57_The Horizon Reports

The Horizon Reports

2009-2011 - Johnson, L. Levine, A., & Smith R. Austin texas: the New Media Consortium

Available at: http://www.nmc.org/horizon 

I highly recommend to anyone, but institutions in particular, consulting this great, easy to read resource that has been made available to the public since 2002, as the result of conversations of professionals across the globe, watching out for trends and challenges around technology and its implications on education. Each year since 2002, the report publishes a number of emerging technologies to watch out for and puts them in two key contexts: the short term adoption (up to 1.5 years) and the longer term adoption (up to 5 years).

Key trends that are truly important to consider (if all other rationales fail around adoption of technologies for education in general) are as follows (these come from the last three years worth of reports):

TRENDS

• We must reconsider the idea of collective intelligence, harvest it and protect it - it is changing the landscape of education as we speak!
• Abundance of resources are putting into question the role of educational institutions, instructors and students (role changes)
• Online gaming and role play games are still an untapped potential in the education field. Some of their benefits include: community building and collaboration, engagement and commitment.
• Visualization tools and intuitive interfaces are making it easier and easier to adopt and use all sorts of technologies.
• Mobile accessibility is here to stay!
• Cloud-based knowledge is also becoming more and more evident and offers economic and educational advantages at all levels.
• People want to study whenever and wherever.
• Collaboration in the workplace imposes a restructuring of ways in which education prepares students for collaborative work.

CHALLENGES

• Students are all different while educational resources (in the more formal and traditional sense) are not. This needs to be addressed.
• Computer literacy skills are increasingly needed while it remains hard to define them and attend to them through education.
• Institutions are asked to prepare learners for future roles (professional) that do not exist yet - the need to address and master procedural knowledge and skills is quite evident.
• Institutions lack appropriate ways to measure all skills of learners, in the digital era.
• The overwhelming amount of information remains highly untapped and still hard to manage and take advantage of for education purposes. 

In addition to defining trends and challenges on a yearly basis, the report proposes six emerging technologies each year, providing definitions, ideas and implications for education and literary research and professional blog links for further reading. Extremely good resource to keep in mind.