Critical challenges in the Horizon Reports

May 11th, 2009

The Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand 2008 (released December 2008)

  • Protectionism limits access to materials, ideas and collaborative opportunities
  • Many teachers do not have the skills to make effective use of emerging technologies, much less teach their students to do so
  • Assessment contines to be a significant barrier to adopting new tools and approaches
  • Poor quality broadband limits options at school and at home

The Horizon Report 2009 (January 2009)

  • There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
  • Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not
  • Significant shirts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy
  • We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning
  • Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content and media to mobile devices

The Horizon Report K-12 2009 (March 2009)

  • There is a growing need for formal instuction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy and technoligical literacy
  • Students are different, but educational practice and the material that supports it is changing only slowly
  • Learning that incorporates real life experiences is not occurring enough and is undervalued when it does take place
  • There is a growing recognition that new technologies must be adopted and used as an everyday part of classroom activities, but effecting this change is difficult
  • A key challenge is the fundemental structure of the K-12 education establishment

Key Trends in the Horizon Reports

May 11th, 2009

The Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand 2008 (released December 2008)

  • Worldwide production of over 1 billion mobile phones per year is driving both innovation and adoption of ever more capable portable devices
  • There is an increasingly important set of influences from the workplace that are impacting how learning is designed and conducted
  • The increasing connectedness of people around the globe has and continues to dramatically reduce the costs of collaboration
  • As both connectors and the network increase in connectedness and capability, the set of technologies available to educators grows ever richer

The Horizon Report 2009 (January 2009)

  • Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate and communicate
  • The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision
  • Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce
  • Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
  • As more than one billion phones are produced each year. mobile phones are benefitting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition

The Horizon Report K-12 2009 (March 2009)

  • Technology continues to profoundly affect the way we work, collaborate and communicate
  • Technology is increasingly a means for empowering students, a method for communication and socializing, and a ubiquitous, transparent part of their lives
  • The web is an increasingly personal experience
  • The way we think of learning environments is changing
  • The perceived value of innovation and creativity is increasing

Technologies to watch according to the Horizon Reports

May 11th, 2009

The Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand 2008 (released December 2008)

  • Time to adoption: One year and less:
    • Virtual Worlds and Other Immersive Digital Environments (eg. Second Life)
    • Cloud-based applications (eg. Google Docs)
  • Time to adoption: Two to Three years:
    • Geolocation (eg. Flickr map)
    • Alternative Input Devices (eg. wii controller)
  • Time to adoption: Four to Five years:
    • Deep Tagging (eg. Viddler, notes on Flickr photos)
    • Next-Generation Mobiles (eg. iPhone, Android)

The Horizon Report 2009 (January 2009)

  • Time to adoption: One year and less:
    • Mobiles
    • Cloud Computing
  • Time to adoption: Two to Three years:
    • Geo-everything
    • The personal web (eg. Friendfeed)
  • Time to adoption: Four to Five years:
    • Semantic-aware applications (eg. TripIt)
    • Smart Objects (eg. Poken)

The Horizon Report K-12 2009 (March 2009)

  • Time to adoption: One year and less:
    • Collaborative environments (eg. Ning)
    • Online communication tools (eg. Ustream, Skype)
  • Time to adoption: Two to Three years:
    • Mobiles
    • Cloud Computing
  • Time to adoption: Four to Five years:
    • Smart Objects
    • The Personal Web

What’s on the Horizon? Work Matters session 20 May 2009

May 1st, 2009

This session is part of the Work Matters series at Murdoch University. It will happen on Wednesday 20 May 2009, 12:30 - 2pm in the Flexible Teaching and Learning Room in the Library on Level 3, North Wing.

Murdoch staff and students can enrol here.

The Horizon reports are a joint project of the New Media Consortium and Educause. The project involves thirty to forty educators worldwide, across all sectors, examining existing and emerging technologies to identify those that within the next five years are :

likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.

They examine reports, conference proceedings, press clippings, and other types of research to identify possible technologies. Each year, over 80 technologies are identified, ranked by the panel and then narrowed down to twelve that are extensively researched. Six out of these then emerge as the major trends to watch and are outlined in the report.

In this session we discuss:

The wiki where anyone interested can discuss the Horizon Reports is at Horizon Project Wiki. Links discussed in the Horizon Report can be found at delicious (social bookmarking site), searching on the tag hz09 or hzk09 or hzau08

At the start of the session - before any of the reports have been discussed - we are asking participants to fill in a poll about which technologies they think will be most influential for Murdoch University. This is to get them thinking about what they understand about each technology.