The Horizon Report 2008

The New Media Consortiumand the Educause Learning Initiative collaborated to produce the 2008 Horizon Report. The report "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations."
This report describes 6 emerging technologies or practices that are likely to become mainstream in such organizations over the next 1 to 5 years. For each technology/practice there is an overview, a discussion on its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression, examples, and links to further reading. The last includes a link to resources tagged on del.icio.us by the Horizon Advisory Board for the technology/practice, and readers are invited to add their own, appropriately tagged links. Also described are a set of challenges and trends that will probably influence us within the above time frame. The precise research methodology used to compile the report is described. So, on to the technologies ...

Time to adoption horizon: 1 year or less
1. Grassroots video, easily produced, edited and made available on the Web by anyone with the right hardware, software, and ideas.
2. Collaboration webs, using free or inexpensive web-based tools to set up collaborative workspaces, allow users to easily work, share resources and capture ideas.
Time to adoption horizon: 2 to 3 years
3. Mobile broadband, perhaps best illustrated by the statement that "mobiles are increasingly about networking on the go", with an ever-expanding variety of content.
4. Data mashups, web applications that combine data from a number of sources
Time to adoption horizon: 4 to 5 years
5. Collective intelligence can be explicit (such as Wikipedia) or tacit, resulting "from the data generated by the activities of many people over time", eg Google's PageRank system.
6. Social operating systems, of which Facebook and MySpace are precursors. Such systems recognise webs of links, both actual and potential between people.

The critical challenges identified by the Horizon Advisory Board members include:
- Significant shifts in scholarship, research, and creative expression leading to a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy;
- Higher education facing a growing expectatin to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices;
- The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning that is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment; and
- The academy being faced with a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual and technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today's tools.
The significant trends identified include:
- The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking, combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship;
- The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases;
- Access to and portability of content is increasing as smaller, more powerful devices are produced; and
- The gap between students' perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.

Also in the Report is a reflection on the first five years of the Horizon Report. The topics identified each year have proved without exception to be "worthy of our attention". Three metatrends are becoming clear:
- The collective sharing and generation of knowledge;
- Connecting people throug the network; and
- Moving the computer into three dimensions.

The Report concludes by listing the 36 members of the 2008 Horizon Project Advisory Board. They come from higher education institutions around the world (including two from Australia), representatives of the New Media Consortium and Educause, and people from a number of private and public sector organisations.

The 2008 Horizon Report is well worth reading.

Post-script
The Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition for 2008 was published subsequently. This report follows the same format as The Horizon Report 2008. It's "the first in a new series of regional reports and examines emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand in particular."

Key trends include production of mobile phones "driving innovation and adoption of ever more capable portable devices", "an increasingly important set of influences from the workplace that are impacting how learning is designed and conducted", the increasing connectedness of people is continuing to reduce collaboration costs, and the set of technologies available to educators increases as both computers and the network increase in connectedness and capability.

Critical challenges include protectionism limiting "access to materials, ideas and collaborative opportunities", teachers lacking skills needed to make use of emerging technologies and teach their students how to do so, need for assessment before adoption, and poor quality broadband limiting options.

Technologies to watch include:
A. Time to adoption horizon one year or less:
1. virtual worlds and other immersive digital environments;
2. cloud-based applications;
B. Time to adoption horizon two to three years:
3. geolocation;
4. alternative input devices;
C. Time to adoption horizon four to five years:
5. deep tagging; and
6. next-generation mobile.

As with the original 2008 report, or each technology there is an overview, a discussion on its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression, examples, and links to further reading. The last includes a del.icio.us-tagged resources and readers may add to these.

Finally, the methodology is described and the members of the ANZ advisory board are listed.

Again, this report is well worth reading.