2007 Horizon Report

The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative have issued their 2007 Horizon Report on technology and higher education.

In their executive summary, they identify these key trends (listed in priority order):
*The environment of higher education is changing rapidly.
*Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
*Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given.
*Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
*The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
*Students' views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty.

The report also lists the following critical challenges:
*Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers.
*There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.
*While progress is being made, issues of intellectual property and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done.
*There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content.
*The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
*Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.

The main body of the report contains an in-depth examination of 6 emerging technologies that will impact higher education in the near future:

One Year or Less - User-Created Content; Social Networking

Two to Three Years -Mobile Phones; Virtual Worlds

Four to Five Years - New Scholarship; Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming

Take the time to read the entire report in online format rather than as a pdf. For each of the 6 technologies above, the authors hyperlink numerous recommended readings and examples of these technologies in higher education.

They've also organized the links under these del.icio.us tags so that you can visit them easily:

http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+user_content
http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+socialnetworking
http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+mobile
http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+virtual_worlds
http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+scholarship
http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+educational_games