Eagerly awaited each year, the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report is out! I don't always agree, as I'm more of an affordance and value fanatic than the techie types that work very hard to come to consensus here. Still, each year I eagerly await, digitally rip open, and comb their effort to "identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education."
Work hard they do, and always come up with some provoking, leading-edge, out-there technologies that will (they claim) influence how we incorporate technology into higher education initiatives. Check it out and see how some of us will be teaching 1, 2-3, 4-5 years up the road.
With eBooks, mobile devices, augmented reality, gaming, gesture-based computing and even incorporating learner analytics into the stew, there's a lot to consider in this release.
Note on the analytics bandwagon that so few understand but lots are tossing about:
We should start a drinking game for each time we see 'analytics' used to mean something else. Like assessment. Or data analysis. Or accountability. But the Horizon Report has good intention and some reason to suggest accountability and results will be demanded of HE up ahead. Kudos to them, even if the mentioned emerging technology is not about learning and/or analytics and/or emerging technology at all. Not at all. For more on my rant on this topic see recent article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly re Nudge Analytics)
So, could all these hot technologies wind up in the HE teaching and learning stew within next few years? It could happen. Will any of them be the disruptive innovation that changes the "industry" for the better? Not likely. I think that's eLearning, or the market-driven/customer culture of the new proprietary schools, but that's another post.
Read the Horizon Report!
