Emerging technologies in YOUR classroom

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education.

The report tracks the emerging technologies and their impact over a 5 year span. So, expect more of the following in your classrooms in the next ...

year:

• Grassroot Videos - Custom branding has allowed institutions to even have their own special presence within these networks, and will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are.
• Collaboration Web - The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation. Colleagues simply open their web browsers and they are able to edit group documents, hold online meetings, swap information and data, and collaborate in any number of ways without ever leaving their desks

2-3 years:

• Mobile Broadband -New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content—content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network.
• Digital Mashups - custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are “mashed up” into a single tool— offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets that will transform the way we understand and represent information.
  These are evident in organizations at the leading edge of technology adoption, and are beginning to appear at many institutions.

4-5 years:

• Collective Intelligence - In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained.
• Social Operating Systems - The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content. This simple conceptual shift promises profound implications for the academy, and for the ways in which we think about knowledge and learning.

To paraphrase the movies ... Horizon Reports has seen the future, and the future is now.