Monday, January 25, 2010

Technologies to Watch in Higher Education: 7 Years' Worth of Predictions

The New Media Consortium and Educause recently published their annual Horizon Report, which "describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years" (Johnson, Levine, Smith & Stone, 2010).

In response, I compiled the lists of technologies to watch from all seven reports:


































































Year

Time to Adoption: 1 Year or Less

Time to Adoption: 2 to 3 Years

Time to Adoption: 4 to 5 Years

2004

Learning objects
Scalable vector graphics (SVG)

Rapid prototyping
Multimodal interfaces

Context-aware computing
Knowledge webs

2005

Extended Learning
Ubiquitous wireless

Intelligent searching

Educational gaming

Social Networks & Knowledge Webs
Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality

2006

Social computing
Personal broadcasting

The phones in their pockets
Educational gaming

Social networks and knowledge webs
Context-aware computing/augmented reality

2007

User-created content
Social networking

Mobile phones
Virtual worlds

The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication
Massively multiplayer educational gaming

2008

Grassroots video
Collaboration web

Mobile broadband
Data mashups

Collective intelligence
Social operating systems

2009

Mobiles
Cloud computing

Geo-everything (geo-tagging of data)
Personal web

Semantic-aware objects
Smart objects

2010

Mobile computing
Open content

Electronic books
Simple augmented reality

Gesture-based computing
Visual data analysis



Food for thought: Which technologies did they call correctly? Which ones not?

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

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