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2009 Horizon Report:
Key Emerging Technologies
one year or less
two to three years
four to five years
advisory board
key trends
critical challenges
the new media consortium
The 2009 Horizon Report, the sixth in the annual series produced by the New Media Consortium in collaboration with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, describes six emerging technologies likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, research, and creative expression in the next one to five years.

The Report also discusses current trends and critical challenges that will shape the face of education over the same time period.
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about the report
about the new media consortium
mobiles
cloud computing
The unprecedented evolution of mobiles continues to generate great interest. The idea of a single portable device that can make phone calls, take pictures, record audio and video, store data, music, and movies, and interact with the Internet  — all of it —  has become so interwoven into our lifestyles that it is now surprising to learn that someone does not carry one. As new devices continue to enter the market, new features and new capabilities are appearing at an accelerated pace. One recent feature — the ability to run third-party applications — represents a fundamental change in the way we regard mobiles and opens the door to myriad uses for education, entertainment, productivity, and social interaction.
The emergence of very large “data farms” — specialized data centers that host thousands of servers — has created a surplus of computing resources that has come to be called the cloud. Growing out of research in grid computing, cloud computing transforms once-expensive resources like disk storage and processing cycles into a readily available, cheap commodity. Development platforms layered onto the cloud infrastructure enable thin-client, web-based applications for image editing, word processing, social networking, and media creation. Many of us use the cloud, or cloud-based applications, without even being aware of it. Advances in computer science to ensure redundancy and protection from natural disasters have led to data being shared across many different hosting facilities. Improved infrastructure has made the cloud robust and reliable; as usage grows, the cloud is fundamentally changing our notions of computing and communication.
geo-everything
Everything on the Earth’s surface has a location that can be expressed with just two coordinates. Using the new classes of geolocation tools, it is very easy to determine and capture the exact location of physical objects — as well as capturing the location where digital media such as photographs and video are taken. The other side of this coin is that it is also becoming easier to work with the geolocative data thus captured: it can be plotted on maps; combined with data about other events, objects, or people; graphed; charted; or manipulated in myriad ways. Devices we commonly carry with us increasingly have the ability to know where they (and, consequently, we) are, and to record our coordinates as we take photographs, talk to friends, or post updates to social networking websites. The “everything” in geo-everything is what makes this group of technologies interesting, and what will make them so much a part of our lives — geolocation, geotagging, and location-aware devices are already very nearly everywhere.
The idea behind the semantic web is that although online data is available for searching, its meaning is not: computers are very good at returning keywords, but very bad at understanding the context in which keywords are used. A typical search on the term “turkey,” for instance, might return traditional recipes, information about the bird, and information about the country; the search engine can only pick out keywords, and cannot distinguish among different uses of the words. Similarly, although the information required to answer a question like “How many current world leaders are under the age of 60?” is readily available to a search engine, it is scattered among many different pages and sources. The search engine cannot extract the meaning of the information to compile an answer to that question even though it can return links to the pages that contain pieces of that answer. Semantic-aware applications are tools designed to use the meaning, or semantics, of information on the Internet to make connections and provide answers that would otherwise entail a great deal of time and effort.
1. multi-touch displays & alternative interaction
2. 3G and wifi access to Internet & GPS
3. motion and position sensing/accelerometers
4. third-party apps
what's significant here?
what's significant here?
1. scale-on-demand software (Flickr to Google to MyNiftyApp)
2. shift in the way we think of storing files & using apps
3. greater distribution & decreased cost of applications
4. huge resources (processing, storage) are cheap & easy to get
examples
Cloud Computing Testbed @ Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Open Science Grid @ Univ Wisconsin-Madison
Virtual Computing Lab @ North Carolina State University
Flickr
Google App Engine
Gmail
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
examples
iStanford
iGFU @ George Fox University
Mobile MAAP @ Columbia University
SnapTell
Shazam
TwitterFon
Educators, researchers, practitioners, 
and industry leaders from eight countries
served on the 2009 Advisory Board
All work was completed online in the Horizon
Project wiki from August - December 2008
To nominate yourself or another for the 2010 Horizon Project Advisory Board, visit http://bit.ly/horizon-nominate
Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.
Information technologies are having a significant impact on how people work, play, gain information, and collaborate. Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world — online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, virtual worlds, and more — teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time.
Each year the Horizon Advisory Board researches, identifies and ranks key trends affecting the practice of teaching, learning, research, and creative expression. The Board reviews current articles, interviews, papers, and new research to discover emerging or continuing trends. The trends are ranked according to how significant an impact they are likely to have on education in the next five years. The top trends highlighted for 2009 are presented below in priority order, as ranked by the Advisory Board.
Collective intelligence may give rise to multiple answers, all equally correct, to problems. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are redefining scholarship as we grapple with issues of top-down control and grassroots scholarship. Today’s learners want to be active participants in the learning process – not mere listeners; they have a need to control their environments, and they are used to easy access to the staggering amount of content and knowledge available at their fingertips.
A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project* found that massively multiplayer and other online game experience is extremely common among young people, is rich and varied, and that games offer opportunity for increased social interaction and civic engagement among this group. The success of game-based learning strategies owes to active participation and interaction being at the center of the experience, and signals that current educational methods are not engaging students enough.

* http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/263/report_display.asp
As tools of this nature continue to be developed and used, visual literacy will become an increasingly important skill in decoding, encoding, and determining credibility and authenticity of data. Visual literacy must be formally taught, but it is an evolving field even now.
New capabilities in terms of hardware and software are turning mobiles into indispensible tools. Third-party applications, now available on several models of mobile devices, expand their utility even further.   This trend, observed in the Horizon Report now for some time, will continue to impact the ways we communicate and view computing and networked resources.
The Advisory Board annually identifies critical challenges facing learning organizations over the five-year time period covered by this report, drawing them from a careful analysis of current events, papers, articles, and similar sources. The following challenges have been ranked as most likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, and creativity in the coming years.
There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not.
Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
We are expected, especially in public education, 
to measure and prove through formal assessment 
that our students are learning.
Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices.
This challenge is even more true today than it was when it first appeared in the Horizon Report two years ago. As new devices continue to make content almost as easy to access and view on a mobile as on a computer, and as ever more engaging applications take advantage of new interface technologies like accelerometers and multi-touch screens, the applications for mobiles continue to grow. This is more than merely an expectation to provide content: this is an opportunity for higher education to reach its constituents in new and compelling ways, in addition to the obvious anytime, anywhere benefits of these ubiquitous devices.
Data collection and mining of student information systems for such evidence is being considered as a component of accreditation, and institutions increasingly are expected to collect, manage, sort, and retrieve an expanding mountain of data related to not only learning, but the entire spectrum of their activities.  Current systems are not capable of managing and interpreting real time information flows on the scale that is anticipated.
A challenge cited as critical now for several years running, academic review and faculty rewards are out of sync with the practice of scholarship. Clear approaches to assessing emerging forms of scholarly practice are needed for tenure and promotion. Students who are living and learning with technologies that generate dynamic forms of content may find the current formalism and structure of scholarship and research to be static and “dead” as a way of collecting, analyzing and sharing results.
Schools are still using materials developed decades ago, but today's students come to school with very different experiences than those of 20 or 30 years ago, and think and work very differently as well. Institutions need to adapt to current student needs and identify new learning models that are engaging to younger generations. Assessment, likewise, has not kept pace with new modes of working, and must change along with teaching methods, tools, and materials.
The skills involved in writing and research have changed from those required even a few years ago. Students need to be technologically adept, to be able to collaborate with peers all over the world, to understand basic content and media design, and to understand the relationship between apparent function and underlying code in the applications they use daily.
what's significant here?
1. geolocation technology is everywhere
2. it's super easy to capture geolocation data
3. applications we already use can do things with geo data
4. it's easy to combine geo data, maps, and other data into mashups
examples
Buzzd
Flickr Maps
mobile Facebook apps
Drop.io Location
The Mapas Project @ Univ Oregon
Next Exit History @ Univ South Florida & Univ West Florida
1. it's easy to organize, tag, filter, and customize web content
2. even if it's not your own
3. collections of unrelated tools work together seamlessly
4. personal tools support online publishing & collaborative work
examples
Flat World Knowledge
WeBook
Delicious
Zotero
Blogs & RSS
Swurl
Friendfeed
FRESCA @ San Francisco State Univ
Open Publishing Lab @ RIT
Omeka
OpenSophie
smARThistory
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what's significant here?
1. semantic tools make connections obvious
2. connect related ideas, facts, places, people, events
3. a whole new way to think of searching & finding
4. organize & present information buried in our data
examples
SemantiFind
Open Calais
Tripit
Twine
Semantic Mediawiki
Semantic UMW @ Univ Mary Washington
SIOC.Me
1. many underlying technologies support smart objects
2. smart objects connect the physical world with the world of information
3. track an object's properties: location, age, condition, version
4. and contextual information about it, too: opinions, reviews, where to buy
examples
TikiTag
Mir:ror
ThinkeringSpace @ Illinois Institute of Technology
Semapedia
Arduino
Home-based Health @ Univ Florida
download the report at http://horizon.nmc.org
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The New Media Consortium's Emerging Technologies Initiative focuses on expanding the boundaries of teaching, learning and creative expression by creatively applying new tools in new contexts. The Horizon Project, the centerpiece of this initiative, charts the landscape of emerging technologies and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 300 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.

NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the United States, across Canada, and in Europe, Asia and Australia. Among the membership are an elite list of the most highly regarded colleges and universities in the world, as well as a growing list of innovative museums, research centers, foundations, and forward-thinking companies.

The consortium serves as a catalyst for the development of new applications of technology to support learning and creative expression, and sponsors programs and activities designed to stimulate innovation, encourage collaboration, and recognize excellence among its member institutions. Through its many projects, its comprehensive website, and its series of international conferences, the NMC stimulates dialog and understanding through the exploration of promising ideas, technologies, and applications.

As a central part of its mission, the NMC encourages and supports innovation in the pursuit of effective collaboration, especially in the activities and projects in which it plays a leadership role.
http://www.nmc.org
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In addition to the global report released each January, focused editions are also being released. The first regional edition, the 2008 Australia-New Zealand edition, was published in the fall of 2008. A K-12 edition is slated for release in March 2009.
Focused Editions
Eagerly Awaited Release
The release of the Report is awaited each January. Here, in what we trust is an obviously faked photo, we cherish the hope that the Report reaches interested parties in all sectors.
Past Horizon Reports, as well as the current edition, are available as PDF files at no cost on the Horizon Project website (http://horizon.nmc.org). Each year, reports from previous years are downloaded again.
2008 Report
2007 Report
2006 Report
2005 Report
2004 Report
Help!
How do I use this?
You can navigate this in two ways: either use the arrows at the lower right, which will 
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         To start the navigation over, click on the gray section to the left (it's the edge of the 
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"Geo Everything" by Michael Bearman (2009). 4:10.
Always Available
What's Inside?
This word cloud was created at http://wordle.net from the 2009 Horizon Report. Words that appear more frequently are larger, while words that appear less often are smaller.

The six emerging technologies that appear in the Report are not the only six that will be important in higher education; nor is the Report an attempt to predict adoption. Rather, the Report includes emerging technologies that the Advisory Board believes are of special interest during the time the Report was researched.
the personal web
what's significant here?
Fifteen years after the first commercial web pages began to appear, the amount of content available on the web is staggering. Sifting through the sheer volume of material — good or bad, useful or otherwise — is a daunting task. It is even difficult to keep track of the media posted by a single person, or by oneself. On the other hand, adding to the mix is easier than ever before, thanks to easy-to-use publishing tools for every type and size of media. To cope with the problem, computer users are assembling collections of tools, widgets, and services that make it easy to develop and organize dynamic online content. Armed with tools for tagging, aggregating, updating, and keeping track of content, today’s learners create and navigate a web that is increasingly tailored to their own needs and interests: this is the personal web.
semantic-aware
applications
smart objects
what's significant here?
Smart objects are the link between the virtual world and the real. A smart object “knows” about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, who owns it and how they use it, what other objects in the world are like it — and about its environment. Smart objects can report on their exact location and current state (full or empty, new or depleted, recently used or not).  Whatever the technology that embeds the capacity for attaching information to an object — and there are many — the result is a connection between a physical object and a rich store of contextual information. Think of doing a web search that reveals not pages of content, but the location, description, and context of actual things in the real world. The means to create, track, and use smart objects has not yet entered the mainstream, but recent advances in identification technology have led to some interesting proof-of-concept applications that suggest everyday uses are just down the road.
presentation created by Rachel S. Smith
flickr photo by shapeshift. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/shapeshift/707543617/
"What Is Cloud Computing" slide on flickr by Michael Marlatt. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelmarlatt/3151591960/
"Cloud = Freedom" slide on flickr by Michael Marlatt. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelmarlatt/3146169701/
flickr photo by Ollie T. creative commons. http://flickr.com/photos/olliesphotos/333193604/
"News" slide on flickr by lynetter. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/2424498807/
"Publish" slide on flickr by lynetter. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/2724002777/
flickr photo by Duncan Hull. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/2071110042/
flickr photo by Duncan Hull. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/639163558/
flickr photo by 5volt. creative commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/5volt/2200733171/
photo from http://www.gumball144.com/peter/pirelli-to-release-chipped-cyber-tire/
photo from http://www.inqmnd.ca/blog/?tag=advertising
creative commons. some rights reserved: by-nc-sa. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en