elearnspace

With location-aware software and mobile devices…and the immediacy of Twitter/Facebook, the gap between physical and virtual is shrinking. As Tony Karrer notes, in addressing online/face-to-face conferences: “What’s interesting here is that it used to be that you could count on your in-person audience to be singletasking (is that a word?) and paying attention. Now, they are going to be multitasking just like your online audience.” Perhaps I spend too much time online, but I would like to do with the physical world (and conversations) what I do online: tag, sort, annotate, organize, archive (the internet of things?). Overlaying a data layer on the physical world – such as walking through a historical district and being able to see buildings on your mobile device as they looked 100 years ago – contributes to physical/virtual blurring. I’ll take it a step further: the biggest challenge facing technologists today is to provide a seamless method of integrating our online selves and our physical selves. I’d argue the two separate selves shouldn’t even exist – they will converge into one entity.