ABSTRACT
There are numerous people who make a living from looking into the future, through tracking trends to estimate what might be the next focus of development and what gadget might grab people’s attention. In this penultimate chapter of the book I discuss the type of technology that might be available to us and I consider the implications of this for the Ecology of Resources approach. The saturation of our lives with more and different technologies is unlikely to lessen and there are implications of these developments that need to be taken into account when we consider the process of developing technology-rich learning activities. Sometimes we, as learners, choose to select from the increasing range of available technology, and on other occasions the choice is not necessarily ours. For example, I know that if I want to catch a bus into town from the bus stop near my house I can go to the bus company website and look to see when the next bus is due to arrive, or I can use my mobile phone to text the bus stop code to a bus service phone number and receive the information as a text message on my mobile phone. If I do not wish actively to seek such information then the electronic displays at many of the bus stops will also let me know the time till the arrival of the next bus(es). I can of course simply choose to wait and see when the bus arrives. I have a choice about the extent to which I personally engage with these technologies to support my journey planning. Once I arrive in town I can make other choices, but some technologies are not within my control: the surveillance cameras that record activity across large parts of the town, for example, or the photo someone else takes which has me in the background and which they post to their blog.
