Horizon Report 2008: get social, get mobile

The Horizon Report 2008 has been released.

A joint project of the New Media Consortium and Educause, it involves thirty to forty educators worldwide, across all sectors, examining existing and emerging technologies to identify those that within the next five years are :

likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.

They examine reports, conference proceedings, press clippings, and other types of research to identify possible technologies. This year, over 80 technologies were identified, ranked by the panel and then narrowed down to twelve that were extensively researched. Six out of these then emerged as the major trends to watch.

This year they were:

Time-to-adoption: One year or less

• Grassroots Video - (eg. YouTube, Machinima, blip.tv, justin.tv)
• Collaboration webs - (eg. Google documents, Ning)

Note to self: Keep playing with FRAPs and Virtual Dub. Take video camera to Brisbane and Melbourne next week. Think about institution-wide education about collaboration webs.

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Mobile Broadband
• Data mashups (interestingly Meebo chat boxes for “Ask a Librarian” services are given as an example of this)

Note to self: Learn to txt properly and budget for iPhone. Release the blidget I created for this blog following Ellyssa’s instructions …and then finish writing the Facebook App for it .

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Collective Intelligence (eg. Amazon.com - “You may also be interested in…. “, Wikipedia)
• Social Operating Systems (eg. change of function of web from a place to share files to a place to share relationships. kazaa vs Facebook . Your social graph integrated with productivity tools - eg. email that gives you the history of your interactions with the email’s sender )

Note to self: Keep twittering, it’s useful. Become a wikipedian to understand more about the social culture. Be very careful who I friend where.

Check out the Horizon Report Project wiki where you can see their research in detail and tell them what you think of their predictions. On the same wiki is the “Where are they now ?” pages for the Horizon Reports going back to 2004.

Well, they were certainly right on the money in 2007 when they predicted that user created content and social networking would be having a BIG impact about now.

I guess that the Letters of Jessica Mitford that I bought for my plane trip will be put aside for a while as I read the whole thing. (Along with that JISC report with the scary kid on the front that concludes we are all the google generation, and that Pew report into online activities and pursuits, and that Enhancing Graduate Education thingy. )

Thanks to the collective intelligence of the twitter telegram, I heard that it was out via Jude O’Connell who heard it from Vicki Davis, one of this years’ panel.