You can always change this.

“..statues of Matti Tedre will be put up all over Finland … when farmers find out how much the statues scare the birds away”. This has been predicted by Matti and Justus a year ago for the year Two Thousand.

How about 2007, what is coming down the road? Perhaps not as hilarious as those we heard from Justus and Matti, I am presenting here some predictions, with a varying degree of speculation, hunch, and seriousness.

– There will be at least two new PhD graduates, however, no more than five.
– SciFest@Joensuu will attract more than 10000 visitors, out of which half will in future enroll to the CS dept@Joensuu. Other half will become science and technology ignorants forever.
– Members of the research group finally start to use delicious, as suggested by Andrés. Andrés, however, start to convince them to use digg.
– Roman will need only another 35 good advices from Justus. Per month.
– By the end of 2007, a half of edtech users are on a Mac. Another half uses Linux. And the remaining half does not return from Mexico, why to bother with computers anyway.
– Jeliot 3 is used as the main support tool in the introductory cs courses worldwide, and students write their alternative-end theses in Woven Stories.
– Grant proposals are written in Woven Stories, too.
– EdTech builds a satellite hub on the Moon. The reason, as lately discovered, is that the proposal is not proofread by the court-language-editor.
– After a long fast, at least three new edu-tech games are developed. One for seniors, one for kids, and one for Jussi to stop him from the constant complaining.
– Mikko becomes a minister of education of African Union, outcomes of which are yet to be observed.
– All members of edtech join the North-Carelian Africa society.
– The edtech joint paper “Ultimate confusion: an empirical evaluation of a novel game-like strategy for teaching programming in technology enhanced remote village classrooms in developing countries” becomes the single most cited edtech publication ever.
– To counter-attack, Justus publishes a paper “I always knew the strategy works and my students love it.”, in ICALT 2007.
– Kid’s club brand merchandise finally yields first results, as a night club of the same name opens in the city center.

The discussion below is open for your insights about 2007 & edtech.

It is difficult to do one non-trivial task that requires attention with one hand and other task with the other hand; especially without practicing. Try, for example, balancing a pen on the forefinger of your right hand, while typing with your left hand. Playing piano both-hands is that kind of task that needs practicing. (What actually happens in piano playing is that as the artists develop their expertise, they will not anymore waste the precious visual attention on their hands.)

A step to make this even more challenging is to control two things simultaneously using one hand only. Try this game. (Don’t blame me if it took your working day away.)

Here are my scores in the orders of trials (technical-errors excluded): 3.532, 6.177, 7.265, 15.143, 9.731, 9.84, 8.4, 4.9, 17.086, 7.76, 11.434, 9.851, 21.841, 12.907.

It seems there are some peaks in the performance with increasing number of trials. After each of the peaks the performance for a while stabilizes on a level that is higher that the level before the peak. In other words, some learning seems to take place. What I’d like to see, however, is how visual attention patterns develop with the trials. Anybody is interested to come for a short time being eye-tracked?