What’s on the Horizon? The potted version

The annual Horizon Report, published by the ‘New Media Consortium’ tries to predict which technologies are going to be important for higher education over the next 5 years. It’s actually a very good read.  The 2011 edition is just out now at: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Horizon-Report.pdf. Here’s a potted version:

Key trends, as in 2010, are:

• Abundance of resources and relationships made accessible via the internet is challenging the roles of educators and institutions.
• People expect to work wherever and whenever they want.
• Increasingly collaborative world of work is prompting reflection on the nature of students’ projects.
• Increasing use of cloud-based technologies and decentralised IT support.

Critical challenges:

• Digital media literacy is a key skill for all, but not well-defined nor universally taught. Pace of change of technology exacerbates problem.
• Difficulty of finding metrics for evaluating new forms of scholarly publishing.
• Economic pressures and new educational models are challenging traditional models of the university.
• Staff and students are struggling to keep up with pace of technological change , and with information overload.

The report describes the top six ‘technologies to watch’. Open content and visual data analysis have disappeared, and  new in this year are game-based learning and ‘Learning Analytics’ (which looks intriguing).  They have three ‘horizons’ and the report describes the technologies in detail – and points to case studies.

Technologies to watch in the near term (12 months)

• E-books, e-readers with note-taking facilities, some augmentation of functions to allow immersive experiences and social interaction.
• Mobiles – increasingly users’ first choice for internet access.

Technologies to watch in 2-3 years

• Augmented reality – layering info on top of representation of the real world: access to place-based information.
• Game-based learning, from simple individual/small group games to massively multiplayer online games – ability to foster collaboration, problem solving, procedural thinking.

Technologies to watch in 4-5 years

• Gesture-based computing
• Learning analytics, along with data gathering and analysis tools to study student engagement, performance and practice in order to inform curriculum & teaching design and enhance the student experience.