Horizon Report from New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Identifies Six Learning Technologies to Watch

Today, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) released the 2007 Horizon Report at the ELI annual meeting in Atlanta. The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC's Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education. The fourth edition in this annual series, the 2007 Horizon Report is again a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and ELI.

Each year, the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. “Over the four years the report has been published, technology has taken some interesting turns,” noted Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of the NMC. “Campus leaders like the format of the report, and its focus on relevance and examples. Practitioners find it a valuable way to stay in front of the curve.” More than 10,000 copies of the 2006 Horizon Report were distributed in print and electronically; the report was downloaded nearly 30,000 times after its release.

“One of the reasons the Horizon report is so valuable is that it doesn’t just talk about technology—it talks about how it is used to enhance teaching, learning, and the creative arts,” according to Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE vice president and director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. “Putting the technology in an educational context and providing a number of examples really helps people understand why these particular technologies are so exciting.”

In defining the six selected areas—for 2007, User-Created Content, Social Networking, Mobile Phones, Virtual Worlds, New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication, and Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming—the project draws on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable individuals in business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project's Advisory Board probes current trends and challenges in higher education, explores possible topics for the Report, and ultimately directs the selection of the final technologies.

To create the 2007 Horizon Report, the 27 members of the 2007 Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, and interviews; discussed existing applications and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of more than 100 candidate technologies that emerged for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression.  The 2007 Advisory Board included representatives from eight countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, Japan, and China. Most of their work took place online over fall 2006, using a variety of collaboration tools, notably a special wiki site dedicated to the project.

The 28-page report is free, and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its use, easy duplication, and broad distribution. A full-color Adobe Acrobat version of the monograph is available at http://www.nmc.org/horizon/.

About EDUCAUSE

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 250 corporations, with 17,000 active members. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at www.educause.edu.

About The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI)

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) helps institutions advance learning through IT innovation. ELI is a community that works together to stay on the leading edge of teaching and learning with technology through a focus on learners, interaction and engagement, and learning technologies. ELI brings value to members through exploration, awareness, and enablement. Learn more about ELI at www.educause.edu/eli.

About The New Media Consortium

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, and museums dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the US, across Canada, and in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Among the membership are many of the most highly regarded institutions in North America, as well as the country’s leading state research universities, the nation’s most outstanding community colleges, and a growing list of innovative museums. 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 Web site, and its series of international conferences the NMC stimulates dialog and understanding through the exploration of promising ideas, technologies, and applications. For more information on the NMC, see its Web site at www.nmc.org.