Horizon Report 2007

Each year Educause (in the USA) bring out a new Horizon Report which "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education." I linked to the 2006 one a few months ago, and now the 2007 edition has been published. One of the good things about the report is that it isn't very long (32 pages). The report identifies:

- trends in Higher Education generally (these may cause no shocks, including things like "The environment of higher education is changing rapidly", but the arguments are stated nice and concisely and they include "Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given");

- critical challenges (e.g. "The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment");

- technologies to watch (mobile, virtual worlds, social software, user-created content, "The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication" and multiplayer games). It then goes into the technologies in a little more detail, including a list of some relevant links.

I'm going to an Eduserv event about virtual worlds etc. the week after next, so this looks like a good thing to print out and read on the train.

New Media Consortium and Educause Learning Initiative (2007) Horizon Report: 2007 edition. New Media Consortium. http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=CSD4781

Photo by Sheila Webber: If only people like me wouldn't insist on printing things out to read, perhaps fewer trees would end up like this ;-)) (Sheffield, March 2007)