“Fifty-four precent of all meetings have at least one person on a call with them,” says Anguilo. “That person, within 10 or 15 minutes, is just doing a little email, and 10 minutes later is building a ship in a bottle because they’ve lost track of the meeting and it’s hard to hear what’s going on in the room.”
Convergence is a concept we see in the arena of learning tech, and cloud tools in general. Something that might have started out with one function, say a cell phone, can become a swiss army knife of multi functionality. Such is the case with tech that supports communication in a room with a group…. which now also supports communication with those outside the room, online, as well.
The development of these “conferencing” tools has been a bit slower than, say, the smartphone, at least partly because of the costs, and the limited customers relative to a “mass market” product. But “conferencing” tech is converging with other cloud tools more and more. Gary has noted this in the past, and IIRC, Tempo had some relation to improved teleconferencing software and hardware?
Earlier we explored how local HS were using cloud connected “white boards” in the classroom. Partly because we wanted something like that for our Learning Lab., and partly because we saw a useful convergence between teleconferencing and the online “classroom” such as might exist at a “MultiTask DeVille” facility.
Microsoft has announced plans to build a sort of One Tool To Run it All, with their “Surface Hub”…a very large touch screen computer which incorporates some cool camera and microphone tech as well as providing a very interactive touch screen.
The bad news is that they are “asking” about $20 K for the 84 inch model. The good news is that one can get the 55 inch for $8K. While that is still outrageous outside of the enterprise purchasing department… it might, we hope, become one of those” gets cheaper later” as the market increases items. That’s happened with large screen TVs which are now both huge and “affordable” with amazing tech built-in.
As Apple found out, Samsung will one way or another find a way to make their own version of media tools that seem cool, and/or have a market. Since they already are selling and developing smart TVs and are world leaders in large screen manufacturing and development, one might project some version of the “huge touch screen conferencing tool/ classroom tool, learning lab tool”…etc….from them.
As Samsung trademarked… “The Next BIG Thing is here”?
From Time magazine:
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Can-this-massive-touchscreen-computer-finally-bring-brainstorms-into-the-digital-era.docx”]