For the past five years, Educause and the New Media Consortium have issued the Horizon Report which outlines six technologies likely to impact on research, teaching and creative expression in Education within the next few years. There is a wiki on the site where you can give input about whether they got it right in previous years.
This year, they have created an edition for Australian and New Zealand higher education.
You can read the entire report here, 2008 Horizon Report - Australian and New Zealand Edition.
The technologies identified as likely to have impact are:
Time to adoption - One Year or Less
- Virtual Worlds and Other Immersive Digital Environments (like Second Life)
- Cloud-based applications (like gmail, google docs, delicious)
Time to adoption - Two to Three Years
- Geolocation (devices automatically marking when/where it was collected to create hyperlocal applications)
- Alternative Input Devices (like Nintendo wii, iPhone, interactive whiteboards)
Time to adoption Four to Five Years
- Deep tagging (embedded metadata added to particular parts of an entire work)
- Next-generation mobile (iPhone on steroids)
