Last week Google announced Android Wear, an operating system for wearable computing devices. Moto 360, a smart watch from Motorola running on Android Wear will be out this summer.
I was watching the promo video for Android Wear and wondered if, with smart watches, personal learning agents could soon become a reality. Did you notice the jellyfish warning the girl receives on her watch when she and her friends are about to go surfing? And then the watch presents a couple of nearby beaches as alternatives. Now this is ‘proactive’ performance support – contextual support that senses your location and/or other parameters and pops up without you having to ask for it. How cool is that?
In this blog article of 2010, we had talked of the emergence of personal learning agents by 2015:
“As the semantic web finally starts to form and common ontologies for various types of learning content are developed, intelligent personal learning software agents will emerge as learning content mediators. Having a software agent that runs on a personal computing device such as a mobile phone or tablet and constantly monitors content streams on the internet to provide up-to-date information based on personal preferences, workplace conditions, or for the task at hand will make a good performance support and learning assistance system.”
With Android Wear, this seems very likely to happen. What do you think?
