The Internet of Things and Education

With the Inter­net con­nect­ing us to many things (media, pho­tos, infor­ma­tion, etc.) can it also con­nect us to phys­i­cal objects? Can we launch appli­ca­tions on our com­puter by just touch­ing a phys­i­cal object? Can one phys­i­cal object talk to another phys­i­cal object through an Inter­net con­nect and com­mand it to do a phys­i­cal act or feed it data? The answer is yes and this phe­nom­ena is called “The Inter­net of Things”.

What is exactly the Inter­net of Things? Accord­ing to Wikipedia the Inter­net of Things “refers to uniquely iden­ti­fi­able objects (things) and their vir­tual rep­re­sen­ta­tions in an Internet-like struc­ture. The term Inter­net of Things was first used by Kevin Ash­ton in 1999.” What are some con­sumer exam­ples of the Inter­net of Things? One would be a “smart fridge”. This device could tell you when the items in your fridge are due, what you can make with the items in your fridge and find recipes on the Inter­net for you. Or when you are run­ning low on a cer­tain food item, it would email you a list that you can pull up on your mobile phone while you go food shop­ping. “Intel­li­gent cars” are also being designed in the same way to help you nav­i­gate, avoid acci­dents by sens­ing the objects around you, email­ing you when you need an oil change, or slow­ing down your speed because of bad weather (and email­ing your work to let them know you’ll be late). Sounds like Sci­ence Fic­tion? The ground work for the Inter­net of Things has already been laid down and futur­ist believe we’ll have a totally con­nected Inter­net of Things world in 5 to 10 years out.

So how does the Inter­net of Things exactly work? Each phys­i­cal object would have a Radio-frequency iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (RFID) tag placed on the item or a 2D code or bar­code. When this code or tag is read either by a RFID reader (also run­ning an app to read it) or scanned by an app run­ning on a com­puter or mobile device it would prompt your device to open up a page of infor­ma­tion or send a com­mand for an action to hap­pen, like open­ing up an email client and send­ing a mes­sage or it would call a cer­tain per­son in your address book. Two appli­ca­tions that will allow you to cre­ate tags and asso­ciate them with phys­i­cal objects and have them exe­cute a com­mand are touchatag and Pachube .You can also just attach data (like text or images) to the phys­i­cal object to describe it or have that object feed data into another pro­gram. How eas­ier would it be for you to gather infor­ma­tion about the objects around by just scan­ning them instead of open­ing a browser and hav­ing to search the Inter­net about the object? The rela­tion­ship of the object and the data is already formed for you. So how can the Inter­net of Things be applied to education?

If stu­dents are col­lect­ing data out in the field for research, tag­ging phys­i­cal objects to find and ana­lyze data about the object (and have to feed into other pro­grams for analy­sis) is one way the Inter­net of Things can be used in edu­ca­tion. Once the stu­dents set up the process (tag­ging the item, asso­ci­at­ing cer­tain data and com­mends to feed that data to other servers for analy­sis), they can sit back, col­lect the data and run it through var­i­ous pro­grams for their research. Hav­ing to go out to the phys­i­cal object all the time to col­lect data on dif­fer­ent con­di­tions will be a thing of the past. The stu­dents will have 24 hour data col­lec­tion, which will make their research more accurate.

Say a stu­dent cre­ated a work of art. They can tag that paint­ing with the time, date, loca­tion it was painted, the media that was used for the paint­ing, an audio artist state­ment or even a  video of the artist dis­cusses their influ­ences and attach­ing images of those influ­ences to that phys­i­cal object. This can be done with a viewer scan­ning an AR code and view­ing that data as AR (Aug­mented Real­ity) data. They would be able to see the images super­im­posed on top of the real phys­i­cal object and com­pare the two in the same exact space. There will be no need for the viewer to pull out their phone, look up the artist and the paint­ing infor­ma­tion and try to find inter­views about the piece. It will all be tagged to that object and easy to access.

What if a stu­dent wanted to learn a for­eign lan­guage through touch­ing the phys­i­cal objects that are in their vocab­u­lary list? RFID tags can be cre­ated and attached by the instruc­tor for each of the phys­i­cal items in the vocab list. When the stu­dent places this object on the RFID reader, it will say the word for the item in their native lan­guage and in the for­eign lan­guage. Touch­ing the item will give the stu­dent another sense to be engaged and may help (depend­ing on their learn­ing style) them learn the con­tent faster.

With server space becom­ing more plen­ti­ful and Inter­net con­nec­tions on mobile devices get­ting faster, the Inter­net of Things will become more of a com­mon place real­ity and will find its way into the classroom.