Emerging Instructional Technologies : the near Future

Twenty years ago it would have been hard to imagine that computer networking would have such a profound influence on the field of instructional design and technology (IDT) and throughout society as a whole. The quest to build a better mouse trap is now guided by emerging technologies that continually strive toward being faster, smaller, more intelligent, and distributed. Predicting the future of IDT in this blur of technology innovation is at best a risky endeavor. In this chapter, John Jacobs and Jack Dempsey review a broad spectrum of emergent technologies in order to select those they think will have a growing impact on the IDT field over the foreseeable future. Even within this limited scope, they present evidence of a technology induced paradigm shift currently underway. The authors also describe ethical issues that may soon overtake the research community as it reaches out to incorporate advances within the related fields of cognitive science and neuroscience. We hope this chapter will spark an interest in the research of scientific fields that are on a convergent path with that of our field.