The Horizon 2010 report on emerging technologies for education

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium

The New Media Consortium’s annual report on emerging technologies is out. It follows previous formats in identifying six technologies over three time periods. This year the authors picked the following:

One year or less

• mobile computing
• open content

Two to three years

• electronic books
• simple augmented reality

Four to five years

• gesture-based computing
• visual data analysis

Perhaps more importantly, they identified four key trends that will drive technology adoption over  the five years:

• redefinition of educators’ roles in sense-making, coaching and credentialling
• people expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to
• the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized
• the work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.

Lastly, they identified four critical challenges:

• the role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives — is changing
• new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind
• digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession
• institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate

The first critical challenge is for me the most important. Quoting a 2007 report of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the New Media Horizon report states:

It is incumbent upon the academy to adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today’s learners; to emphasize critical inquiry and mental flexibility, and provide students with necessary tools for those tasks; to connect learners to broad social issues through civic engagement; and to encourage them to apply their learning to solve large-scale complex problems.

If you have to give priority to your reading, this opublication should be top of your list.