Review by: Brahm, Taiga (2007-02-18)

The 2007 edition of the Horizon Report – issued by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative – is a research-oriented collection of emerging technologies which are deemed to have an impact on higher education in the near future. To identify the relevant technologies, first, key trends in higher education were reviewed. The following six trends emerged:

(1) The rapid change of the environment of higher education refers to declining budgets, rising costs, fewer student enrollments, increasing demand for distance education and the rather new competition from the for-profit sectors.

(2) Increasing globalisation allows students to access more resources and to meet more perspectives. Additionally, skilled workers from Asia influence the way we work, collaborate and communicate.

(3) Although the so-called digital natives grow up with continuous access to the internet, information literacy should not be taken granted. Especially, the skills of research, evaluation, and critical thinking are missing.

(4) Due to the possibilty of digital expression of scholarship and the trend towards more collaboration, the standard of peer-reviewed paper publications will decline. Instead, other models of academic review and faculty will slowly emerge.

(5) Accordingly, the question what constitutes an expert in a field has to be reconsidered since a trend towards mass amateurization and collective intelligence can be identified.

(6) The views of students and faculty what should be considered technology are also increasingly different from each other.

Starting from the trends, challenges for higher education were identified. Some of them will be briefly summarized in the following:

• Methods of assessment and learning do not match, i. e. learning takes place in multiple environments (e. g. simulations, games) and this kind of learning cannot be captured by ordinary assessment. Evaluating portfolios of learning also poses problems.
• Despite some progress, the challenge of intellectual property and copyright still remains. Universities, on the one hand, face the problem of securing their own digital material and, on the other hand, do not know what kind of usage is acceptable when content is openly available.
• An increasing demand of collaborative learning can be identified, e. g. through the phenomenon of social networking. This will lead to the development of new forms of interaction and assessment.
• Another challenge is the growing expectation and demand of anytime, anywhere access to learning, thus, pushing universities to deliver services and content to mobile and personal tools.

The main focus of the Horizon Report is the identification of "technologies to watch" along three adoption horizons. On this year's nearest adoption horizon (one year or less) are user-created content and social networking which have already been established on some campuses. As for user-generated content, the former "audience" of the world wide web is now involved in producing content. Examples are wikis, blogs, photostreams, and so on, which can now be easily created and accessed. These technologies lead towards increasing authorship at almost all levels in higher education.Social networking is already used by the majority of students who connect with friends, and colleagues via these tools. The most prevalent examples of this usage are MySpace and Facebook. Using the same mechanisms as social networking is seen as a key opportunity to engage students more deeply into their course activities since these tools offer possibilities of contributing, sharing, communicating, and collaborating.

With an adoption horizon of two to three years, mobile phones and virtual worlds are identified as emerging technologies in higher education. Mobile phones are already vastly available – addressing our need for instant access to information, entertainment and also communication. Since the capability of mobile phones is increasing rapidly, it might soon be an integrated part of education. Mobile phones could, for instance, provide access to campus-based services (like scheduling or updates on the basis of GPS), deliver self-paced audio and video files (e. g. by detecting where a user is and providing appropriate information packages), or encourage the creation of art or comments. Virtual Worlds are also seen to have an adoption horizon of two to three years. They offer the possbililties to explore virtual environments, to collaborate, role-play and to experience challenging situations in a safe surrounding. The outstanding example of a virtual world at the moment is Second Life. Virtual worlds can be used to create effective learning environments which are deemed to be applicable for many disciplines since they are not very contexual. Examples of how to use virtual worlds in higher education are the support of cultural and societal understanding through virtual world experiences or learning through simulations and role-playing using complex activities which can only be solved in virtual worlds (e. g. by entering a different profession).

New scholarships and emerging forms of publications as well as massively multplayer educational gaming are likely to emerge within an adoption horizon of four to five years. As mentioned above, the practice of scholarship is changing through new tools to publish and critizise. What new forms of publication and scholarship might look like is still rather fuzzy. Massively multiplayer games are deemed to be engaging, thus leading to deeper involvement of learners. Since they are still very difficult to produce, their mass implementation is likely to take a few years. However, it is expected that open-source gaming engines will promote the development of these games. For education, the usage of such games will provide possibilities to develop manage-ment and leadership skills, practise and apply knowledge in safe competition as well as learn a foreign language.

In sum, the report provides a good introducation to the key trends and challenges likely to have an impact on higher education. The technologies identified were chosen and described in a complex and deliberate process including many sources and expert voices, however, the trends, challenges, and technologies were hardly connected to each other. In total, the report links to many internet sources and provides a great repository of the emerging technologies.