Touch and go

This is part 9 in the series on the future of learning and technology. Everything it seems, is being disrupted. By this I mean that new technology is arriving all the time, and much of it is changing forever the way we do things, the way we think about things, and the way we use things. The reason technology has the capacity to be so disruptive, is that it moves more quickly than industry, business, education, health, entertainment, in fact just about every part of the society we live in is constantly struggling to keep pace with it. As Larry Downes wrote recently: 'Social, political and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.'

In these exponential times, we can expect new technologies to emerge with increased regularity, and we can expect more and more to find ourselves scratching our heads, figuring out how we are going to harness their strange power and potential within familiar situations. Disruption occurs when we introduce new technology that impacts so dramatically upon previously familiar practices, that it changes them irrevocably. Stephen Heppell remarked that technology radically changes everything it touches. We will never return to the days of linear tape machines. Audio and video tape were replaced by digital media. The physical presence of music media is being rapidly eroded by digital media. The vinyl discs I used to buy as a teenager are already curios, and CDs will also become collector's items as they slowly begin to disappear from our high street shops. High street shopping itself is in very real danger of disappearing too, as online stores strengthen their grip an on entire generation of consumers. Photography, telephony and telecommunications, travel, leisure, commerce, news gathering, marketing, movie making, the list goes on of hundreds of industries that have been forever disrupted by technology. Digital skills are at a premium. If you don't possess the skills to use a computer or other digital device, you automatically exclude yourself from the majority of jobs currently available.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about the Internet of Things - a world where every object is connected to the Web. I wrote that 'Once upon a time, objects were simply objects. They only came alive in Disney cartoons'. Now, the announcement of a new technology called Touché has the potential to change forever they way we interact with everyday objects. And ironically, it has emerged from research by Disney Corporation. Touché uses a Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique to make just about any every day objects 'aware' that users are touching them. From door handles to sofas, once connected, objects will be context aware, and respond to our natural gestures. The manufacturers claim that using the technology may ultimately render keyboards and other peripherals completely redundant. Touché can detect whether humans are present or absent, and a variety of multi-touch gestures can be programmed to be recognised. Watch the video below to see for yourself the full potential and fascinating implications of this technology. Ask yourself how it could be applied in your own area of work. And then prepare yourself for disruption ...




Touch and go by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.