2009 Horizon Report Lists Six Technologies of Interest to Learning-Focused Organizations

January 21, 2009 by Lisa Jansen

Want to know what’s on the horizon for teaching and learning technology? Take a look at the 2009 Horizon Report. It lists six technologies which will impact the choices of learning-focused organizations in the next year, two to three years, and four to five years.

The report contains an executive summary listing technologies to watch, key trends and critical challenges. Sections on each of the six technologies provide an overview of the technology, relevance for teaching, learning, research or creative expression, examples, and links to further reading.

Here is a brief overview of the six technologies.

Time to adoption: One year or less

• Mobiles - Mobile devices are everywhere and their use in teaching and learning is being enabled by new applications and increasing wireless network access.
• Cloud Computing - Faculty, staff and students access large clusters of networked computers to increase processing and data storage capability.

Time to adoption: Two to three years

• Geo Everything - Common devices record their own precise location and save the data along with captured media, or transmit to web-based applications.
• The Personal Web - A growing set of tools and applications make it easy to create a customized, personal web-based environment that supports a variety of activities.

Time to adoption: Four to five years

• Semantic-aware applications - “Tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract embedded meaning are providing rich new ways of finding and aggregating content.”
• Smart objects - "Sometimes described as the 'Internet of things,' smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information.”

The Horizon Report is one of many resources L&S Learning Support Services consults when considering technologies for use in teaching and learning.

The Horizon Report is produced collaboratively by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, an EDUCAUSE program. UW-Madison is an institutional member of both NMC and EDUCAUSE.