Dragging through RSS feeds, noticed a recent post by Darren Draper at Drape’s Takes highlighting George Siemens tweeted question, “Anyone want to share their working definition of emerging technologies for teaching/learning?” Rather than starting from scratch, I’ll start with Darren’s initial stab (as he calls it) at a definition,

Emerging technologies for teaching and learning consist of all hardware, software, concepts, and ideas that can be employed to advance social, connective, and educational processes.

I think I would add to Darren’s definition by inserting

Emerging technologies for teaching and learning consist of recently developed and mostly untested applications of technology hardware or software (including web-based tools) to facilitate educational processes.

I agree with Darren that an idea can qualify as a technology if the idea is a new and different application of a technology to the learning process.  I believe “recently developed and mostly untested” provides the necessary reference to limit “emerging” technologies to those that are truly emerging; those for which the applications are being discovered and tested.  Once a technology application – hardware or software – has been tested or used in classroom environments by a sufficient number of teachers, I believe it transitions from an emerging technology to a developing or established one. George posted some of the twitter responses he received to his original question. Your thoughts?  How do you define “emerging technologies?”  What distinguishes “emerging” technology from non-emerging technology?

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