Here is a summary compiled by my colleague at UIC, Ed Garay.

Some key trends:
1) People expect to be able to work, learn, and study  whenever and wherever they want to
2) The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized
3) The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured
4) The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators
5) Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models
6) There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning

Some significant challenges:
1) Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of higher education
2) Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching
3) Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession
4) Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies
5) New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities

Technologies to watch:
* Short-term (12 months):
a) Mobile Computing
b) Tablet Computing

* Mid-term (two to three years):
c) Game-based Learning
d) Learning Analytics

* Long-term (four to five years):
e) Gesture-based Computing
f) Internet of Things (small objects connectedness)

Here’s a sneak peak at some of the many gadgets that will be the star of the show, if even for it’s allotted 15 minutes.

Iogear’s Multi-Link Bluetooth Mini Keyboard ($63) – perfect for multiple devices that you may be using – tablets, smartphones, etc. that accept Bluetooth connections.  With this device, you can connect to up to six devices.  This way you do not have to carry around multiple Bluetooth keyboards for all of the devices in your bag.

Kensington’s BungeeAir – here’s a way to make sure you are even more tethered to your phone.  This keyfob alerts you when you are too far away from your device.  There is also available a protective case that supplies up to four extra hours of battery life.  If you go a certain distance from your phone, the keyfob locks the screen.  (Which, incidentally, can be done anyway through settings in the phone.)

BodyMedia FIT BodyBand – “one of those personal fitness gizmos that goes far beyond the basic wellness tracking features found in many similar offerings. Using the FIT BodyBand, anyone who wants to lose weight can have access to his own personal digital trainer and nutritionist.” Apparently with this device, you can track as many fitness settings as you think can think of (sleep patterns, physical activity, calories, etc.).

For a look at more gadgets, here are some useful peepholes:

CES 2012 Preview: 16 Hot Gadgets

Mashable

c|net’s preview of CES

Marketplace (American Public Media)

PC World

Keep in the loop about what’s happening at the conference via Twitter @intlCES (and via various hashtags: #ces2012, #ces); Facebook; the official YouTube Channel; and even via Flickr.

Personally, I wish I could attend, because there is a “Mobile Apps Showdown” scheduled for January 12, and and entire “digitalHealth Summit” track that runs on January 11 and 12.   Like most of you, I will keep tabs on it from afar.  In the health track, there are some interesting sounding sessions:

• Diabetes and Obesity: How can Technology Change the Outcomes?
• The Patient as Consumer: Pushing Digital Health to New Heights
• Data Liberation: Making Health Data Intelligible for the Consumer
• Is Technology Changing the Doctor-Patient Relationship?

Sounds interesting!

This first set of tech trends comes from Jason Hiner at Tech Republic. He reported on the Gartner Group’s annual symposium where they revealed their list of the 10 most strategic tech trends of 2012. Drum roll, please:

1. Media tablets and beyond – the era of Microsoft and PC domination coming to a close
2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces – building user interfaces for multiple screen sizes
3. Contextual and social user experience – using information about an end user to improve the quality of the interaction with the device
4. Internet of Things – objects acting as user of other systems
5. App stores and marketplaces – a new term emerges: apptepreneurs
6. Next-gen analytics – mobile devices being able to self-analyze for full optimization
7. Big data – new and exotic technologies are required to manage the extreme volume of data created today
8. In-memory computing – faster response time in analytical operations
9. Extreme low-energy servers – new entrants to the server business proposing a radical way for future servers to work
10. Cloud computing – cloud computing was very recently number one and now is number ten. This is significant that it is viewed as not living up to its hype.

Pete Cashmore, the editor of Mashable, shares his list of the Top 10 Technology Trends for 2012.
As he points out, “Predicting what will happen in 2012, therefore, is a shot in the dark: A year is virtually a lifetime in the digital era.”

1. Touch Computing – we’ll be using our mice less often and increasingly using desktop computers in similar ways to how we use tablets and smartphones.
2. Social Gestures – ‘frictionless sharing’ – where with the click of a button you can share what you are doing from services like Spotify, to social networks (once you authorize it of course)
3. NFC and Mobile Payments – with the success of the Square Payment dongle for iPhone, and NFC (Near Field Communication) in 2011, awareness of this technology will likely make it more popular in 2012…it’s not without a lot of security concerns…
4. Beyond the iPad – the iPad costs $499′ the Kindle Fire is $199. There has been speculation that while the iPad is king today, it may lose the crown in 2012.
5. TV everywhere – with the rise of the tablet, it’s easier to have ‘TV in your hand’ but the cable companies have ways to keep you tethered to subscriptions.
6. Voice Control – thanks to the popularity of Siri and the iPhone 4S, voice recognition and voice search will show up on more devices.
7. Spatial Gestures – personally, I was fascinated with the technology in the movie Minority Report and hope I see it in my lifetime. Microsoft Kinect is an example of using spatial gestures in current technology.
8. Second-Screen Experiences – Cashmore says, “It refers to apps (mainly on the iPad) that listen to the audio output of your TV and display content related to the show or movie you’re watching.” An example from the music industry is Gracenote.
9. Flexible Screens – Can you imagine a phone that rolls up in your pocket, or one that you can slip into your wallet like a dollar bill? Bendable interfaces will be seen more in 2012, though it’s likely to not be fully implemented for a number of years.
10. HTML5 – this fifth version of HTML, could take the place of Flash on many mobile devices.

What are your predictions for 2012?

By the way, this blog post was written on an iPad using touch technology!

The Taubman Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan will host the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s traveling exhibition, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibition illustrates how Nazi leadership enlisted people in professions traditionally charged with healing and the public good, to legitimize persecution, murder and, ultimately, genocide. Deadly Medicine, which is cosponsored by the University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine, will premiere on February 3, 2012 on the 4th floor of the Taubman Health Sciences Library and runs through April 13, 2012.

Accompanying the exhibition will be an opening reception and closing reflections panel discussion. Event details will be announced at a later date.

“Deadly Medicine explores the Holocaust’s roots in then-contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific thought,” explains exhibition curator Susan Bachrach. “At the same time, it touches on complex ethical issues we face today, such as how societies acquire and use scientific knowledge and how they balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the larger community.”Deadly Medicine is based on the acclaimed exhibition of the same name that opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in April 2004. An online version is viewable at http://www.ushmm.org/deadlymedicine.

The Nazi regime was founded upon the conviction that “inferior races” and individuals had to be eliminated from German society so that the fittest “Aryans” could thrive. By the end of World War II, six million Jews and millions of others—among them Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people diagnosed as hereditarily ill, homosexuals, and others belonging to ethnic groups deemed inferior—had been persecuted and murdered. Join us as we explore this dark chapter in history and its legacy on the health profession today.

Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race

Location: Taubman Health Sciences Library – 1135 E. Catherine St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (http://www.lib.umich.edu/thl)

Dates and Times: The exhibition will be viewable February 3 – April 13, 2012 during library hours.

This display is cosponsored by the U-M Taubman Health Sciences Library and the U-M Center for the History of Medicine.Exhibition and events are free and open to the public.

For more information contact Kate Saylor at 734.936.1394 or kmacdoug@umich.edu

NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), in partnership with England’s National Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, the Cochrane Collaboration, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and other agencies in the US and abroad, now makes available more than 18,000 clinical effectiveness reviews via PubMed Health. PubMed Health organizes these clinical effectiveness research results, including full texts as well as summary information, for consumers and clinicians.

Effectiveness studies are essential for informed clinical and consumer decision making. Multiple studies are necessary over time, and interpreting their complex and often conflicting results is a challenge.

Systematic reviews of clinical effectiveness studies address this need with rigorous scientific methodology. However, they are scattered across the biomedical literature and the Web sites of public health agencies around the world that produce many of them. The National Library of Medicine is uniquely positioned to gather these critical clinical resources in one place.

Users of PubMed Health can:

• Access the whole comprehensive collection of resources in a single search, including cancer information for consumers and clinicians from the National Cancer Institute
• See the results of a simultaneous search for reviews in PubMed
• Refer to consumer medical encyclopedia search results also delivered simultaneously
• Follow RSS feeds of featured reviews and “Behind Headlines,” which looks at the research behind news stories
• Learn to make sense of research results in its “Understand clinical effectiveness” and “Behind Headlines” sections
• Share resources via e-mail and social media with “Add this”

NLM invites you to visit PubMed Health, learn more about the Web site (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/about/) or follow the project on Twitter @PubMedHealth to help you keep up with the evidence on healthcare effectiveness.

Inspired by Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Chicago, Municipal Pier No. 2, as Navy Pier was originally known, was built beginning in 1914 and opened to the public in 1916. It was designed to serve as a huge freight terminal to encourage lake shipping and as a gathering place for the people of Chicago, with an auditorium and an open-air promenade where citizens could attend carnivals or even free lectures given by the City’s Health Department. Lake shipping never took off as the city had hoped, and in 1927, to honor those who served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Chicago changed the name of Municipal Pier No. 2 to Navy Pier.

In 1941, just months before America entered the war, the U.S. Navy transformed the Pier into a Naval Training School where about 60,000 men were trained. Pilots would fly from Glenview Naval Air Station and practice landing on air craft carriers by the Pier. Among them was future president, George H. W. Bush. In1946, the Navy turned control of the Pier over to the City of Chicago and the University of Illinois.

In 1944 Congress passed the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act,” better known as the G.I. Bill, which offered subsidies for home purchases, business startup costs, hospitalization, and education. To meet the demand for education in Illinois, a new branch campus of the University of Illinois opened on Navy Pier on  October 21, 1946. The Chicago Undergraduate Division (or CUD) was born.

A permanent campus was created at Harrison and Halsted, named the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC) and opened in February 1965. In 1982, the Medical Center and Circle Campus consolidated to form what we know today as the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

For more information about the history of the University of Illinois at Chicago, please see History of the University of Illinois at Chicago: http://www.uic.edu/depts/uichistory/index.html.

Photo Credit: Chuckman’s Collecction (Chicago Postcards) Volume 4: Navy Pier MID-1960s http://chuckmancollectionvolume4.blogspot.com/2011/11/postcard-chicago-navy-pier-as.html