Hidden in plain sight

Living in Gettysburg, you can't get away from the history of the town. I live less than a mile from the battlefield, which sounds interesting until you realize that the only places not less than a mile away are sitting on the battlefield itself. The battlefield itself is covered in monuments, markers, statues and of course tons and tons of cannon pointing everywhere. One of the most interesting things about all the displays isn't obvious to folks who don't know much about artillery. For example, check the two pictures to the left



If you ask people what the differences between the weapons are, most would probably just comment that the one on the bottom is green, yet the two cannon are vastly different.

The green cannon is a 12 pound Napoleon, a very popular weapon on the battlefield- about 40% of the total cannon on both sides were variants of this design. The gun tubes were made of bronze (thus the green patina) smooth inside and they were loaded by ramming powder, wadding and shot into the muzzle (front) of the cannon. With some luck you could hit a target a mile away with one of these, but they were more effective at close range firing canister rounds - effectively big shotgun shells- into massed infantry.

The weapon on the top is a 2.75 in Whitworth Breechloading Rifle. Only two of these were at the battle, both owned by the South who used them to shell Union positions south of the town from a hill to the north of Gettysburg. The gun barrel was rifled, allowing for much greater range, easily twice that of the Napoleon. It was loaded from the rear (breech) rather than the front, and the barrel was made from iron and steel. Virtually all modern artillery pieces follow this design- the Napoleon was a technological dead end, and continuing increases in range, accuracy and fire rate made modern artillery the most effective killer in warfare until the modern bomber came along.

So what all does this have to do with educational technology? Reading through the 2008 Horizon report from EDUCAUSE I'm struck by how the "transformative" future technologies have been hidden in plain sight much like the differences in the Civil War cannon. Their first key emerging technology is grassroots video. Nothing here appears new at all- students have been using cameras to make short films and videos for decades. Yet the incredible price drops in digital cameras and camcorders coupled with the explosive growth in hard disk capacity and improvements in online streaming technology have suddenly changed the entire landscape from one where a few film studies students could spend semesters learning the technology and then slowly putting together a five minute film to one where virtually any student can grab a camera, shoot hours of footage, slap it together in an easy to use editor and share it with anyone on the internet in a few hours. Nothing really looks all that different at first, but the underlying technology is so different and so much more efficient that it's not really the same after all.

The same is true with things like collaboration webs and mobile broadband. Nothing here is new at all- internet based editable documents have been around forever and viewing web sites on a mobile phone is nothing really new. Yet again the base technology is changing enough that suddenly what was tricky to set up or annoying to use isn't anymore. I left my laptop at home at a recent conference and brought only my phone, and I didn't really miss it- I was able to send mail, view web sites and even read EDUCAUSE reports on it. So long as I didn't mind the web being 320x240, it was fine.

The longer range stuff such as data mashups isn't quite there yet for non-specialists (I've developed custom Google Maps apps, but it's still only for the truly geeky), but it's obviously coming and once the technological barrier to entry drops things will change just as fast- technologies that don't really appear any different from what was there before will suddenly take over.

Or will they? I have to think back to the cannon and remember that modern tanks have ditched the rifled cannon in favor of smoothbores. Everything old is new again...