The New Media Consortium/ Educause have released their annual Horizon Report that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years  on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.

Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., & Haywood, K. (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: New Media Consortium. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2011.pdf

This years’ trends are:

Time-to-adoption One Year or Less:

• • Electronic Books
• • Mobiles

Time-to-adoption Two to Three Years:

• • Augmented Reality
• • Game-based Learning

Time-to-adoption Four to Five Years:

• • Gesture-based computing
• • Learning Analytics

The “key trends” and “critical challenges” at the start are often more interesting.

Key Trends:

• • The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• • People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
• • The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
• • The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

Critical Challenges:

• • Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• • Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
• • Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university.
• • Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike.