The HORIZON REPORT 2008 Emergent Technologies and their Relevance to Teaching, Learning and Creative Expression

The HORIZON REPORT 2008 The Horizon Report is an annual publication summarizing a year long qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning or creative expression within learning- focused organizations.

Origins The report is a collaboration between New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). The project condenses the viewpoints of 36 advisory board members in the fields of business, industry and education.

Emergent Technology The main sections of the report describe six emergent technologies or practices that will likely enter mainstream use in learning-focused organizations within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years.

Adoption Horizons First adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of entry within the next year Second horizon is a two to three year expectation. Third assumes within a four to five year window.

Why should we pay attention? They are cool. :-D Developing technologies will directly effect the landscape of the e-learning world. There is an ever widening gap between students who are born “technology natives” and teachers who are typically “technology immigrants”.

The 6 Emergent Technologies Grassroots Video Collaboration Webs Mobile Broadband Data Mashups Collective Intelligence Social Operating Systems

Where they are on the adoption horizons? Horizon One (within one year) Grassroots Video Collaboration Webs Horizon Two (two to three years) Mobile Broadband Data Mashups Horizon Three (four to five years) Collective intelligence Social Operating Systems

Grassroots Video assroots+video assroots+video In January billion videos were viewed online by nearly 123 million Americans, 70% of the total internet audience of the US. Tools for assembling and editing clips are free or extremely low cost. There are dozens of web communities that offer easy-to-access outlets for distribution and richly featured search and tagging functions.

Educational Applications As the costs of production and distribution of video have dropped to nearly zero, many of the barriers to using in learning and creative situations have fallen away. Many institutions are beginning to turn to services like and I Tunes University to host their video content for them. This offers and unprecedented and growing range of educational video content from small segments on specific topics to full lectures.

Relevance to what we do… Already hosting services provide institutional “channels” where content can be collected and branded. The University of Minnesota uploaded a video on Mobius Transformations that has had 1.3 million views. FnY FnY Institutions are offering courses in New Media Production and New Media Literacy that have evolved around these video platforms.

Further applications… Secondary school students from five schools in five countries researched and envisioned the future of education and sociery through the framework of the 2007 Horizon report. They collaborated on the project with a Wiki and then produced videos on the topic which were up loaded and shared on You Tube.

Collaboration webs Web based tools and collaborative workspaces have been available for some time. However, developments in two key areas have resulted in tools that are now quite inexpensive and often free. The tools often require no special installation, are designed to be used within a web browser, produce materials that can be easily shared and offer a convenience and flexibility that make virtual collaborations both simple and highly productive.

Collaborative tools There has been an explosion of online straight forward tools that allow people to break work into smaller pieces that a team of people can work on together or in parallel. Excellent examples include Google Docs all and Zoho Office all

Collaborative Workspaces The second area of development has been in online collaborative workspaces that serve as a hub where a group of people can easily work, share resources, capture ideas and even socialize. The most popular of these tools are highly flexible and can be adapted to almost any project. At the same time these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources.

What This Means Student and teachers are able to interact across a building or across the world. There are no longer any boundaries to the compilation and dissemination of knowledge. An excellent example of this is the Flat Classroom Project. Students in the US and Qatar use the site to share information about each other, collect resources and information, showcase multimedia clips and other class projects, provide access to course materials and participate in forums used to support group discussions and interactions.

Technology Applied is a global project that uses a mix of technologies (blogs, LMS, Wikis and virtual worlds) for collaborative learning. It currently has schools from the US, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and Japan participating.

Mobile Broadband There are more than a billion new mobile phones produced every year- one for every six people on the planet. Mobiles are increasingly about networking on the go. Better displays and new interfaces make it easier to interact with an ever expanding variety of content.

Advances in the technology Mobiles now keep us in touch in almost all the ways that laptops used to; with , web browsing, photos and videos, documents and shopping- all available without the need for a hotspot or a power outlet.

Advances in the Technology Newer, longer lasting batteries. Storage capabilities have significantly increased Software embedded features are allowing unprecedented flexibility. Open API’s (application programming intefaces) are already encouraging the creation of special add-on software (widgets).

Relevance to what we do… Students doing field work or service projects are already using mobiles to take notes and photographs and send them directly to course blogs, where they receive instructor feedback. Colleagues using virtual collaboration tools have access to materials while traveling or otherwise away from their computers.

Examples of Mobile in Action Montclair State University required students to own cell phones for security and it evolved into project based learning that includes blogging, polling, and video podcasts. Bowling Green University and Case Western University have created a virtual space that allows students to take virtual field trips from the Amazon to outer space is an application for mobile phones that enables photos taken with phones to be location tagged and uploaded to Flickr, from the phone. Geotagged data has obvious educational application in field research.

Data Mashups Mashup- a web application that combines data from more than one souce via a single unified tool. i.e.-data visualization. Tools like Google’s Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes both make it relatively easy to create applications that grab online data organize it and display it the way the author wants.

Current applications The Environmental Protection Agency crated a Google Earth mashup that generates maps of the U.S. displaying air quality based on the kind of pollutants emitted by businesses. e.htm e.htm nreportmashup/noblog nreportmashup/noblog

Relevance to what we do… Mashups help people distill information and reach conclusions in new ways. Web based tools for manipuating the data are usually easy to use, free and widely available. As tools like these become more robust, we will see faculty creating custom mashups to illustrate concepts and students will use them in reports and assignments.

Collective Intelligence The knowledge imbedded within societies or large groups. Explicit- knowledge gathered and recorded by large groups. Example- Implicit- intelligence that is distilled from data generated by the activities of people over time. Humans are components of a “learning machine”. This conscious evolution builds the “noosphere” --a transcendent, rapidly evolving collective intelligence--an informational cortex of the planet.

What is out there… Wikipedia, Cellphedia and other self- correcting, social encyclopedias provide opportunities for research and self- study, giving students the chance to practice the construction of knowledge, as well as consuming it.

What is out there… Geobased mashups of health and commercial data once ovelayed on mapping resources are tracking developing trends in their infancy. is an open, shared online database that is not only edited but structured (data types, catagories, ect…) is community created. is a game that collects word associations from thousands of players and creates a visual map common associations for a given word

Social Operating Systems Paradigm shift from the web as an application and file sharing platform to the view that the real value of the network lies in the way it helps us create, identify and sustain relationships. Analysis of data mined from all available data i.e.- cc fields of , attendee lists from conferences, tagged Flickr photos, comments in blogs, co-authored presentations and papers and so on… The idea is to place people and relationships at the center of informational space.

Placing people and relationships at the center will change… Our relationship to knowledge and information Research methodolgy Evaluation of credibility Student / eduactor interaction The way that students model and learn to become professionals in their chosen fields.

In its infancy…. An early form of this is Xobni- Xobni (currently in Beta for Outlook) is a tool that extends . When an is selected Xobni will provide everything about that person that is implicit in the system. It places the person at the center of the data and helps you manage interactions.

Yahoo Life! Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang outlined plans for Yahoo to offer this type of next generation “user experience” that would unite its current and developing products in to a social context

Team ORCA Project The team project by students in the Masters of Human Computer interaction program at Carnegie Mellon University is a prototype of a system that will facilitate this type of interaction helping scientists locate and interact with each other. HCI/2007/PittDental/ HCI/2007/PittDental/

The Vision… The picture of someone’s digital identity is a rich mosaic that communicates who they are. Social operating systems will tap that mosaic and encourage relationships between people based on connections. These tools will bring discussions, colleagues and products of our/their lifestreams to us, without having to search for them.

Critical Challenges Education is facing an expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices. The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interacton and assessment.

Critical Challenges Issues like ownership of collaborative work and certification of authorship present difficulties for evaluation. Fluency in information, visual and technological literacy is critical but has not been formally taught. New and expanded definitions of these literacies and methods for teaching and evaluating are needed.

After five years: The Metatrends The evolving approaches to communication between humans and machines The collective sharing and generation of knowledge Computing in three dimensions Connecting people using the network Games as pedagogical platforms Content production by users The evolution of a ubiquitous platform