The 2008 Horizon Report

Just finished re-reading the 2008 New Media Consortium Horizon Report. I decided to cut-and-paste some quotes around the six technologies highlighted within a short, medium and longer-term time frame. I found these quotes thought-provoking with clear implications for our practice at DMU. They are pretty self-explanatory.

• grassroots video and collaboration webs, both on the short-term horizon

"The effect of all these developments is that the capacity for video production has been distributed to the grassroots level, to the point that even major news outlets routinely feature audience-captured cell phone videos of breaking news stories."

"A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources... The same tools can be used to set up a personal portfolio where a student can display his or her work in any form — photos, blog posts, shared videos, and more can be pulled to the page by widgets that grab the student’s contributions on other sites."

• mobile broadband and data mashups, both on the mid-term horizon

"The combination of social networking and mobility lets students and colleagues collaborate from anywhere they happen to be. Add to that connectivity the multimedia capacities of phones, and the storage they offer for podcasts, videos, photos, PDF files and even documents and spreadsheets, and it is not hard to see why phones are increasingly the portable tool of choice."

"The power of mashups for education lies in the way they help us reach new conclusions or discern new relationships by uniting large amounts of data in a manageable way."

• collective intelligence and social operating systems, both on the long-term horizon

"Two new forms of information stores are being created in real time by thousands of people in the course of their daily activities, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge stores like the Wikipedia and Freebase, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and actions. The data in these new information stores has come to be called 'collective intelligence' and both forms have already proven to be compelling applications of the network. Explicit knowledge stores refine knowledge through the contributions of thousands of authors; implicit stores allow the discovery of entirely new knowledge by capturing trillions of
key clicks and decisions as people use the network in the course of their everyday lives."


"Social networking systems have led us to a new understanding of how people connect. Relationships are the currency of these systems, but we are only beginning to realize how valuable a currency they truly are. The next generation of social networking systems—social operating systems—will change the way we search for, work with, and understand information by placing people at the center of the network. The first social operating system tools, only just emerging now, understand who we know, how we know them, and how deep our relationships actually are. They can lead us to connections we would otherwise have missed. As they develop further, these tools will transform the academy in significant ways we can only begin to imagine."

There are some other quotes that I like, which should shape or impact our pedagogic engagements, as curriculum facilitators or mentors, with learners who are utilising social media tools, or who would benefit from their affordances.

1. "learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are" [does that include a VLE?]
2. "data mashups that will transform the way we understand and represent information" [are we too hung up on plagiarism?]
3. "expand our understanding of ourselves and the technologically-mediated world we inhabit" [do we do affective learning in HE?]
4. "base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content" [but we are obsessed with subject-specific content in HE]
5. "The expectation is that advances in technology over the next twelve to eighteen months will remove the last barriers to access and bring mobiles truly into the mainstream for education" [best crack on with our JISC project, MoRSE then]
6. "it is critical that the academic community as a whole embraces the potential of technologies and practices like those described in this report" [does this demand a change in institutional commitment to professional development?]
7. "This is more than merely an expectation to provide content: this is an opportunity for higher education to reach its constituents wherever they may be" [see 1 above - the structure and operationalisation of the traditional University appears friable]
8. "The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment" [I'll raise a glass to that if it involves proper deliberation between learners and mentors]
9. "Web-based tools are rapidly becoming the standard, both in education and in the workplace. Technologically mediated communication is the norm. Fluency in information, visual, and technological literacy is of vital importance, yet these literacies are not formally taught to most students" [wow! The subject is king, so engaging with 6 above is critical]
10. "The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen. Students and faculty continue to view and experience technology very differently" [Is that really true throughout institutions?]