Already I’m feeling a little weary. It’s only January and it seems that already there’s more technology on the horizon that may need to be integrated into teaching and learning.
The Horizon 2009 report, produced by the New Media Consortium and Educause, has been released and its focus is on emerging technologies and higher education.
Within the next year they are of the view that mobiles and cloud computing are the next big things. Given the rate of organisations to change, and pedagogies and assessment modes to change, this seems to me to be a bit on the fast side.
In the next two to three years the technologies to watch are ‘Geo-everything’ and the Personal web.
In the next three to five years we’re looking at semantic aware applications and smart objects.
If we add these to the technologies from last three Horizon reports we’ve got a lot of technologies to look out for:
- social computing
- personal broadcasting
- The phones in their pockets
- educational gaming
- augmented reality and enhanced visualisation
- context aware environments and devices
- user created content
- social networking
- mobile phones
- virtual worlds
- new scholarship and emerging forms of publication
- massively multiplayer educational gaming
- grassroots video
- collaboration webs
- mobile broadband
- data mashups
- collective intelligence
- social operating systems
How these will all fit together and make sense in a teaching and learning context, assuming they are taken up, is the challenge. How we learn how to teaching using them, assess them and are clear about what it is our students need to learn and have to learn are also questions.
I see some repetition in the nominations over time which suggests to me that maybe technology is not changing as fast as it sometimes seems. Themes that are emerging and perhaps it’s more useful to focus on them rather than this year’s nominations in isolation. The themes I can see here include mobile computing (of various kinds), immersive/interactive online environments, people creating content, and people networking.
Under these headings is a vast array of possible tools, technologies and applications.
It would be great to have an Horizon School where, as technologies and tools are identified, they are showcased, proofed, trialled, tested, have pedagogies and assessment processes developed around them for all levels and for different purposes. And all of this would be free, and online and you could download it and use it - rather than each of us trying to make sense of it all on our own.
4 Comments
You’ve begun to answer some of the questions I was starting to pose today Jen when I tried to table what the last 3 reports related to the Horizon have said.
http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2009/01/23/how-good-have-the-predictions-been/
I think your idea of a Horizon School (a virtual one?) is a good one.
For me, answering the question of “did it come to pass?” is also important. What predictions did we make, prepare for, and put time and resources into that were an illusion? The Millenium Bug comes to mind.
Kerrie, absolutely agree. If systems, organisations, jurisdictions and governments are making investments in these technologies, there also needs to be some evaluation of the correctness of the predictions. It would be good to get a sense of how widely the technologies are implemented and what learning impacts they have had - that is, whether the $ investments have provided a return for students.
Jen
Alan Levine has pointed me to
If you are looking for the longer term track record, please see the broader analysis of the 2004-2008 Metatrends
http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Metatrends
plus each year our board *does* look back at previous reports to reflect on them:
http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Where_Are_They_Now_2004
2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[…] Muchas personas se han enlazado al informe sobre el horizonte 2009 (2009 Horizon Report), una publicación anual que documenta las tendencias en tecnología educativa (Helge Scherlund,Jeffrey R. Young, Gerry White, Derek Wenmoth, Doug Dickinson, Will Richardson, Jen Millea, Bryan Alexander, Mark van ‘t Hooft). Mi enlace favorito, sin embargo, es el de Kerrie Smith, que mira a las predicciones pasadas para ver cómo resultaron. ¿Cuán buenas has sido las predicciones? Smith escribe: “El hecho de que la computación distribuida o compartida (Cloud Computing) no estaba en las predicciones de 2008 (2008 Horizon Report) es interesante.” Me gustaría ver estos análisis de predicciones-pasadas hechos unos años más atrás. New Media Consortium (NMC, Consorcio de nuevos medios) y EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI, iniciativa de aprendizaje de causa educativa). [Liga] [etiquetas: pronósticos, redes] […]
[…] The Horizon report for 2009 released this month presents technologies to look out for in the next five years. Jen Millea and Kerrie Smith have written interesting posts raising questions about which of these new technologies might become essential elements in the classroom. In forthcoming posts I plan to explore the four themes of mobile computing, immersive/interactive online environments, user created content and people networking. Briefly, I interpret mobile computing to include the use of smaller computing devices such as net books and mobile phones in a wireless environment. We are currently in the process of trialling the small form factor computers with the view of perhaps utilising them as a cheap and simple option for students before/after the student owned tablet programme which operates in years 7-9. I am not aware of any teachers currently exploring the use of mobile phones as learning tools but there is some literature around which suggests it may happen. Online gaming and virtual worlds might be examples of the immersive/interactive online environments. This is an area which I have little to no experience of but need to find out more as for our students, games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft are certainly popular. User created content and social networking are two obvious areas of technology development which will (or are already) impact on the way we teach our students. The use of wikis, blogs, slidesharing and cloud computing tools as well as discussion forums, community tagging and video sharing are already prevalent in many classrooms. Some examples can be found in this portfolio site I put together for my studies last year. […]
Post a Comment