The Horizon Report

Changes in online education are intimately tied to changes and discoveries in the fields of science and technology. The discoveries/inventions produced by STEM fields are often so progressive and rapid that education lags several years behind the curve. So, what potential changes are in store for online and virtual education? That depends on changes in technology and its applications. Luckily, the Horizon Report keeps the popular world of consumers and educationists up to date.

The Horizon Report annually describes the ongoing work of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project. Since 2002, researchers have identified emerging technologies likely to significantly impact learning, teaching, research and creative expression in learning-centered organizations (schools, companies, etc…). The 2009 report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). To compile the report, researchers do an exhaustive search of relevant research literature, blogs, and technology.

The Horizon Report places technologies along a continuum of “adoption horizons.” The first adoption horizon predicts that the emerging technology will become institutionally mainstream within the next year; the second horizon, within 2 to 3 years; and the third adoption horizon, within 4 to 5 years.

The 2009 report identifies 6 technologies. Mobiles and cloud computing are in the first horizon. Mobiles (like the iphone) are portable devices with a variety of applications: users can phone, record, photograph, store data, access the internet and operate a variety of applications that are educationally relevant (e.g., calculators). Mobiles have revolutionized the volume and accessibility of educationally relevant information for the single user. And, as the report implies, the increasing use of personal Mobiles is doubtless something teachers (online and on-ground) should consider for classroom practice.

Cloud computing is changing the way data is stored and accessed. Instead of data being stored or locked on a single computer, it is distributed over a network of computers, making software or files accessible over the internet (e.g., from any computer). Since applications and files ‘live in the cloud’, this makes it easier to share, edit and manage information collaboratively (a wiki is the most obvious example of a “cloud” application).

Geolocation Technology and The Personal Web are on the second horizon. Geo-location technology is now available on a variety of devices like mobile phones, cameras, etc., and this can prove convenient as radar can give users precise information related to their location: local news, weather, restaurant reviews are some examples. Geolocation technology can also impact intellectual/scientific life as it “opens opportunities for field research and data acquisition in the sciences, social observational studies, medicine and health.”

The Personal Web represents a variety of technologies that reorganize, reconfigure and manage online content. These technologies manage the excess of the world wide web and “explicitly support [your] social, professional, learning and other activities via highly personalized windows to the networked world.” Popular examples of these technologies include Delicious – a system that uses tagging to save and organize online content – and Zotero, a tool that allows users to tag, categorize and add personal notes to online websites (similar to a bibliographic reference system).

Semantic Aware Applications and Smart Objects represent the third horizon. The Semanic Web uses search tools designed to “use the meaning, or semantics, of information on the Internet to make connections and provide answers that would otherwise entail a great deal of time and effort.” Consider searching for “Turkey” on the internet. With the regular web, a variety of different information sources will pop up – from information about the country, to the natural habitat of the bird, to recipes for holiday dinners. The semantic web allows users to input specific meaning and contextual information to make researching easier and less time-intensive. Despite the promise, the report argues that education-specific examples are rare. But, the future looks bright as semantic web applications can make research more efficient.

A Smart Object, in the words of the report, “‘knows’ about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, who owns it and how they use it, what other objects in the world are like it — and about its environment.” A funny example is a coffee pot with a special computer chip that knows about its environment and location and can thus provide you with a weather report as you pour your first cup of coffee in the morning. Another example in limited use is a “tire” that can relay information about its own features – like air pressure – to a vehicle’s central computer system.

The report sites the discipline of archeology as a potential site of the influence of smart objects on educational environments: “The way that a single smart object connects to a network of information is useful for many disciplines. Consider a student or researcher examining a group of objects from an archaeological dig. A tag attached to the label of each object, when scanned with a mobile device like a camera-enabled phone, would instantly bring up photographs of other objects from the dig, video of the dig site, maps, and any other media or information associated with the area.” Smart objects intend to bring information and the world of real objects together. Indeed, this can change the way we think about the boundaries between the classroom and the real world. More than ever before, I think the report makes clear that technology is revolutionizing the access we have to relevant information and is making it easier to dissolve the boundaries between the classroom (where information is in excess) and the spaces outside its walls (the real world).