Horizon Report 2008 – Summary

The following is summarised from The Horizon Report 2008 Edition.

Executive Summary

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organisations.

The main sections of the report describe six emerging technologies or practices that will likely enter mainstream use in learning-focused organizations within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years.

Key Emerging Technologies

The first adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of entry within the next year; the second, within two to three years; and the third, within four to five years.

The following summary focus only on the two technologies with a predicted adoption horizon of one year or less. For details on the other technologies, please refer to the full Horizon Report.

Taken as a set, the research indicates that all six of these technologies will significantly impact the choices of learning-focused organisations within the next five years:

Grassroots Video
Collaboration Webs
Mobile Broadband
Data Mashups
Collective Intelligence
Social Operating Systems

Significant Trends

The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking, combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurisation, is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship.

The proliferation of tools that enable co-creation, mashups, remixes, and instant self-publication is remaking the traditional model of academic publication and has growing implications for tenure and merit systems. Web 2.0 and social networking tools are increasingly being adopted for educational use.

The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases.

With the increasing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world—online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, Skype, and more—it is increasingly common to see courses that include international students who meet online or incorporate connections between classrooms in different areas of the world.

The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.

Students and academic staff continue to view and experience technology very differently. Academic staff are often either unaware of tools like Google Docs and Swivel, or have difficulty integrating them into educational processes.

Grassroots Video

Overview

Tools for assembling and editing clips are free or extremely low cost and make it easy for amateurs to get good results without investing in expensive equipment, software, or training.

Video content is as easy to post to the Internet as is text, and in some cases, even easier.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Rather than investing in expensive infrastructure, universities are beginning to turn to services like YouTube and iTunes U to host their video content for them. As a result, students—whether on campus or across the globe—have access to an unprecedented and growing range of educational video content from small segments on specific topics to full lectures, all available online.

Hosting services like YouTube and iTunes U even provide institutional “channels” where content can be collected and branded.

Academic staff have more options than ever before to incorporate video into their curricula. Video capture, in the hands of an entire class, can be a very efficient data collection strategy for field work, etc.

Examples from other institutions

www.youtube.com/ucberkeley; www.youtube.com/umbc; www.youtube.com/unsw
Courses from UC Berkeley are available on its own specially branded YouTube channel, an approach also used by the University of New South Wales.

UMBCtube, a custom YouTube channel for the University of Maryland Baltimore County, allows the campus to blend community generated content with institutional video offerings. UMBCtube is designed to complement UMBC’s main course media portal on iTunes U.

Collaboration Webs

Overview

It has become common for people who are not physically located near each other to collaborate on projects.

Web-based tools and collaborative workspaces that support a range of activities from productivity-type tasks to fully fledged virtual conferences have been available for some time the difference being these tools are now quite inexpensive and often free. These tools require no special installation or setup, are designed to be used within a web browser, produce materials that can be easily shared, and offer a convenience and flexibility that can make virtual collaborations both simple and highly productive.

Another area of development has been in online collaborative workspaces that serve as a hub where a group of people can easily work, share resources, capture ideas, and even socialize.

Taken together, the tools in the related links section are fostering collaboration webs that span almost every discipline.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

These tools make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more.

In class situations, academic staff can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time.

Examples from other institutions

A course in Digital Entrepreneurship at Rochester Institute of Technology created a Ning network on the topic, bringing undergrads enrolled in the course into contact with over a hundred graduate students, venture capitalists, faculty, practitioners, and business owners around the world. To visit the community page, use the login “digentguest@gmail.com” and the password “ritdigent”

Faculty of Economics and Business

Horizon Report 2008 – Summary

Executive Summary

Key Emerging Technologies

Significant Trends

The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking, combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurisation, 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.

The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.

Grassroots Video

Overview

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Related links

Examples from other institutions

Collaboration Webs

Overview

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Related links

Examples from other institutions