The Horizon Report 2010

This is an excerpt' for the full report, click here.

Key Trends

The technologies featured in each edition of the Horizon Report are embedded within a contemporary context that reflects the realities of the time, both in the sphere of academia and in the world at large. To assure this perspective, each Advisory Board researches, identifies, and ranks key trends that are currently affecting the practice of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry, and uses these as a lens for its later work. These trends are surfaced through an extensive review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research. Once identified, the list of trends is ranked according to how significant an impact they are likely to have on education in the next five years.

The following four trends have been identified as key drivers of technology adoptions for the period 2010 through 2015; they are listed here in the order they were ranked by the Advisory Board.

** The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sensemaking and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount. Mentoring and preparing students for the world in which they will live, the central role of the university when it achieved its modern form in the 14th century, is again at the forefront. Universities have always been seen as the gold standard for educational credentialing, but emerging certification programs from other sources are eroding the value of that mission daily.

** People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope. A faster approach is often perceived as a better approach, and as such people want easy and timely access not only to the information on the network, but to their social networks that can help them to interpret it and maximize its value. The implications for informal learning are profound, as are the notions of “just-in-time” learning and “found” learning, both ways of maximizing the impact of learning by ensuring it is timely and efficient.

** The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized. The continuing acceptance and adoption of cloud-based applications and services is changing not only the ways we configure and use software and file storage, but even how we conceptualize those functions. It does not matter where our work is stored; what matters is that our information is accessible no matter where we are or what device we choose to use. Globally, in huge numbers, we are growing used to a model of browser-based software that is device-independent. While some challenges still remain, specifically with notions of privacy and control, the promise of significant cost savings is an important driver in the search for solutions.

** The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more crosscampus collaboration between departments. While this trend is not as widespread as the others listed here, where schools have created a climate in which students, their peers, and their teachers are all working towards the same goals, where research is something open even to first year students, the results have shown tantalizing promise. Increasingly, both students and their professors see the challenges facing the world as multidisciplinary, and the need for collaboration great. Over the past few years, the emergence of a raft of new (and often free) tools has made collaboration easier than at any other point in history.

Critical Challenges

Along with current trends, the Advisory Board notes critical challenges that face learning organizations, especially those that are likely to continue to affect education over the five-year time period covered by this report. Like the trends, these are drawn from a careful analysis of current events, papers, articles, and similar sources, as well as from the personal experience of the Advisory Board members in their roles as leaders in education and technology. Those challenges ranked as most significant in terms of their impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in the coming years are listed here, in the order of importance assigned them by the Advisory Board.

** The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives — is changing. In a 2007 report, the American Association of Colleges and Universities recommended strongly that emerging technologies be employed by students in order for them to gain experience in “research, experimentation, problem-based learning, and other forms of creative work,” particularly in their chosen fields of study. It is incumbent upon the academy to adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today’s learners; to emphasize critical inquiry and mental flexibility, and provide students with necessary tools for those tasks; to connect learners to broad social issues through civic engagement; and to encourage them to apply their learning to solve large-scale complex problems.

** New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind. Citation-based metrics, to pick one example, are hard to apply to research based in social media. New forms of peer review and approval, such as reader ratings, inclusion in and mention by influential blogs, tagging, incoming links, and retweeting, are arising from the natural actions of the global community of educators, with increasingly relevant and interesting results. These forms of
scholarly corroboration are not yet well understood by mainstream faculty and academic decision makers, creating a gap between what is possible and what is acceptable.

** Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. The challenge is due to the fact that despite the widespread agreement on its importance, training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in any discipline, and especially rare in teacher education programs. As faculty and instructors begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This reality is exacerbated by the fact that as technology continues to evolve, digital literacy must necessarily be less about tools and more about ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative. That is why skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral and difficult to sustain.

** Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate. Across the board, institutions are looking for ways to control costs while still providing a high quality of service. Schools are challenged by the need to support a steady — or growing — number of students with fewer resources and staff than before. In this atmosphere, it is critical for information and media professionals to emphasize the importance of continuing research into emerging technologies as a means to achieve key institutional goals. As one example, knowing the facts about shifting server- and network intensive infrastructure, such as email or media streaming, off campus in the current climate might present the opportunity to generate considerable annual savings.

These trends and challenges are having a profound effect on the way we experiment with, adopt, and use emerging technologies. These aspects of the world that surround and permeate academia serve as a frame for considering the probable impacts of the emerging technologies listed in the sections that follow.

Technologies to watch

The six technologies featured in each Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative inquiry. The near-term horizon assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for institutions within the next twelve months; the mid-term horizon, within two to three years; and the far-term, within four to five years. It should be noted that the Horizon Report is not a predictive tool. It is meant, rather, to highlight emerging technologies with considerable potential for our focus areas of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. Each of them is already the focus of work at a number of innovative institutions around the world, and the work we showcase here reveals the promise of a wider impact.

on the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content.

Mobile computing, by which we mean use of the network-capable devices students are already carrying, is already established on many campuses, although before we see widespread use, concerns about privacy, classroom management, and access will need to beaddressed. At the same time, the opportunity is great; virtually all higher education students carry some form of mobile device, and the cellular network that supports their connectivity continues to grow. An increasing number of faculty and instructional technology staff are experimenting with the possibilities for collaboration and communication offered by mobile computing. Devices from smart phones to netbooks are portable tools for productivity, learning, and communication, offering an increasing range of activities fully supported by
applications designed especially for mobiles.

Open content, also expected to reach mainstream use in the next twelve months, is the current form of a movement that began nearly a decade ago, when schools like MIT began to make their course content freely available. Today, there is a tremendous variety of open content, and in many parts of the world, open content represents a profound shift in the way students study and learn. Far more than a collection of free online course materials, the open content movement is a response to the rising costs of education, the desire for access to learning in areas where such access is difficult, and an expression of student choice about when and how to learn.

The second adoption horizon is set two to three years out, where we will begin to see widespread adoptions of two well-established technologies that have taken off by making use of the global cellular networks — electronic books and simple augmented reality. Both of these technologies are entering the mainstream of popular culture; both are already used in practice at a surprising number of campuses; and both are expected to see much broader use across academia over the next two to three years.

Electronic books have been available in some form for nearly four decades, but the past twelve months have seen a dramatic upswing in their
acceptance and use. Convenient and capable electronic reading devices combine the activities of acquiring, storing, reading, and annotating digital books, making it very easy to collect and carry hundreds of volumes in a space smaller than a single paperback book. Already in the mainstream of consumer use, electronic books are appearing on campuses with increasing frequency. Thanks to a number of pilot programs, much is already known about student preferences with regards to the various platforms available. Electronic books promise to reduce costs, save
students from carrying pounds of textbooks, and contribute to the environmental efforts of paperconscious campuses.

Simple augmented reality refers to the shift that has made augmented reality accessible to almost anyone. Augmented reality used to require specialized equipment, none of which was very portable. Today, applications for laptops and smart phones overlay digital information onto the physical world quickly and easily. While still two to three years away from widespread use on campuses, augmented reality is establishing a foothold in the consumer sector, and in a form much easier to access than originally envisioned.

on the far-term horizon, set at four to five years away for widespread adoption, but clearly already in use in some quarters, are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis. Neither of these two technologies is yet commonly found in campus settings, but the high level of interest and the tremendous amounts of research in both areas indicates that they are worth following closely.

Gesture-based computing is already strong in the consumer market and we are seeing a growing number of prototypical applications for training, research, and study, though this technology is still some time away from common educational use. Devices that are controlled by natural movements of the finger, hand, arm, and body are becoming more common. Game companies in particular are exploring the potential offered by consoles that require no handheld controller, but instead recognize and interpret body motions. As we work with devices that react to us instead of requiring us to learn to work with them, our understanding of what it means to interact with computers is beginning to change.

Visual data analysis, a way of discovering and understanding patterns in large data sets via visual interpretation, is currently used in the scientific analysis of complex processes. As the tools to interpret and display data have become more sophisticated, models can be manipulated in real time and researchers are able to navigate and explore data in ways that were not possible previously. Visual data analysis is an emerging field, a blend of statistics, data mining, and visualization, that promises to make it possible for anyone to sift through, display, and understand complex concepts and relationships.

Each of these technologies is described in detail in the body of the report. These sections open with a discussion of what the technology is and why it is relevant to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. Examples of the technology in practice, especially in academia, are listed there to illustrate how it is being adopted at the current time. Our research indicates that all six of these technologies, taken together, will have a significant impact on learning-focused organizations within the next five years.

Regular readers of the Horizon Report will note that some topics have strong ties to topics that were featured in past editions. Mobile computing, in particular, is the latest aspect of a trend toward smaller, more powerful computing devices that has grown over the past three years. We have watched mobile phones become increasingly capable and flexible. As described here, the topic of mobile computing encompasses handheld devices with the ability to access the Internet, a group of devices that includes the mobile phones most people carry as well as other often specialized devices that are increasingly powerful. The significance of mobile computing is not so much in the device used, but in the ability to easily access an expanding cellular network and fullyfeatured tools from the palm of your hand.

Simple augmented reality and gesture-based computing also have roots in previous editions. Augmented reality first appeared in the 2005 Horizon Report on the far-term horizon, returning in 2006 with a focus on its applications for visualizing large data sets, a use that is now common in many research labs. Today, augmented reality has become simple and available on the computers and mobile devices we already own. Gesture-based computing is one offshoot of a group of technologies that was noted in the first Horizon Report, published in 2004; multimodal interfaces, as this group was called, included gestural as well as other types of input. Gesture-based computing also has ties to contextaware computing, featured in 2005 and as contextaware devices in 2006.