Horizon Report 2008

December 15th, 2008 by Paula in 21C, Elearning, Emerging Technology, Uncategorized

On 1st December 2008 the New Media Consortium (NMC) released the first in a new series of regional and sector-based Horizon Reports with the NMC Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition.The new series is a product of the Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education around the globe. This volume is the first in a new series of regional reports, and examines emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand in particular. The core of the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education in Australia and New Zealand within three adoption horizons over the next five years. A portion of the work of the Advisory Board is devoted to reviewing key trends and critical challenges in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity. The four Key Trends and Critical Challenges below were determined to be those most likely to have a significant impact in education in Australia and New Zealand in the next five years:

Key Trends:

Worldwide production of over 1 billion mobile phones per year is driving both innovation and adoption of ever more capable portable devices. A capacity to access the network, but they are not owned by the institution, a movement away from desktop computers and labs is shifting the locus of control over access to resources from central authorities to users, with a resulting shift in the ways learning spaces are conceptualised and designed.
There is an increasingly important set of influences from the workplace that are impacting how learning is designed and conducted. This is pushing a greater awareness of the value of hands-on, purpose-driven, authentic, and other active learning approaches with the increased emphasis of the workplace on skills which will fuel a greater focus on certifications, portfolios, and other ways that life experiences can be documented.
The increasing connectedness of people around the globe has and continues to dramatically reduce the costs of collaboration. A decline in these costs is paralleled by tremendous growth in the sorts of free and/or very-low-cost tools available to bring people together in real time, to share assets and resources, and to communicate.
As both computers and the network increase in connectedness and capability, the set of technologies available to educators grows ever richer. The ubiquity of these tools has lowered the cost of entry to use them, and is in turn opening up a range of new opportunities for e-learning and other forms of technology-mediated learning.

Critical Challenges:

Protectionism limits access to materials, ideas, and collaborative opportunities. Security concerns too often go too far. Both policies and firewalls are severely limiting access to — and hampering the utility of — the Internet, the use of digital materials, and many benefits of social networking.
Many teachers do not have the skills to make effective use of emerging technologies, much less teach their students to do so. The technical skills of teachers are too often out of step with those of their students. Related issues are the capabilities of the staff supporting teachers, which suffer from the same problem, limiting the options available for training.
Assessment continues to be a significant barrier to adopting new tools and approaches. In a sort of chicken-and-egg syndrome, there is a persistent need to have solid data on the efficacy of new tools and approaches that often limits the experimentation required to gain those data in the first place.
Poor quality broadband limits options at school and at home. Public policy and reliance on telecom companies for infrastructure and broadband services has failed to ensure sufficient resources to support the level of quality broadband penetration needed to remain competitive. Metering adds to this by discouraging network use: the more useful the network is, the more it is used, and the more expensive it becomes — a cyclical process that ultimately discourages greater utility of the network because it adds unmanageable costs.

Body of the 2008 Horizon Report Each featured technology includes specific examples, but as the horizon moves further out in time these become more isolated. Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses in Australia and New Zealand within the next five years.

Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments. The use of virtual worlds and other sorts of immersive digital environments in education has skyrocketed in the last few years. Hundreds of colleges and universities worldwide are using these spaces for all manner of projects. A continuing stream of new developments in the platforms and their underlying technologies promise to keep this an exciting, innovative space for some time to come.
Cloud-Based Applications. Most of us use cloud-based applications daily, sometimes without being aware of it. Cloud computing promises nearly infinite storage space, vastly increased processing capability, and distributed services that are beginning to change the way we think about applications and data management.
Geolocation. Attaching information about physical location to both our media and ourselves is becoming ever easier to do, and increasingly is being done for us transparently by the devices we use. New and very useful applications for locative information are emerging in the form of data visualization tools, personalized place-based services, and procedures for searching and finding.
Alternative Input Devices. We are witnessing the first major innovations in interaction design to take hold since the invention of the mouse — and they will change the way we work with computers. Accelerometers built into handheld controllers and mobiles allow the devices to react to motion and to the way they are being held. Multi-touch interfaces accept intuitive, gesture-based commands and open up possibilities for simultaneous, collaborative work.
Deep Tagging. As the amount of rich media available to us increases, so does its potential utility for learning and research. But rich media is difficult to work with; it is problematic to search and find content embedded in long audio or video recordings or large multimedia pieces. Deep tagging, a technology still in development, promises to ameliorate that issue by enabling parts of larger media to be tagged and annotated, with obvious implications for improved search and retrieval.
Next-Generation Mobile. With more than 1.2 billion new phones produced each year, the mobile phone markets are bubbling with innovation. Mobiles now routinely have the ability to access cellular, wifi, and even GPS networks; new touch-screen interfaces are redefining how we use the devices; mobiles are beginning to rival laptop computers in the range of capabilities they possess. Every student carries one, and in the coming years, mobiles will become a main source of educational and campus-based activities.