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)

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

Visit: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/mlawebcast/ for detailed information on how to become a sponsored site.

The GMR will cover the registration costs for up to two (2) sites per state in the region for this webcast. Because of the limited number of sites we can sponsor, we encourage you to work with your state and local librarian groups to identify centralized locations. Sites will be selected based on geographical location, accessibility, and potential number of attendees.

The deadline to email/fax your registration and email additional information to the GMR is NOON, Wednesday, October 26, 2011.

Contact Holly Burt at the GMR, if you have any questions and for more information on this webcast, visit:
http://www.mlanet.org/education/distance_ed/escience/escience_webinar.html

Enter IFTTT .  It stands for If This Then That.  And, it’s one of the coolest tools I have seen recently.  I like what the creator of this tool, Linden Tibbets, wrote on the blog about it: “I realized that the key to unlocking the creative potential of our existing digital tools might be to build a service that simplifies and consolidates the way those tools can be connected.”  There is also a great article in the Chronicle which goes into detail about ifttt: How To Use IFTTT (And Why You Might Want To) by George Williams.

So how does it work? Tasks > Trigger > Actions. Triggers and actions come from channels.  Channels mean applications we use all the time like Twitter, Instagram, the Weather Channel (wouldn’t it be awesome if it was going to rain and you could get a text message about it?) Here’s a list of the currently available channels.

First thing, you create a task. Then create a trigger for this task – example: starring items in Google Reader.  What is the action? When I star this item, have it post to my Twitter account.  Done! Now for the graphics

Create the action.

Star the item in Google Reader.

Voila! It posts to Twitter.

This is just one example.  Check it out for yourself!

• Mary Blackwelder, Medical College of Wisconsin Todd Wehr Library, Milwaukee, WI
• Jane Blumenthal, University of Michigan Taubman Medical Library,Ann Arbor, MI
• Pam Bradigan, Ohio State University Prior Health Sciences Library, Columbus, OH
• Arlis Dittmer, Blessing Health System, Blessing Health Professions Library, Quincy, IL
• Liz Fine (MN), University of Minnesota Health Sciences Libraries, Minneapolis, MN
• Martha Hardy, Metropolitan State University Library Services, St. Paul, MN
• Heather Holmes, Summa Health System Medical Library, Akron, OH
• Matt Hoy (WI), Mayo Clinic Health System Eau Claire Library and AV Services, Eau Claire, WI
• Rhona S. Kelley (IL), Southern Illinois University School of Medicine Library, Springfield, IL
• Joyce Lindstrom (IA), Des Moines University Medical Library, Des Moines, IA
• Mike McGraw (OH), Case Western Reserve University Cleveland Health Sciences Library, Cleveland, OH
• Cody McSellers-McCray, Westside Health Authority, Chicago, IL
• Barbara Platts (MI), Munson Healthcare Library Services, Traverse City, MI
• Elizabeth Rowan (KY), Shriners Hospital for Children Library/Learning Resource Center, Lexington, KY
• Travis Schultz (ND), Medcenter One Health Library, Bismarck, ND
• James Shedlock, Northwestern University Galter Health Sciences Library, Chicago, IL
• Elaine Skopelja (IN), Indiana University School of Medicine Library, Indianapolis, IN
• Corey B. Smith PhD, Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board, Northern Plains Tribal Epidemiology Center, Rapid City, SD
• Janet Stith,University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center Library, Lexington, KY
• Molly Youngkin (SD), Wegner Health Science Information Center, Sioux Falls, SD