The annual Horizon reports track emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on teaching and learning in the future. The predictions of earlier reports are available elsewhere on this blog: 2009 2008 2007 and if you want to go further back see the Horizon website.
A short preview of the 2010 report (PDF) is already available. The technologies it highlights (time frames for becoming mainstream to be taken with a pinch of salt perhaps) are:
- Mobile Computing & Open Content (mainstream in the next year)
- Electronic Books & Simple Augmented Reality (2-3 years)
- Gesture-Based Computing & Visual Data Analysis (4-5 years)
If you want to know more about any of these then the preview is short, worth a look and has links to examples. The other aspect of the Reports are the key trends and challenges that it highlights:
Trends
- The abundance of resources and relationships induced by open resources and social networks is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching and credentialing.
- More and more, people expect to be able to work, learn, study, and connect with their social networks wherever and whenever they want to.
- Technologies are becoming more decentralized.
- Students are increasingly seen as collaborators, and there is more cross-campus collaboration.
Challenges
- 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 lag behind or fail to appear.
- Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key 21st century skill, but there is a widening training gap for faculty and teachers.
- Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate.
No time for commentary today, so I’ll return to this when the full report is published in the new year.
