	1,612,000	24,134,200
2	1,176,000	17,504,100
3	1,110,000	17,504,100
4	993,000	17,341,400
5	850,000	15,982,700
6	689,000	15,490,800
7	532,000	9,790,000
8	532,000	9,631,400
9	509,000	9,451,000
10	468,000	8,056,700
Ave.	847,100	14,488,640

Figure 1. Facebook's most popular groups and applications (rounded to nearest one hundred) as of February 28, 2009. In addition, the application totals show monthly users, while groups show the total number of individuals who have ever signed up for them.

Convergence of devices: A cautionary tale

Another area of convergence that hasn't worked out exactly as envisioned is the convergence of devices. For example, by now we were all supposed to be down to one wireless device that combined all the functions of a PDA, phone, web browser, email/IM, MP3 player, camera, portable game player and more, and while there are certainly devices out there that perform many of these functions (e.g. the iPhone and Blackberry Storm), we still seem to be some distance away from seeing a point where most users will believe they really need only one device to perform them all, although there is some interesting research going on into wireless devices that can sense by the way you hold them what function you want them to perform and reconfigure themselves (including form factor) into that type of device.^[20] In the present, at least, the fact that camera phones now take pictures with 8 megapixel resolution still leaves a number of reasons why the average person with an interest in photography with a digital camera isn't going to give it up any time soon,^[21] even though the existence of camera phones has certainly greatly expanded the number of photos being taken that couldn't or wouldn't have been taken before. And while many users now play games on their cell phones, they seem unlikely to displace portable game consoles any time soon.

For some similar reasons--and some different--television/film and interactive media have been slower to converge than expected, too. Many of the interactive features touted in technologies like Blu-Ray are not significantly different or better than those offered on some of the earliest multimedia prototypes like Life Story, for example, more than twenty years ago, even though at least some of these prototypes were robust enough even then to penetrate tough markets like K-12 schools.^[22] As with cameras and cell phones, some of this is the result of difficulty optimizing a device for all relevant uses, albeit in a more subtle sense: interactive media is widely believed to be a 'lean forward' experience, while television is 'lean back.' To a greater extent than wireless innovators, proponents of interactive television have also had to deal with a fair degree of institutional intransigence where their vision is concerned.^[23] As a result, most of the convergence between television and interactive has been internal to the users of both media as they increasingly multi-task between them,^[24] a scenario that the television industry has increasingly chosen to support as it has become clear that it's irreversible. ____________, __________, and _________ are all good examples of television shows that have clearly embraced a '360' or 'surround sound' approach to media, coordinating television and interactive offerings in real time. Not surprisingly, many of the best examples are targeted to younger consumers, as is, of course, the bulk of informal science education.

Will television eventually really converge with interactive as the default consumer experience, or will it turn out that a two-screen solution-one screen 'lean forward' (and likely relatively small and wireless) and one 'lean back'-is really the best approach (as even some of the earliest multimedia proponents believed)? The most optimistic convergence proponents say widespread adoption of interactive television is, at best, one or two years away, and warn television executives not to be on the wrong side of history,^[25] but even if one accepts a logarithmic view of technology adoption,^[26] the length of this particular curve seems to indicate more resistance than one would expect from a purely technological progression like Moore's Law.

At the end of the day, the point is not that device convergence won't happen--in many cases it has, and will continue to--the point is that it has already taken significantly longer than many expected, which should be a cautionary note as we consider other forms of convergence that in many ways look to be considerably more profound. After all, as has often been noted, as much as 90% of the success or failure of a particular technology is the result of good or bad timing,^[27] and this can apply even more to resource-constrained appliers of technology like informal science practitioners.

Convergence of media function

The simplest and most subtle of these convergences, already well underway, is a convergence of function within media, in which one form or format of media merges with another. The most obvious and well publicized example of this is the many ways in which social media such as blogs, profile-based social networks, and user-generated video and photo sites have merged with traditional news media. News now is often broken by social media, explored in more depth by social media (while the traditional news media moves on to the next story); beyond this, social media has changed the definition of what's newsworthy and even changed the look and feel of traditional news (as network graphics, style, and layout become increasingly Web-like in format).

Often, these types of convergences are viewed as invasions by the new of the old, and in a biological sense this may be accurate in that their trajectories can resemble nothing so much as the process by which organisms often co-evolve into relative stasis with one another. It may appear, for example, that social media in the form of wikis have more or less overrun traditional reference media (and generalist publishers whose customers can live with 'good enough' accuracy may have difficulty surviving), but ongoing, nagging, and widespread dissatisfaction with Internet accuracy^[28] may well presage an ultimate synthesis between the top-down expert-driven approach of traditional reference media and the bottom-up 'wisdom of crowds' faith of social media proponents in which new forms foster collaboration between experts and end-users to gain 'best of both worlds' benefits. In fact, it could be argued that this synthesis, not the semantic Web, will be the real Web 3.0, a synthesis based, for example, on end users' desire (and competition) to become better authors of online content, a desire experts will fulfill by creating tools, apps, widgets, and data for end users to work with, in this way distributing their expertise in highly scalable--and highly memorable/constructivist-ways.

A particularly intriguing 'invasion'/ functional convergence that seems to be on the cusp of happening is the spread of games into a wide variety of other domains. A constellation of factors ranging from corporate realization that adults are often at least as drawn to games as children are^[29] to post-Cold War diffusion of knowledge from military contractors with a sophisticated understanding of the potential of games for training and learning has led to the rise of so-called serious games, and this, in turn, is causing providers in a variety of arenas to look at games or game-like features as potential vehicles to advance their goals.

For example:

• Google is using a game called the Google Image Labeler to get large numbers of users to help it semantically tag images for more accurate searches;^[30]

• Medical researchers are using a game called Fold It to harness humans' puzzle-solving powers in competition with each other to determine the correct structure of proteins;^[31]

• Microsoft expects much of its future productivity tools and how people interact with them to be derived from learning it has gained about the game space via Xbox and other offerings.^[32]

• More examples?

Convergence of the real and virtual worlds

In some ways functional convergence is a subset of a broader and deeper merging that's also rapidly gaining momentum: the convergence between the real and virtual worlds, which takes a wide variety of forms. For example:

• Sociopolitical integration: In politics and economics, the virtual world is having increasingly profound impacts on the real world, whether making possible the organization of massive cause-related efforts on college campuses^[33], the instant organization of civic protests in China^[34], the election of a long-shot US presidential candidate^[35], the movement of labor within and between countries, to name only a few examples.

• Forces driving further integration: The more closely fitted real and virtual socio-political worlds are, the more profound the impacts become, which only encourages innovators to find ways to more tightly integrate and coordinate them. Consider the evolution of new media's involvement in the political process from 2004, when the Internet was viewed almost exclusively as a vehicle for raising money, to 2008 when it became an integral element of organization and persuasion at all levels (with many more opportunities still to be exploited).

• Blended environments: Over the next decade, we can expect virtually the entire geography of the United States to be GPS-tagged with increasing precision, both by companies and institutions and, increasingly by end users/consumers themselves. With GPS-enabled cell phone penetration approaching saturation during the period, virtually every environment and, eventually every environmental detail, will become, in essence, a blend between its physical reality and its virtual informational attributes. Of course, the reverse is also true: the virtual world is becoming increasingly infused with the real.

• Higher order blended environment features: Beyond simple tagging, we can expect a plethora of location-based games like Torpedo Bay and Swordfish^[36]--30% of kids 6-17 already say they're played one or more location-based games on their wireless devices^[37]--locative art creations evocative of William Gibson's Spook Country, locations mapped onto other locations (e.g. national parks mapped onto urban environments for kids unlikely ever to visit them to explore), and more.

• Sentient environments: Kevin Kelly recently counted more than 6,000 "species" of technology in his home (the King of England at the turn of the 20th century had only 7,000 objects total).^[38] It seems clear that location-aware, context-aware objects-from major appliances to children's building blocks-that can communicate with each other are only going to increase in coming years until we reach a point where, to use the Institute of the Future's term, our environments can be considered, for all practical intent and purpose, sentient, if not to the same extent as we are ourselves.

• Cloud computing: To the extent one views offline computers as part of the real world, it seems inevitable that more and more of the functions these devices perform offline will migrate online until there is, in effect, one machine that all others plug into,^[39] an ultimate convergence of a kind, current (legitimate) concerns about privacy and reliability notwithstanding.

• Cloud computing effects: Complete migration to the cloud could, in turn, result in major gains in accessibility, since the high up-front costs of computers (particularly for those whose credit is poor) and key software packages, which have always been the key barriers to entry, not Net access itself,^[40] would presumably be replaced by much lower device costs and more manageable monthly software subscription costs. We could also see a variety of interesting applications of the "one machine's" raw processing and other powers as it becomes, in essence, a new type of organism or ecosystem, depending on the scale with which we view it.

Convergence of humans and machines

A third, potentially even deeper convergence, is between humans and the machines we use which, like the real/virtual convergence, could take many forms. Meme theorists like Susan Blackmore would argue that it's already well underway, that just as the replication of memes required an increase in our brain size beyond what our genes required (to the point where gene reproduction--child birth--became uniquely dangerous in humans to both mother and child), temes (techno-memes) are already compelling changes in us to make us more efficient replicators of themselves-the rapidity and facility with which our children develop the ability to use technology (Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiments are a particularly compelling example of this^[41]), the growing extent to which we are permanently 'connected' 24/7/365, the burgeoning power and variety of substances we are consuming to stay awake and alert so that we can 'keep up,' and more.^[42] Consider also:

• Wearable technologies for health monitoring, communication, and fashion have gone from 'outlandish' concepts in places like MIT's Media Lab to an industry segment robust enough to justify its own international conferences.^[43] Meanwhile researchers have moved on to trying to print holograms and even entire functioning computers on pieces of paper.^[44] Restaurateurs like Homaro Cantu are already printing out food (and menus that you crumble into your first course).^[45]

• This year will see the first toys hit the marketplace that allow children to manipulate virtual or real objects with their thoughts, e.g. Lucas' Force Trainer and Mattel's Mind Flex,^[46] while other games already in the field such as Journey to the Wild Divine already integrate biofeedback (such as stress levels) into their environments.

• There has been a profusion of medical implants in the last decade. Now the first robotic cells--respirocytes (robotic red blood cells) are in testing and have already been shown to cure Type I diabetes in rodents. As a side benefit, creators claim that replacing 10% of our RBCs with respirocytes will allow us to sprint for fifteen minutes on a single breath and sit at the bottom of our swimming pools for up to four hours (assuming the need ever arises). Multiple conferences on the next steps for these technologies (white blood cells of various types appear to be the next target) are slated for the coming year.^[47]

• Researchers project that many of the devices being first developed for the disabled will have subsequent generations that enable humans in general to do things that were formerly not possible--to see infrared and ultraviolet, for example, or hear bats sing.^[48]

• There are already hundreds of medical applications available for the iPhone,^[49] and scientists have hacked other phones to use them to do a variety of disease diagnostics.^[50]

• MIT's Technology Review recently picked biological machines--biological systems ranging from cells to entire organisms (early work has been with insects) remotely controlled by humans to collect, manipulate, store, and act on information from their environments--as one of their top 10 emerging technologies for 2009. Creators envision applications ranging from tissue or self-repair (e.g. wood furniture that repairs itself) to search and rescue missions.

• Sometime between 2020 and 2040, the combined processing power of all the world's computers is expected to exceed that of all human beings.^[51]

Technology optimists foresee a day in the not too distant future when human intelligence will literally be merged with machine intelligence (e.g. via implants), combining the creativity and pattern recognition strengths of humans with the raw processing power, storage, and analytical powers of machines, and each of us will be able switch what we actually see and experience from real world to virtual reality (and back) with a thought.^[52] In fact, teme theorists like Blackmore would argue much of this is already happening even without implants or other medical devices. Optimists further believe the potential resource barriers to their vision will be eliminated by nanotechnology just over the horizon that will allow us to create anything we need from inexpensive raw materials.^[53]

Leaving aside the dangers of gray goo (i.e. nanotechnology run amok) and the related possibility that we could, in our quest to develop machine intelligence (e.g. using evolutionary programming), create machines and temes that no longer need us to replicate (and therefore have no particular vested interest in a planet habitable for life^[54]), there seem to be at least a few shorter-term disconnects in the vision as well. For example, at a time when the healthcare industry is moving en masse to personalized medicine because it has discovered that organs much simpler than the brain-such as the heart-are actually highly individual, it seems a bit strange to tout how simple it is to model different parts of the brain with a computer program as evidence for the facility with which humans and machines could be integrated. More to the point, can abstract computer modeling in an environmental vacuum really project the likely mechanisms and effects of this kind of integration on the most plastic of human organs, the brain, which is a product-in each individual-of a complex combination of genes, an impossibly complex myriad of environmental influences (that tie social scientists in knots), and time? Are we sure that what might be gained via a 'better processor' exceeds what might be lost in the process?

Implications for Informal Science Education

In any event, even if only a fraction of what tech optimists hope for comes to pass, the impact is likely to be profound. The same is true of real world-cyberspace convergence and, to a lesser extent, any further convergence of media functions. Thinking of informal science education, in particular, some of the likely opportunities and implications include: Answers from the group?

Abstraction

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The relentless growth in the quantity and availability of information is leading or will lead to another trend with many manifestations, namely greater and greater tendencies or trends towards abstraction versus concrete one to one correspondence with the physical world. Some of the expressions and potential consequences--or opportunities--we see coming from this include:

Short-form communication

In the space of the last twenty years, interpersonal communication has moved from letters and phone calls to email to instant messaging, text messaging, and Twitter/Facebook entries (limited to 140 characters in the case of Twitter). One can argue that at least some of the words in longer form communications were superfluous, but the proliferation of shorthands, emoticons, slang, and haiku-like expressions all argue that short-form communicators are seeking to pack more meaning into smaller quantities of information, by definition a form of abstraction. As with multi-tasking (see below), another level of abstraction is added by the number of these threads of communication often being engaged in simultaneously or side by side.

On the plus side, creation of a new level of abstraction in language is a creative activity, likely to have other creative consequences, at least assuming that, like English itself, it's a task that's never finished. But the implications for other aspects of self-expression (because not all words in long form communication were/are superfluous) as well as the ability and desire for short-form communicators to take in information from others (such as science educators) that requires richer linguistics is not yet fully understood. It may be that entirely new ways to express information types that currently seem to require long-form communication will have to be developed, not only for natural short-form communicators but for us all, to the extent that we continue to need to take in more and more information.

Multi-tasking & hyperlinking

In the early days of the Net, it appeared Internet use was going to cannibalize television, and to some extent this has happened. But what has become far more prevalent is simultaneous Net/TV use and, more recently, what we call 'active multitasking' between the Net and TV in which the use of one medium is actually connected in some way to the use of the other.^[55] In fact, the average child tells us he/she is engaged in at least 2-3 other activities "a lot" while watching TV, and the average Net-TV multitasker (a majority of kids) says he/she is engaged in at least 3-4 other activities "a lot" while watching television.^[56]

To the extent these various information inputs are uncoordinated (because television and its advertisers have been slow to adopt 'surround sound' or 360 approaches and don't have control over simultaneous inputs like 'talking to friends on phone'^[57] though they can impact what those friends are talking about), there would seem to be a necessary level of abstraction in the way users are processing and in many cases putting these inputs together. Even where there is coordination, the acts of watching television, playing a game, talking with friends and other simultaneous inputs are different enough that in general a frame created by a content provider to really encompass two or more of these communication forms seems bound to include a level of abstraction, either directly or in the experience of the end-user.

The continuous act of connecting (or even just juxtaposing) often disparate inputs, in turn, could lead to a cornucopia of creative effects (e.g. one could argue that the hyperlinking, multi-tasking experience made the creation of mash-ups inevitable), or it could be leading to mental or at least analytical chaos. The academic jury is still out. We also don't know yet what it's best to do with the abstraction multi-tasking creates or how to modulate it for better educational results. To a lesser extent, the same hopes and fears can be expressed about the typical surfing experience once users leave the search environment and begin clicking from site to site. Is hyperlinking helping users make more creative connections themselves, and are there strategies practitioners can employ that make this more likely? It's been many years since hyperlinked fiction (and non-fiction) first hit the scene, a lot of it wiped away by the first Net crash--have its lessons been thoroughly exploited, is there more to be explored?

Somewhere in between media multitasking and hyperlinking in terms of abstraction generation lies the new world of personal news feeds on sites like Facebook and Twitter, whose positive or negative impact on cognitive function has not really been explored yet at all. (Fellow participants, if you know of good research into the cognitive effects of multitasking, surfing, personal feeds, etc. please add here)

Sensory diffraction

As physical environments become more and more heavily tagged (with location-based text and other types of tags, including multimedia) and user interfaces are developed to make this information more accessible and compelling, the processing of this information, side by side or intermittently, with sensory information about the physical environment is likely to become increasingly intertwined and to interact in the human mind in interesting, novel, and as yet uncharted ways. However information from the physical environment is processed, it seems inevitable that the intrusion or addition (depending on how you view it) of virtual content will lead to interpretation that is at some remove from the level of concreteness that formerly existed, either "more real than real" (to the extent the tagged information actually adds to depth of perception in some way) or, as with unmediated multi-tasking, more formally abstract. In either case, how we see-or hear-the world will literally be changed (particularly for those who choose to take virtual world filters to their logical extremes), with all the creative and analytic nuances this implies.

Metaphor and mapping

The volume of Internet and other media information creates an ongoing hunger for information organization in general and information visualization in particular that seems only likely to increase. In the early days of the Internet, it was common for providers to seek to organize their own or the Net's content using metaphors familiar from the real world-the town, the store, the body, etc. To a certain extent, the overwhelming popularity of Google Earth and associated mash-ups is a continuation of this. But over time, it's become clear information is either too rich or too disparate to be well-organized via real world metaphors. As a consequence, the general trend online has been for organizing metaphors to become increasingly abstract. Since there's nothing inherent limiting mapping to physical geography, we can expect information mapping to become increasingly abstract as well. There have, of course, already been many attempts to organize and visualize information abstractly that haven't gained the kind of traction that Google Earth mash-ups have.^[58] But we think the ever increasing pressure of information will, in turn, lead to more creative efforts and focus in this area.^[59]

'Post-modern' games

It can be argued that as an art form, games have in some ways recapitulated the history of painting. Games had their 'medieval period,' dominated by board games which, like medieval art were abstract or abstractions partly by design, partly for want of technique. Carrying the analogy further, we're now in games' 'Renaissance period,' in which, as with Renaissance art, a plethora of techniques have emerged that allow games to increasingly approach complete realism in the processes they seek to depict. What comes next? In the case of art, the emergence of the photograph led artists to the realization that art needed to be something more or different than pure depiction of reality, which in turn led back to abstraction, but this time informed by the techniques learned in the Renaissance. As Picasso was fond of saying, "to do art, first learn to draw the human form."^[60]

In the case of games, it may be the press of information and life that leads to an era of 'post-modern' games that synthesize the best of both previous periods. As John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts (America's largest game company) was recently quoted as saying; the videogame industry needs to "do more to appeal to the casual gamer," adding "we're boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play."^[61]

Post-modern games, we think, are likely to return to a level of abstraction that makes them, like classic board games, easy for wide audiences to engage in, focused on the essence of the processes they are trying to depict, not on including every realistic detail, and in some cases even the ideal of the process (the most popular real estate simulation of all time is, after all, still Monopoly-real estate 'as it should be,' in the eyes of many--i.e. dealings with contractors and zoning boards not included). While simpler and therefore more abstract than many current offerings, these games will continue to borrow from a lot of what's worked in the current environment, and in particular will continue to appeal to serious gamers (who drive a lot of traffic, after all) by providing categorically different levels of engagement (Spore is a good example of this), as opposed to higher levels that are just more difficult versions of the same thing, with the higher levels in all likelihood approaching the realism of current offerings and perhaps even going beyond them, at least in the sophistication of the underlying code (if not what's graphically depicted), ideally by leveraging resources saved by starting from a base that's simpler overall. Starting from a simpler, more abstract base will also allow games to be more easily and widely repurposed, perhaps to the point where there is game coverage for all relevant state educational standards.

'Out there' differentiation

In 2003, Grunwald Associates released a study called Children, Families, and the Internet about new media use and desires of parents and children. One of our key areas of focus was a group of children we called online influencers (others have since called them promoters), kids who disproportionately tell others about places to visit online. What we've learned since then is that the kids we called influencers in 2003 would be ordinary children today--the 'viral velocity' (the rate at which children tell other children about sites) has increased at least 258% since then.^[62]

The result of this is that any site of interest is quickly spread to the entire audience, led by influencers (who now tell 40% more other children about sites than they did in 2003^[63]). The key words in that sentence are "of interest." What motivates influencers to tell others about sites they've found? Almost by definition, one would expect these sites to be significantly differentiated from others, since presumably influencers (who have a number of potentially 'uncool' attributes such as high grades and above average tendencies to respect their parents and teachers^[64]) are looking to impress their peers by finding offerings the likes of which other children have never seen before.

And in fact our research confirms this. In Children, Families, and the Internet, we tested interest in a number of concepts, many of which still haven't been attempted by any provider. When one specifically considers the concepts that are the most abstract--i.e. most creative--there is particularly strong interest on the part of influencers versus other children, as seen in the chart below.

                (c) Grunwald Associates, 2003

To be clear about what we're talking about here, 'online telescopes' were described as 'an "online telescope" that lets me look all over the world through a network of Webcams;' 'online parachutes' were described as 'a way to fly over the Internet and parachute in whenever I see something interesting;' 'international team games' were 'team games and activities where every member of my team is from a different country;' 'personality-based search" was described as 'a way to search the Internet based on my personality, how I'm feeling, or the personality of someone I admire,' and 'places to plant words, grow websites' were described as 'a place where I can plant words and watch them grow into websites.' And 'interest' was considered a 4 or 5 level of interest on a 1-5 scale. As far as we know, none of these concepts have been executed since 2003 (the closest might be Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope whose 'lens' is firmly fixed on the heavens, and, of course, in its own way, Google Earth).

The implications of this research is that there is continual pent-up demand on the part of influencers-the users who drive most of the Net's 'word of mouth'-for unusually innovative concepts. These influencers are continually scouring the web for innovation (they visit far more websites per unit time than other users64), and have their ears to the ground for innovation more than others (far more likely to check out sites others email to them and to do so more frequently^[65]). The upshot is that new sites that want to get recognition will be forced to differentiate themselves more and more (particularly as time goes by and viral velocity continues to increase), which will generally push them to greater and greater levels of abstraction (since concrete, real world representations are among the least differentiated).

Implications for informal science education

Thoughts from other participants to be added here.

Maturation

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In typical business parlance, maturation signifies a market's approach to senescence and ossification. But in an environment-technology--in which price, performance, capacity, and bandwidth double every year (or halve in the case of price) and have been doing so for years (with a number of successors to Moore's Law already in the offing^[66]), and in which paradigm shifts have arguably been happening on a logarithmic scale for an even longer time period,^[67] maturation in media and technology refers more to a relentless "growing up" that must be taken into account in any analysis of what the future might hold for science education.

Kevin Kelly says that the first rule of the Internet is: "we have to get better at believing the impossible."^[68] He meant it, of course, about concepts that seem theoretically and practically undoable like Wikipedia. But it could also apply to cherished beliefs about change itself. Google sits astride the online world today, and the notion that this might someday be otherwise is likely to be greeted with knowing talk about "first mover advantage" and "network effects." Yet end-user dissatisfaction with search results is increasing, and at nearly 50%^[69] is approaching the level of dissatisfaction that existed in 1998 when the "search wars" were widely declared "over," with Yahoo the winner. Similarly, Facebook may look to be at the top of the social media world, but it has made a series of apparent missteps in the last year^[70] that may remind one of some of those made by AOL, the old online community king, after a much longer ascendancy.

The relentless rate of change applies to much smaller niches as well. Consider the 'online community for dogs and cats' space, for example, meaning spaces or opportunities for dogs and cats, presumably represented by their owners, to talk to each other. One might expect this to be a 'one and done' novelty, but since 1996, the space has been ruled by Bad Dogs, Meow Mail, Dogster (and Catster), LOLCats, and now, rising quickly, Facebook applications Dogbook and Catbook. Should there be any doubt there will be more? First-mover advantage, as it turns out, is temporary, and the same network effects that bring new offerings to the fore are capable of bringing forward others to take their place, or at least move them to the side.^[71] After all, the top expectation the Internet generation has of the Net is that through it they will "always find something new and exciting."^[72]

In short, it's difficult to say for sure who will be on top, but there's no question there will continue to be a number of areas of growth and innovation in addition to those already mentioned. Here are a few, in hopes that other participants will add more.

People-Powered Search

One of the hot topics on the Net today is the semantic Web, an effort headed up by Tim Berners-Lee to tag every word and other object on the Web with semantic context so that machines will be able to read Web pages as easily as people do. If ever completed, users doing searches would not get lists of pages, but taken directly to the relevant points on pages-instead of pages linking to pages, data would link to data.

At first it was thought that the daunting problem of in effect publishing (or re-publishing) every page on the Web in two formats--one HTML, the other semantic--could be solved by developing creating a machine-readable format that would generate the semantic data automatically whenever new data was published, or whenever another machine requested such data. But human communication has proved sufficiently complex that it's proven necessary to develop different formats for different types of communication-a microformat for resumes, another for reviews, another for events, and so on. This effort, however, has lost steam-there have been no new microformats published since 2005.^[73] Critics argue that even if a full set of microformats were completed, there would remain seven major barriers to successfully tagging every word and object online appropriately, summarized in Cory Doctorow's essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.^[74] As MIT's Technology Review recently observed: "If there is to be a Web 3.0, it is likely to include only a portion of the semantic Web community's work, along with a healthy smattering of other technologies."^[75]

If only a portion of the semantic Web is to be developed, it probably behooves the informal science education community to try to insure that what gets developed is most useful to us. But the struggle to develop the semantic Web is part of a larger understanding. Although the ultimate goal of the project is to allow machines to read Web pages, no matter how many microformats and other tagging tools are created, at the end of the day, its success will depend on Herculean labors of people reading pages for the machines, if only to determine what words and other objects mean in every possible context. As Technology Review observes: "Google's remarkable success at taming the jungle of text-based Web pages fostered the dream among some researchers that all digital information could be indexed, organized, and comprehended algorithmically--that is, using software alone. If this dream ever comes true, it will be far behind schedule."^[76]

Many companies, having understood that even the semantic Web is really a people-powered search masquerading as a machine format, are not waiting for its completion to directly leverage this fundamental truth. A myriad of people-powered search services are in the offing, including:

• Yotify, which allows searchers to access and use other users' searches (an application so far primarily focused on shopping and limited to Yotify's partners).^[77]

• Microsoft's SearchTogether, a tool that, once installed, allows a user who has initiated a Web search to invite the others to join him/her. The tool tracks the work done by the group, making it easier for the initiator to assign tasks and for group members to keep track of what they've done.^[78]

• Groupization: Microsoft is also researching whether people using search data from several people of the same social group (e.g. individuals who share a demographic or psychographic characteristic, irrespective of whether they know each other or not) produces better search results for that group. So far groups made up of individuals with similar interests are proving more successful than traditional demographic categories.79

• Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service, which gives entrepreneurs and individuals access to Yahoo's continually updated index of Web pages (prohibitively expensive for many start-ups to generate themselves) so that they can create their own search engines, e.g. focused on and customized for specific niches.^[79]

• Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allows users to earn micropayments for completing small search-related tasks that are easy for humans, but hard for machines, e.g. quickly searching hundreds of thousands of satellite images for signs of a boat missing at sea.^[80]

• Search assistance site ChaCha, which employs 30,000 live guides paid on piecework basis to help users with specific searches in their areas of expertise, a model not unlike About.com from the dot-com era, but focused specifically on live search help.^[81]

• Wikipedia's Wikia Search, which envisions users working together to build the engine, with volunteer editors organizing and highlighting the best content, and average users voting on the usefulness of each search result.^[82] (Note: since this article was written, Wikipedia has abandoned Wikia Search--a casualty of the economy--although the source code is being made available to other sites)

• Music sites like Midomi, which hopes to allow users to find music by humming a few bars, provided the hum matches other previously successful searches by other users.^[83]

• Most of the services on this list rely on a model of 'technology plus the wisdom of crowds'; Pandora Radio is an example of what can be achieved in new media through the dedicated efforts of a small group of people-with a staff of fifty, working on what they call the "Music Genome Project" Pandora has cataloged hundreds of musical attributes of tens of thousands of songs to allow users to create-and share-their own music stations, e.g. a "Paul Simon station" that not only plays Simon, but potentially any song which, through its collection of attributes, sounds like Paul Simon or appears to have been influenced by Simon's work.

• Twitter recently refused a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook in part because it believes it will soon be offering a unique people-powered solution, where users will be able to query the company's 6 million+ users and get real-time results, an element that could be particularly useful for searches that are temporal in nature (e.g. where's the best place to go for x right now?)^[84]

At the end of the day, as Technology Review observes: "what's increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world's digital data in a single framework."^[85]

Authoring 2.0

One of the big findings in Grunwald Associates LLC's 2007 Kids Social Networking study is the extent to which children are engaged in a wide variety of sophisticated authoring activities online; many clearly aren't satisfied with what's available to them generically.^[86] But even a cursory look at a "blank page" site like MySpace shows that many lack the skills or resources to really create the online offerings one would think they'd really like to represent them. Many children say they are already borrowing branded, professional-looking content from corporate sites to improve the look and feel of their own.^[87] And the accessibility of large, royalty-free libraries of quality audio, video, animation, and images, ultimately with easy to use tools to enable repurposing and manipulation of these materials is only one of a number of ways we expect providers will step up to help user-created content and services get to the proverbial next level (particularly since both kids and parents will have strong positive feelings towards the brands that step up^[88]). Others include:

• New generations of site-building tools designed specifically for kids or other specific demographics (like the elderly)

• Site-building offerings specifically designed for particular interests and occupations, making the design and functionality that's most useful for those interests and occupations easy to generate--e.g. a site-building toolset for doctors that differs from the set of tools a birder would use to set up their representation online, and tools that help users with multiple personas (doctor and birder, for example) integrate their offerings if they wish.

• New generations of easier-to-use image, video, and audio editing tools, with large libraries of templates and macros to help users achieve specific effects.

• Tools that do a better job of helping users create high-quality animations

• Tools that help users generate more compelling text content for their sites (e.g. by allowing the user to tell the application what he/she is writing about and having the app generate questions it could be interesting to know the answers to about the subject)

• Tools that make it easier for users to find, capture, understand, and implement source code from other sites (including source code that's not accessible at all today).

• More tool sets for creating specialty content-a tool set specifically for designing chairs, for example (or even a particular type of chair), or for creating a wide variety of objects in a particular style (including styles the user him/herself creates).

• In general, more tool sets that find better, more sophisticated syntheses between giving users a blank page and something completely pre-fabricated to work with.

• Tools that create new authoring forms (like PostSecret) or enable new, specific variations on an existing form (e.g. tools that support the creation of a new type of mash-up)

(Fellow participants, if there are any of these needs that you think are already being well-met, even for relatively novice users^[89], please include the names of those toolsets in the bullets above; if you think there are other types of authoring tools that are going to arise that aren't referenced, please add them)

As a special case that can perhaps also serve to indicate the type and magnitude of what's still to come, consider the case of friend-to-friend communications in the authoring context. Two years ago, friend-to-friend was limited mainly to 'send to a friend' and a few fairly simple applications like 'poking' a friend on Facebook, despite the huge increases in viral velocity that had occurred in prior years. ^[90] Since then there has been an explosion of such applications both in social networks (especially Facebook, where most applications are designed to include a reason to send the app to other Facebook users) and the commercial world (e.g. Office Max's Elf Yourself, Coke's Sue-A-Friend, Pizza Hut's Message From Dick (Vitale) campaign, etc.).

Yet there is still a great deal of room for growth and improvement. Most greeting card offerings, for example, still don't let users have control of even basic, simple parameters like font and color, and very little true interactivity is supported within them, let alone interactivity employing sender-generated content. And a recent analysis of one of the most popular types of Facebook send-to-a-friend applications found there were more than thirty fairly basic authoring features that none of the leading providers support.^[91]

Collaboration 2.0, Assessment-based Communities

In 2007, nearly one in five kids 6-17 said they had dropped their membership in at least one social networking site because it "didn't seem to have a purpose."^[92] It was easy to imagine a child getting done with their MySpace or Facebook page and wondering, is that all there is? Since then, of course, Facebook applications have provided a plethora of things for users to do with their friends (to the point there are growing groups of FB users that want to ban them), and Facebook's news feeds (along with Twitter and its clones) provide a sense of always-on connection with friends that didn't exist before.

But communities that have lasted have always been defined by shared enterprise, from cathedrals to sports stadiums. And when one looks at the Facebooks of the world, one can wonder: have they created a version of community that can persist without collective action (or collective action limited to periodic cause-related flare-ups over temporal issues)? And if not, what will their cathedrals be? The fact that collaboration has become a fashionable word again suggests that there's a hunger in the social media world for something more than profile pages, news feeds, and apps to share with friends.

But most of what currently passes for collaborative opportunities online is more or less individual and haphazard. A user creates something from scratch using a toolset, posts (or shares) it online, and then others can add to it. This can work well for relatively small concepts that one individual can carry forward to the point where others can just surf its momentum, not so well for larger scale endeavors. For the latter, we can expect a proliferation of adherents to two models, which, borrowing from Eric Raymond, we'll call the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

In what we would call the cathedral model, a project is determined, and perhaps to some extent built out, by an existing organization, then needs are identified (data, art, music, marketing, QA, etc.) and made known to users, who decide how and where they fit in, then plug in and contribute to the collective enterprise. Grunwald Associates has done some research that indicates a high degree of interest in this kind of collaboration on the part of both parents and kids (i.e. "working with companies and other kids to create new products"^[93]), but so far there hasn't been much of it online, though there are a number of indications this is changing.^[94] We'd also put informal science/citizen science projects like eBird and Project Feederwatch in this category, albeit in a limited way, since only data is asked of participants.

In the bazaar model, collaborations emerge organically: a group of people with different capabilities who don't necessarily know each other come together, decide on a project, and then execute it together. In the real world, this rarely happens with projects on a scale any greater than an impromptu jam session in a jazz club, but in theory it ought to easier to generate online, though we haven't seen any services set up to date that really enable it outside the software development world and to a certain extent the social activism space, e.g. MobileActive). (Fellow participants, if you know of some services that really do this, please insert here) The closest-and it isn't that close-is a service like Microsoft's Photosynth, which stitches together photos taken by hundreds of amateurs of specific locations to generate immersive online replications of those locations. It may turn out that the best way to create these kinds of collaborations will be to start from communities of shared interest that then, in an asynchronous way (with perhaps some external guidance and prompting) generate collaborative products iteratively over time, in the way that mountain bikes and rap music were created, for example.^[95]

More generally, deliberate efforts to generate communities of interest could be another way for social media to add a sense of meaning and purpose for online users. In today's new media world, there are thousands, if not millions of groups, but very few utilities that help users find groups they ought to belong to; it's just (wrongly) assumed people know themselves well enough to know. This in spite of the fact that every time an assessment-based community approach (i.e. users taking an assessment and then having the opportunity to join a community with others who 'scored' similarly) has been used, it's been successful: Ringling Brothers' Be A Performer, Discovery's Automatic Adventure Personality Profiler, various online iterations of Harry Potter's Sorting Hat (e.g. in which kids sorted to Gryffindor gathered together with other Gryffindors), PatientsLikeMe.com, among others. Moreover, assessment-based community is one of the few values Internet users have proven they're willing to pay for, in the form of online dating services like eHarmony.com (where the community consists of the user and his/her matches).

Over time, we expect that not only will assessment-based communities become more prevalent (as users increasingly seek to find their way through an ever-rising sea of groups), but that the kinds of question batteries used in assessments will be used in other kind of new services as well. For example, sites currently under development like Equilib360, a psychological game in which users compete to create, using pass-along assessments, the largest 'balanced' circle of friends online (the bigger a group gets, the weaker its ties from end to end, the less imbalance it takes to 'tip it'), or Who I Helped Today, in which users complete batteries about their daily, weekly, and monthly activities, then can check in daily to see all the positive effects they've had in the world (that day, cumulatively) and periodically, at certain milestone points, get (anonymous) thank you emails from other service users who've been helped by their actions (or get asked to broadcast such mail to others themselves). The mounting evidence that even relatively simple psychosocial interventions (such as requiring students to write a single essay on their values) can have on long-term academic performance will also increase the use of assessment-based services online.^[96]

New Groups, New Audiences Online

Both parents and their children have been online for some time, but to an unprecedented extent they are online together--even parents and teens-and increasingly joined by grandparents and other family members as well. For example, Grunwald Associates found in 2007 that 63% of kids 9-17 (including 60% of teens) go online with their parents at least monthly, 22% of kids (including 23% of teens) go onto social networking sites together at least monthly, and nearly 4 in 10 parents say they text, IM, or email their children at least weekly.^[97] Both parents and kids-including large numbers of teens-say they wish there were more things online to do together (including games).^[98] So far, services and tools that reflect these realities (e.g. services designed specifically for whole family use or to help families stay connected) have been scarce, but we expect them to be more prominent in years to come (and that this is a prime opportunity for informal science practitioners to 'exploit'). Family services that emphasize opportunities for grandparents could be particularly appealing, since this is the fastest growing demographic online. And in some areas-such as games-that have been stereotypically considered for the young, there are still many opportunities for providers to design for adult/mature audiences in general.^[99]

But the biggest meaningful demographic trend currently in the process of taking place is probably that tens, if not hundreds, of millions of users from the developing world are now coming online every year (a trend that the current financial crisis may delay, but not for long^[100]). Many poor locations that still lack paved roads and clean running water now have Internet access (albeit mainly limited to wireless devices), and companies like HashCache are in the process of greatly accelerating their Net access speeds.^[101] Already Facebook groups in some categories are dominated by groups from Asia and the Middle East; in coming years they will be joined en masse by Africa, which experienced record growth rates in the past decade.^[102] Increasing online interactions between Western and developing country users (inevitable even if both groups want to keep largely to themselves) can be expected to result in a flood of new cultural memes, not only those coming from the developing world directly, but resulting from the interactions. To the extent that one accepts that a globalized world means global responsibilities for educators, developing world users will represent both challenge and opportunity for informal science practitioners, who could (and should) also seize upon the new online presence of so many places previously unrepresented to teach our own citizens about other lands, other cultures, and the science therein.

Other Trends to Follow as New Media 'Grows Up'

Fellow participants, please add trends here.

Implications for informal science education

Participants, please add your thoughts here about implications of any of these trends.

The Elephants in the Room?

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Now, more than any time in recent history, it seems naïve to talk about the future of anything in a socioeconomic vacuum. Can we really project what will happen to media without taking into account a global economic crisis that could be protracted, looming shortages of raw materials like energy that media and technology depend on, serious environmental threats like global warming, a dysfunctional formal education system, and record levels of inequality within and between nations that could result in substantial social disruptions in coming years?

In the shortest of runs, the current crises could actually be a spur to innovation as software developers, no longer chained to payoffs from the conventional wisdom have the opportunity (or are forced) to work on the innovative ideas they actually feel passionate about-certainly that was the case in tech's last dark period (2000-03).^[103] And the venture and entrepreneurial communities have clearly already started to engage with some of our overarching problems, generating a dizzying array of new businesses that promise to deal with energy issues, for example, and reduce our carbon footprint along the way. In fact, tech optimists look at all our current issues as one blip in an inevitable line of progress that will ultimately make each of us virtually immortal and omnipotent.^[104]

Short of that, it's possible we will be able to identify and prioritize solutions that have ripple effects on a variety of other issues. Renewable energy, for example, promises to impact not just our energy issues, but a variety of economic, environmental, national security, and health care issues as well. More prosaically, and closer to home, the resources devoted to the semantic Web (i.e. getting computers to be able to read and understand Web pages) might one day allow computers to read and grade essays and other creative work so that we can actually test students on what has traditionally differentiated products of our educational system--creativity and entrepreneurial initiative--instead of putting our educational system in service of a race to the bottom by 'teaching to the test.'

But we're leaving space here for conference and site participants to tell us what external issues they feel could most impact the future of media and technology (presumably in a negative way), what impact they expect these issues to have and what, if any, steps are available for media and informal science practitioners to mitigate them, either directly or through our influence on others (such as policymakers) who might take these steps.

Participants please add and discuss external issues here.

References

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This article was written by Tom de Boor, Principal Analyst, Grunwald Associates and delivered at the March 11-12, 2009 kick-off event for this virtual conference.