Times they are a-changin': Horizon Retreat

No organization maps the changes in these crazy times more thoughtfully than the New Media Consortium, authors of the Annual Horizon Report on emerging technologies in education. I do believe Horizon Report 2012 is due to be released in the next few weeks, at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (look for me there!) but if you can't wait, take a look instead at what NMC was up to last week.

http://www.nmc.org/news/download-communique-horizon-project-retreat

One hundred thought leaders from across higher education, museums and industry gathered together to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Horizon Report by thinking deeply for three days (ouch!) about the future of higher education, and how technology might bring us closer to a vision that is:

• global, 
• open, 
• mobile, 
• based in the cloud, and 
• creates new kinds of literacy (digital, visual, collaborative) 

Here's the summary, with a nice, short pdf report on meta-trends ahead for higher education. They call the summary report a communique, with accent aigu and all the global trimmings. (It made me feel so fancy to download it. Not just a white paper, but a Francais white paper!)

It has much that is "Sky is blue, babies need milk" for those of us who have been saying same for years, but it's well said and will hopefully be the foundation for a number of rich conversations at ELI in a few weeks.

If you're there, come to my talk with McGee and Morgan on the "Upside-Down Learning Model." I promise to talk about the communique in my best Parisien accent.