At Educause ELI09 meeting, Larry Johnson (NMC‘s CEO) presented the latest Horizon Report for 2009. The Report discusses the technologies which will be at the forefront of education during 2009 and it places them in three time horizons.
The technologies to watch are Mobiles, Cloud Computing, Geo-Everything, The Personal Web, Semantic-Aware Applications and Smart Objects.
Mobile technologies are letting the Internet converge with telephony and bring Web services to every corner, thus following everybody’s whereabouts. Cloud computing’s instances are deployed whenever we use Google Docs or whatever Web-based application in which data and the software itself is stored in “the cloud”, ie in (perhaps distributed fashion) server farms around the world. However, in the mid range timeframe, the Semantic Web and the Personal Web are likely to get a lot of attention in education. The Semantic-aware Web will allow machines to “understand” the meaning of searches we do and the information we need and seek. For instance, while today the answer to the question “How many world leaders are over the age of 60?” is scattered through Google’s search result, soon it may be looked up without hassle, directly. On the other hand…
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.
The Horizon Report can be downloaded free through its website at the NMC. It comes in two versions: the classic pdf Report, and a more “web-friendly” version, which is done through WordPress’ CommentPress plugin, a fantastic technology in itself that showcases WP’s versatility as a great publiching anc content management platform. There’s also a Horizon wiki, which allows for continous collaboration on the Report’s issues.
Last, the Report will be published later in its classic square pamphlet formar. The Spanish version is being prepared by the Universitat Oberta de Catalonya (uoc.edu).
