emerging technology
Note should be taken, however, that in this sense the terms new and emerging technology tend to be synonymous, although they need not be. While a new definition is hazardous and debatable, ET could stand for more recent advancements i.e., employing the Wii Remote’s motion sensitivity to hone skills in surgery and older ones e.g., leveraging open-source LMS on a university campus. Although it might be true that most emerging technologies are newer emerging technology, it is not necessarily true that because they are new, they are emerging.
This concept of new technologies and emerging technologies also raises the following two questions When do technologies stop being new? When technologies stop being new, do they also stop being emerging? For instance, virtual or synthetic worlds were defined as an emerging technology over a decade ago. Virtual worlds are today, even defined as emerging technologies. Newness alone is a challenging definition of what emerging technologies, being older emerging technology, can also be emerging– the reasons shall be made clear after discussing the following characteristics.
ET are coming-into-being organisms
The term evolving captures a state of change and ongoing refinement and development. Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging site, is a good example of an ET that is coming into being. Twitter’s initial success and popularity would frequently lead to frequent outages. These kinds of problems were most evident during mainstream technology conferences e.g., during the Merworlds keynote speech. Twitter’s downtime problems were eventually both criticized and expected by the industry after some time.
When a new firm took over Twitter’s former offices, a picture was posted on the office door as a sarcastic comment about Twitter’s downtime and office move. Early emerging technology solutions to meeting sudden increases in demand were employing additional servers and applying on/off switches to different Twitter functionalities e.g., at the 2008 World Developers Conference, emerging technology, new technology, ai technology, latest trends, top technologies whereas subsequent efforts involved Redesigning the application’s structure and pulling out services e.g., free SMS and instant messaging support. Being in a state of evolution, Twitter keeps evolving and improving its service, yet keeping its fundamental purpose, and remaining an emerging technology and not an established one.
ET goes through hype cycles
Tomorrow’s fad could be today’s emerging technology, and tomorrow’s key to increased productivity could be today’s simple concept. Although it is tempting to get caught up in the plan that innovations today will reorganize and transform learning and teaching, one must be critical of the hype. Although emerging technology has made a significant contribution to the carriage, administration, negotiation, and practice of distance education, it is also key to understand that education as an area of scholarship and practice resists change as a result of organizational, cultural, and actual influences.
Technologies and concepts have cycles of euphoria, uptake, activity and utilization, maturity, effect, enthusiasm, and even infatuation. Ultimately, some of the emerging technologies and concepts of today will prove to be stable and staple, emerging technologies, emerging trends, latest technology, emerging business, software technology, and some will fade to black. One of the ways to explain the hype surrounding new technologies and concepts for education is to look at the Hype Cycle model created by Gartner Inc.
The model assesses the relative maturity and potential impact of technologies and concepts and goes through five phases that have been used successfully on a wide range of subjects. Most relevant to the subject of this book are the hype cycle models created for Higher Education e-learning and technologies.
ET meets the not-yet criterion
One thing that differentiates ET from any other type of technology is the fact that we are not yet capable of grasping what these types of emerging technology are, what they bring to education, and what they signify for learners, teachers, and institutions.
Early studies of ET tend to be evangelical and outline surface-level problems of the emerging technology e.g., technologies, software trends, latest tech updates, emerging advantages, limitations without the aim of gaining an understanding of the affordances of the technology and the way that these affordances can enable alternative and better means of learning and teaching remotely.
Moreover, as these technologies evolve, the study that defines it is classified as falling under the case study and formative evaluation methodologies, but does identify our early efforts to learn about the technology and what it can do. However, since ET is not fully researched yet, initial implementations of cutting-edge technology applications only simulate common processes, causing critics to assert that emerging technology are new avatars of the media debate. Too often, alas, they are correct newer technology tends to be employed in familiar ways Traditional Linear PowerPoint slides supersede slideshow projector blogs despite their collaborative possibilities to replace individual reflection diaries, and pedagogical agent lectures supplant non-agent lectures.
ET are potentially revolutionary but their potential is largely unrealized
People and businesses see that emerging technology a potential exists, but that potential has not yet been actualized. The potential to revolutionize practices, processes, and institutions, is both desired and resisted.
Although this new development has the potential to unsettle scholarship, up to now, most research is still being published in closed-access periodicals and journals. As I have previously maintained, I crafted the above definition/description because I was unable to locate one in the literature.
Conclusion
New emerging technologies have taken on growing significance in policy-making for their perceived power to revolutionize the status quo. This has triggered ad hoc government efforts like the Future & Emerging Technology FET program sponsored by the European Commission in 2013 and the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition.
A significant and rising interest is present in the appearance of new technologies, particularly from the perspective of policy-making. However, emerging technologies are missing some fundamental building blocks, that is a shared understanding of what makes a technology emergent and robust research designs that translate core theoretical concepts into operational terms. The current paper seeks to address this deficiency by crafting a definition of emerging technologies and tying this conceptual work to the creation of a framework for the operationalization of technological emergence. The definition is formulated by merging a general comprehension of the term and specifically the phenomenon of emergence with an overview of seminal innovation studies addressing definitional problems of technological emergence.