Review by: Brahm, Taiga (2008-02-12)

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 challenges for learning organizations are identified. These challenges will be summed up in the following:

• Changes in scholarship and research cause a need for innovation and leadership at the different levels of the academy (students, staff, administrative leadership). In detail, this means that experimentation as well as cooperation among institutions and researches should be supported and encouraged.
• There is a growing expectation to deliver content and services to mobile devices. This challenge is also seen as an opportunity to reach new students. It is based on the availability of new devices like the Apple iPhone and the LG Electronics Voyager.
• Collaborative learning is pushed into the foreground again which also leads to a demand for the higher education community to develop according interaction and assessment forms. An example might be collaborative learning in virtual worlds.
• In addition, there is a growing need for information, visual, and technological literacy. However, most of these skills are not taught formally yet. Thus, new curricula and corresponding assessment methods should be developed to address these literacies.

The key trends which might affect higher education include the expanding usage of web 2.0 and social networking, the changes in how we work, collaborate and communicate, globalisation, access and portability of content with even smaller devices (see above), widening of the gap between students' pereception of technology and that of faculty. In addition to these key trends, seven metatrends were identified which have been persistent over the five editions of the Horizon report. "These seven metatrends include the evolving approaches to communication between humans and machines; the collective sharing and generation of knowledge; computing in three dimensions; connecting people via the network; games as pedagogical platforms; the shifting of content production to users; and the evolution of ubiquitous platform." (p7).

After identifying trends and challenges for higher education, six "technologies to watch" along three adoption horizons will be described briefly: nearest time to adoption horizon (one year or less):

• Grassroots video: video seems to be everywhere; many of the barriers to use videos in education have dropped. One consequence is that students around the world produce videos and publish these via YouTube or iTunes U on the web – sometimes even organized according to institutional "channels". This development will be particularly useful for institutions offering courses in new media production and new media literacy.
• Collaboration webs: the access to collaboration tools such as video conferencing, or social networking tools is straightforward and not very expensive anymore. Thus, collaboration across the internet becomes more pervasive. There are webware suites like Zoho, Google Docs as well as different applications for cutting videos or for sharing presentations. In higher education, these tools can be used for group work from distant locations making sure that everybody has access to the same resources. Additionally, the tools can feed right into one's own portfolio.

time to adoption horizon of two to three years

• Mobile broadband: Since mobile devices have become ever smaller and more versatile and since almost all students now own such modern devices, their potential for higher education is growing as well. It can be expected that mobile broadband and the further development of the phones will merge into the possibility of full-features internet access, touch-screeninterfaces, and high-quality displays. Thus, students will – even more than now – be able to share content, post to their blogs, be supported during their fieldwork (e. g. through instructor feedback).
• Data mashups: "A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source via a single, unified tool" (p 20). Such mashups (e. g. the overlaying of photos with the location) are very common on the internet today. Once they are easier to use and more robust, they will provide the opportunity to illustrate concepts as they are taught, to visualize data and relationships in new ways. This also provides opportunities for research.

time to adoption horizon of four to five years

• Collective intelligence is defined as "the knowledge embedded in societies or large groups of individuals" (p 23). It is differentiated between explicit knowledge (e. g. Wikipedia) and tacit knowledge. Examples of this type of intelligence are already used in the industry, for instance Google's page rankings or Amazon's examination of buying patters to recommend products. Such explicit collective intelligence projects provide possibilities for research but also the possibilities for students to practice knowledge generation and construction.
• Social operating systems: These tools would be an extension to the already existing social networking tools. Their advantage would be to recognize possible connections among people that were not explicitly stated as well as differentiate between shallow and deep relationships. Thus, such tools would lead to a shift in the organization of information. Such tools might provide the possibility to connect students to researchers and scientiest, thus providing new opportunities for collaboration.

In sum, the report provides a very interesting overview over the key trends and challenges likely to have an impact on higher education in the next five years. The technologies identified were chosen and described in a complex and deliberate process and the report links to many internet sources and provides a great repository of the emerging technologies. The identification of metatrends as a kind of reflection after the fifth issue of the Horizon Report is also noteworthy and provides a kind of anchoring; however, it seems impossible for higher education institutions to follow all of the trends and it would be helpful to make the usefulness for educational purposes (as partly expressed under the section of "relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression) more clear.