Horizon report Synopsis

 Prepared by Sue Breeyear

The Horizon Report
“Advances in technology over the next 12-18 months will remove the last barriers to access and bring mobile devices truly into the mainstream for education. “

One year or less:

Grassroots video. Video is easily produced with inexpensive equipment and can be shared via Google, YouTube, or other Web 2.0 sites. Faculty have more options than ever to incorporate video into the course, whether by using video capture to collect data for field work, or for documentation of service learning projects. Many schools are giving students the option of substituting video projects for the classic term paper. When students produce a video on class-related topics, they learn both how to research and how to develop an idea, as well as learning to design and execute the digital project. They become much more careful to make sure their work is done well and correctly once they realize that they’re sharing it, not just with their instructor, but with the world. Some schools are becoming involved with digital storytelling to reinforce research topics.

Collaboration Webs. New web-based applications (webware) allow the sharing of documents and collaboration on content creation, presentations, and slideshows (Google Docs, Zoho Office). Online collaborative workspaces (or funspaces) are available where a group of people can easily work, share resources, capture ideas, and socialize (Facebook, Netvibes). A custom course workspace could include a calendar populated with data from an online calendaring system, an RSS feed with students’ and professors recent blog posts, a course-created tag cloud, a badge featuring related Flickr photos, and a whiteboard widget where course members can leave messages for each other. Students can set up personal portfolios where they can display their work in any form and pull multimedia into their work. The pages are updated automatically as new content appears anywhere within them.

Two to Three Years:

Mobile Broadband - networking on the go
Many students already own and carry mobile devices. Prices are dropping considerably for more sophisticated features. Full-featured internet, touch screen interfaces, remotely upgradeable software, and high quality displays will become as common as camera phones are today. Already people can use their phones to post to their blogs, add appointments to online calendars, find friends in their immediate area, signal the campus police to keep an eye on their whereabouts as they move across campus. Students doing fieldwork can use mobile devices to take notes and photos and send them directly to a course blog for instructor feedback. Huge amounts of data can now be stored on a mobile device, including documents, photos, videos, and PDF files.

Data Mashups
Mash up: a web application that combines data from more than one source via a single, unified tool.
Data mashups are powerful tools for navigating and visualizing datasets, understanding connections between different dimensions such as time, distance, and location, and juxtaposing data from different sources to reveal new relationships. For example, the EPA created a Google Earth mashup that generates maps of the US displaying air quality based on the amount and kind of pollutants emitted by businesses. Another combines data from Wikipedia and Google Maps to identify the location of authors posting updates to Wikipedia almost in real time. New tools are being developed that will make mashups easy to create by non-technical users.

Four to five years:

Collective intelligence - the knowledge embedded within societies or large groups of individuals (Wikipedia, for example). Also the tacit intelligence that results from the data generated by the activities of many people over time. Google’s PageRank system; Amazon.com reviews and recommendations.

Social operating systems. A subtle change, from an emphasis on file sharing to one on relationships via the network.