Technologies on the Horizon
The Horizon Project is the product of a series of ongoing conversations and dialogues of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations from more than two dozen countries. The result is the publication of a report focused on the emerging technologies relevant to higher education based on published and unpublished research, articles, papers, scholarly blogs, and websites. The Horizon Report specifically includes a list of the key technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and learning-focused organizations are thinking about. http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/
2010 Horizon Report
Executive Summary
The annual work of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.
In each edition of the Horizon Report, six emerging technologies or practices are described that are likely to enter mainstream use on campuses within three adoption horizons spread over the next one to five years. Each report also presents critical trends and challenges that will affect teaching and learning over the same time frame.
Key Trends
The technologies featured in each edition of the Horizon Report are embedded within a contemporary context that reflects the realities of the time, both in the sphere of academia and in the world at large.
- The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
- People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
- The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
- The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more crosscampus collaboration between departments.
Critical Challenges
Along with current trends, the Advisory Board notes critical challenges that face learning organizations, especially those that are likely to continue to affect education over the five-year time period covered by this report.
- The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives — is changing.
- New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
- Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
- Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate.
Read the full report at: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report.pdf which includes a comprehensive list of technologies to watch in the near and distant future.
Tags: learning and entertainment technologies, leef, technology
