Yesterday I wrote about the release of the 2009 Horizon Report in What’s On the Horizon? In the past I have looked at the 2008 Horizon report (Emerging Technologies or practices) and the 2008 Australian New Zealand edition released at the end of last year. I’ve referred to them in a variety of other posts.
It did occur to me that these reports are not a lot of use to us if the predictions are not fulfilled. Do they ever say “we were wrong”?
Anyway, be that as it may, I thought it might be worth comparing the predictions given in those three reports so below is rough table:
| 2008 Horizon report (US) | 2008 Australasian Horizon report | 2009 Horizon Report |
| One Year or Less | ||
| * Grassroots video * Collaboration Webs |
* Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments * Cloud Based Applications |
* Mobiles devices * Cloud computing |
| 2-3 years | ||
| * Mobile Broadband * Data Mashups |
* Geolocation * Alternative Input Devices |
* Geo-everything (i.e., geo-tagging) * The personal web |
| 4-5 years | ||
| * Collective Intelligence* Social Operating Systems | * Deep Tagging * Next-generation Mobile |
* Semantic-aware applications * Smart objects |
I’m not sure what I think of the comparisons yet, although the fact that Cloud Computing wasn’t on the 2008 Horizon Report at all is interesting - unless you see it as “collaboration webs”.
The commonality of the “mobile” concept strikes.
The prediction of grass-roots video seems to have come “true” with the expansion of facilities like YouTube. We’ve even been making short videos here at Education.au. We still don’t have ednaTV running but I guess it will come one day.
So, how useful do you think these predictions are? Do they serve any purpose? Have we achieved any of them? Over to you.
4 Comments
Hi Kerrie,
The Horizon Report is not about “predicting” or being right, but forecasting, and generating activities/research around these topics. The “being right” is not always quantifiable, as what is forecasted is when these technologies become “mainstream” in educational organizations, in the realm of the Innovation theory of Rodgers (about a 20% adoption rate, or “crossing the chasm:” from early adopters to mainstream use).
I am not sure if you are looking for an ordely march of topics from far to near horizon as “being right” and people tend to get caught up when something like “Virtual Worlds” as mid horizon in 2007 and not listed in the 6 for 2008- it has not left the horizon and is still on a now 1 1-2 year trajectory; it is just that our advisory board suggested other ideas as being more prominent.
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
The Horizon Project is not intended to be self serving in being “right” it is what makes sense at the time. Things change!
Thanks for the comment Alan. I think there is a fine difference between forecasting and predicting, but whatever, they give us things to look out for.
Thanks for the link to Where Are they Now. That makes interesting reading and I guess that is part of what I was getting at.
The 2004-2008 Metatrends document makes interesting reading too.
Kerrie, to this analysis I’d add that the project actually looks at between 80-100 technologies every year, as well as a wide range of challenges and relevant trends — for serious educational technologists, this part of the work is likely to be far more interesting, as is the annual “Short List”, which are the semifinalist technologies, challenges, and trends.
All this work is open and on the project wiki http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki.
Our own analysis, which can be found there, has shown that the topics in the Report have indeed been consistently worthy of note. Many have morphed and converged, and evolved over time, as the meta trends analysis has shown, but with arguably no exceptions over six years of work, as Alan noted, the topics have indeed been important for their time — and some hugely so.
Our goal is absolutely not to generate a stock picker’s list, but rather to identify interesting developments that are likely to impact the practice of teaching, learning, research, or creative expression over the 5 years considered by the project.
A good example is SVG — scalable vector graphics — an open source technology we described in 2004 which was displaced by Flash. while SVG fell by the wayside as a stand alone technology, Flash incorporates the functionality of SVG (along with much more), and is very much in use all over the net. The new abilities that SVG conveyed were important then, and still are.
People who are “in the biz” of educational technology sometimes sniff at the choices, but it is also important to remember who this particular publication is for — campus policy makes and leaders, and faculty who simply do not have the time to watch all the things we educational technologists do.
If the Report simply generates conversations on campuses about where all this is heading that would not have happened otherwise, we have accomplished much.
Lastly, there are a great many pieces to the project beyond the Report itself — the meta trends analysis, the longer lists of technologies discussed as the report is produced each year, the short list, the “Where are they now” discussions, the extensive links to current articles and news reports on the wiki, the annual work to develop a related research agenda, the demo projects that stem from the work — and not to be forgotten, the extensive and broad experience of the Advisory Board, whose consensus opinion is the basis for the report.
That group is refreshed every year with new perspectives, and every year, at least 1/3 of the members are chosen form outside North America. To date, more than 250 people from more than 20 countries have served on the Advisory Board.
We’d love to include you — let me know if that is of interest!
I like forecasting.. its like the weather.
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[…] 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. […]
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