The View on the Horizon

The 2007 Horizon Report is now available. This collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative is a must-read for anyone involved with teaching and learning in higher ed. This annual report discusses key trends, critical challenges and technologies to watch that will impact higher education.

The key trends they have identified this year:

• The environment of higher education is changing rapidly
• Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate and communicate
• Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given
• Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship
• The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship
• Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to discuss each of the following six Technologies to Watch in more detail and I look forward to hearing your comments and questions about integrating these into your classroom.

• User-created content
• Social networking
• Mobile phones
• Virtual worlds
• The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication
• Massively multiplayer educational gaming

The first two of these technologies, user-created content and social networking, are already established on many college campuses. The time to adoption is one year or less. Are you using them?

Download your copy of the report today and start thinking about the possibilities.