Paula’s E-Musings

It’s been a busy couple of months but I’ve finally had a chance to read this year’s Horizon Report, jointly produced by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium. The annual Horizon Report identifies and describes emerging technologies that are certain to have a major impact on higher education.

The Report provides descriptions and in-depth discussions of “key emerging technologies” that this year include grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, and social operating systems.

Each year the Horizon Report identifies critical challenges that we will be facing in the next five years. This year’s report includes: significant shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression and learning which have created a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy; the growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices; the renewed emphasis on collaborative learning which is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interactive and assessment; and the need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological literacy, as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s web-enabled tools.

The significant trends discussed in this year’s Report are, in order of perceived priority:

• The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking;
• the evolving way we work, collaborate and communicate as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases;
• the increasing access to and portability of content as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced;
• the widening gap between students’ and faculty’s perception of technology.

In its fifth year of publication, this year’s Report identifies metatrends, or conceptual threads, that have been recurring themes each year. Three notable megatrends are collective sharing and generation of knowledge; connecting people through the network; and moving the computer into three dimensions. You can learn more about these and other metatrends and participate in an online discussion at the Horizon Project Wiki site.

The Report has full descriptions and examples of each of these technologies, challenges, and trends, and their impact on the educational environment. At SUNY Cortland we use The Horizon Report to frame discussions among technologists, librarians, and faculty and to provide a context for our strategic planning. I encourage everyone to read the Report in its entirety.