Table of Contents
Executive Summary...... 2
¡ Key Trends
¡ Critical Challenges
¡ Technologies to Watch
¡ The Horizon Project
Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Electronic Books....... 8
¡ Overview
¡ Relevance for Teaching, Learning, Research, or Creative Inquiry
¡ Electronic Books in Practice
¡ For Further Reading
Mobiles................... 12
¡ Overview
¡ Relevance for Teaching, Learning, Research, or Creative Inquiry
¡ Mobiles in Practice
¡ For Further Reading
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Augmented Reality. 16
¡ Overview
¡ Relevance for Teaching, Learning, Research, or Creative Inquiry
¡ Augmented Reality in Practice
¡ For Further Reading
Game-Based Learning............................................................................................................................ 20
¡ Overview
¡ Relevance for Teaching, Learning, Research, or Creative Inquiry
¡ Game-Based Learning in Practice
¡ For Further Reading
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Gesture-Based Computing...................................................................................................................... 24
¡ Overview
¡ Relevance for Teaching, Learning, Research, or Creative Inquiry
¡ Gesture-Based Computing in Practice
¡ For Further Reading
Learning Analytics.. 28
¡ Overview
¡ Relevance for Teaching, Learning, Research, or Creative Inquiry
¡ Learning Analytics in Practice
¡ For Further Reading
Methodology................ 31
2011 Horizon Project Advisory Board................................. 33
The internationally recognized series of Horizon
Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment.
To create the report, the Horizon Project’s Advisory Board, an international body of experts in education, technology, business, and other fields, engaged in a discussion based on a set of research questions intended to surface significant trends and challenges and to identify a broad array of potential technologies for the report. This dialog was enriched by a wide range of resources, current research, and practice that drew on the expertise of the NMC community and the communities of the members of the board.
These interactions among the Advisory Board are the focus of the Horizon Report research, and this
report details the areas in which these experts were in strong agreement.
Each edition of the Horizon Report introduces six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use within three adoption horizons over the next five years. Key trends and challenges that will affect current practice over the same time frame add context to these discussions. Over the course of just a few weeks, the Advisory Board came to a consensus about the six topics that appear here in the 2011 Horizon Report. The examples and readings under each topic area are meant to provide practical models as well as access to more detailed information. Wherever possible, an effort was made to highlight the innovative work going on among learning-focused institutions. The precise research methodology employed is detailed in the closing
EXECUTIVE SU MMAR Y
section of this report.
The report’s format is consistent from year to year and edition to edition, and opens with a discussion of the trends and challenges identified by the Advisory Board as most important for the next five years. The format of the main section of this edition closely reflects the focus of the Horizon Project itself, centering on the applications of emerging technologies in higher education settings. Each section is introduced with an overview that describes what the topic is, followed by a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.
Several concrete examples of how the technology is being used are given. Finally, each section closes
with an annotated list of suggested readings and additional examples that expand on the discussion in the report, including a link to the tagged resources collected during the research process by project staff, the Advisory Board, and others in the global Horizon Project community.
Key Trends
The technologies featured in every edition of the Horizon Report are embedded within a contemporary context that reflects the realities of the time, both in the sphere of education and in the world at large.
To ensure this context was well understood as the current report was produced, the Advisory Board engaged in an extensive review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research to identify and rank trends that are currently affecting the practices of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.
Once detailed, the list of trends was then ranked according to how significant each was likely to be for learning-focused institutions over the next five years.
The highest ranked of those trends had significant agreement among the Advisory Board members, who considered them to be key drivers of educational technology adoptions for the period 2011 through 2015. They are listed here in the order in which the Advisory Board ranked them.
¡ The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing. This multi-year trend was again ranked very highly, indicating its continued influence. With personal access to the Internet from mobile devices on the rise, the growing set of resources available as open content, and a variety of reference and textbooks available electronically, students’ easy and pervasive access to information outside of formal campus resources continues to encourage educators to take a careful look at the ways we can best serve learners.
¡ People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
This highly-ranked trend, also noted last year, continues to permeate all aspects of daily life.
Mobiles contribute to this trend, where increased availability of the Internet feeds the expectation of access. Feelings of frustration are common when it is not available. Companies are starting to respond to consumer demand for access anywhere; in 2010, programs like Google’s Fiber for Communities sought to expand access to underserved communities, and several airlines began offering wireless network access in the air during flights.
¡ The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured. This trend continues from 2010 and is being driven by the increasingly global and cooperative nature of business interactions facilitated by Internet technologies.
The days of isolated desk jobs are disappearing, giving way to models in which teams work actively together to address issues too far-reaching or complex for a single worker to resolve alone.
Market intelligence firm IDC notes that some one billion people fit the definition of mobile workers already, and projects that fully one-third of the global workforce — 1.2 billon workers —will perform their work from multiple locations by 2013.
¡ The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized. This trend, too, was noted in 2010 and continues to influence decisions about emerging technology adoption at educational institutions. As we turn to mobile applications for immediate access to many resources and tasks that once were performed on desktop computers, it makes sense to move data and services into the cloud. The challenges of privacy and control continue to affect adoption and deployment, but work continues on resolving the issues raised by increasingly networked information.
Critical Challenges
Any discussion of technology adoption must also consider important constraints and challenges, and the Advisory Board drew deeply from a careful analysis of current events, papers, articles, and similar sources, as well as from personal experience in detailing a long list of challenges institutions face in adopting any new technology. Several important challenges are detailed below, but it was clear that behind them all was a pervasive sense that individual organizational constraints are likely the most important factor in any decision to adopt — or not to adopt — any given technology. While acknowledging that local barriers to technology adoptions are many and significant, the Advisory Board focused its discussions on challenges that are common to institutions and the educational community as a whole.
The highest ranked challenges they identified are listed here, in the order of their rated importance.
¡ Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. This challenge, first noted in 2008,reflects universal agreement among those on the Horizon Project Advisory Board. Although there is broad consensus that digital media liter acy is vitally important for today’s students, what skills constitute digital literacy are still not welldefined nor universally taught. Teacher preparation programs are beginning to include courses related to digital media literacy, and universities are beginning to fold these literacy skills into coursework for students, but progress continues to be slow. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital technologies morph and change quickly at a rate that generally outpaces curriculum development.
¡ Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching. Noted first in 2010, this challenge continues. Electronic books, blogs, multimedia pieces, networked presentations, and other kinds of scholarly work can be difficult to evaluate and classify according to traditional metrics, but faculty members are increasingly experimenting with these alternate forms of expression. At the same time, reconciling new forms of scholarly activity with old standards continues to be difficult, creating tension and raising questions as to where faculty energy is best directed.
¡ Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition
to traditional models of the university. The twin challenges of providing high-quality services and controlling costs continue to impel institutions to seek creative solutions. As a result, innovative institutions are developing new models to serve students, such as streaming survey courses over the network so students can attend from their dorm or other locations to free up lecture space. As these pressures continue, other models will emerge as well.
¡ Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike. New developments in technology are exciting and their potential for improving quality of life is enticing, but it can be overwhelming to attempt to keep up with even a few of the many new tools that are released. User-created content is exploding, giving rise to information, ideas, and opinions on all sorts of interesting topics, but following even some of the hundreds of available authorities means sifting through a mountain of information on a weekly or daily basis. There is a greater need than ever for effective tools and filters for finding, interpreting, organizing, and retrieving the data that is important to us.
These trends and challenges are a reflection of the impact of technology that is occurring in almost every aspect of our lives. They are indicative of the changing nature of the way we communicate, access information, connect with peers and colleagues, learn, and even socialize. Taken together, they provided the Advisory Board a frame through which to consider the potential impacts of nearly 50 emerging technologies and related practices that were analyzed and discussed for possible inclusion in this edition of the Horizon Report. Six of those were chosen via successive rounds of ranking; they are summarized below and detailed in the main body of the report.
Technologies to Watch
The six technologies featured in the 2011 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons
that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative inquiry. The near-term horizon assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for institutions within the next twelve months; the mid-term horizon, within two to three years; and the far-term, within four to five years. It should be noted at the outset that the Horizon Report is not a predictive tool. It is meant, rather, to highlight emerging technologies with considerable potential for our focus areas of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. Each of the six is already the focus of attention at a number of innovative organizations around the world, and the work we showcase here reveals the promise of a wider impact. On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are electronic books and mobiles. Electronic books are moving closer to mainstream adoption for educational institutions, having appeared on the mid-term horizon last year. Mobiles reappear as well, remaining on the near-term horizon as they become increasingly popular throughout the world as a primary means of accessing Internet resources. Resistance to the use of mobiles in the classroom continues to impede their adoption in many schools, but a growing number of institutions are finding ways to take advantage of a technology that nearly all students, faculty, and staff carry.
Electronic books continue to generate strong interest in the consumer sector and are increasingly available on campuses as well.
Modern electronic readers support note-taking and research activities, and are beginning to augment these basic functions with new capabilities — from immersive experiences to support for social interaction — that are changing our perception of what it means to read.
Mobiles enable ubiquitous access to information, social networks, tools for learning and productivity, and much more. Mobile devices continue to evolve, but it is the increased access to affordable and reliable networks that is driving this technology now. Mobiles are capable computing devices in their own right — and they are increasingly a user’s first choice for Internet access.
The second adoption horizon considers technologies expected to gain widespread usage within two to three years, and this year’s candidates are augmented reality and game-based learning.
Both intersect with practices in mainstream popular culture, both have been considered significant tools
for education for many years, and both have made appearances on a number of campuses already.
Advances in hardware and software, as well as in a broader acceptance of new methods in teaching, secured the place of these innovations as the top technologies for the mid-term horizon.
Augmented reality refers to the layering of information over a view or representation of the normal world, offering users the ability to access place-based information in ways that are compellingly intuitive. Augmented reality brings a significant potential to supplement information delivered via computers, mobile devices, video, and even the printed book. Much simpler to create and use now than in the past, augmented reality feels at once fresh and new, yet an easy extension of existing expectations and practices.
Game-based learning has grown in recent years as research continues to demonstrate its effectiveness for learning for students of all ages. Games for education span the range from single-player or small-group card and board games all the way to massively multiplayer online games and alternate reality games. Those at the first end of the spectrum are easy to integrate with coursework, and in many institutions they are already an option; but the greatest potential of games for learning lies in their ability to foster collaboration, problem-solving, and procedural thinking. For a variety of reasons, the realization of this potential is still two to three years away.
Looking to the far-term horizon, four to five years from now for widespread adoption, are gesturebased
computing and learning analytics. Both remain largely speculative and not yet in widespread usage on campuses, but both are also garnering significant interest and increasing exposure.
Gesture-based computing moves the control of computers from a mouse and keyboard to the
motions of the body via new input devices. Depicted in science fiction movies for years, gesture-based computing is now more grounded in reality thanks to the recent arrival of interface technologies such as Kinect, SixthSense, and Tamper, which make interactions with computational devices far more intuitive and embodied.
Learning analytics loosely joins a variety of data-gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of using what is learned to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment in real time. Building on the kinds of information generated by Google Analytics and other similar tools, learning analytics aims to mobilize the power of data-mining tools in the service of learning, and embracing the complexity, diversity, and abundance of information that dynamic learning environments can generate.
Each of these technologies is described in detail in the main body of the report, where a discussion of what the technology is and why it is relevant to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry may also be found. Given the practical focus of the report, a listing of examples of the technology in use, especially in higher education, is a key component of each of the six main topics. Our research indicates that all six of these technologies, taken together, will have a significant impact on learning-focused organizations within the next five years.
The Horizon Project
This report is part of a longitudinal research study of emerging technologies that began in March 2002. Since that time, under the banner of the Horizon Project, the New Media Consortium and its research partners have held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, museum professionals, teachers and other school professionals, and representatives of leading corporations from more than thirty countries. These conversations have been the impetus for a series of nearly 20 annual reports focused on emerging technologies relevant to formal and informal learning in colleges, universities, schools, and museums.
In 2008, the NMC embarked on a new series of regional companion editions of the Horizon Report, with the dual goals of understanding how technology is being absorbed using a smaller lens, and also noting the contrasts between technology use in one area compared to another. To date, companion editions have been prepared that center on education in Australia, New Zealand, and the fourteen countries of Iberoamerica; the series will expand to include Europe, Singapore, and Africa over the next two years.
The flagship Horizon Report, published each January, focuses on higher education globally, and is translated into multiple languages every year. Over all editions, the readership of the reports is estimated at well over 600,000 worldwide, with readers in more than 70 countries.
The Horizon Project Navigator. This edition of the Horizon Report kicks off the ninth year of the series and a turning point in the NMC’s Emerging Technologies Initiative, which is dedicated to charting the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. In each of the preceding years, the Horizon Project process has focused on the creation of a print-based publication (or its pdf analog), one produced through a collaborative process that leveraged the productive potential of a wiki for posting and responding to ideas, RSS feeds for gathering information dynamically, and tagging for collecting and sharing references. The decision to print the NMC report was based on the fact that a physical report remains a powerful tool on many campuses.
However, in its continuing interest in modeling the advantages of new technologies, over the course of 2010, and with the generous support of the HP, the NMC designed and produced the Horizon Project Navigator (http://navigator.nmc.org), an online database that harnesses the power of technology and social media to create an information and resource hub that is made stronger through the participation of its users.
The Horizon Project Navigator leverages the affordances of social media and computation to offer users access to the same materials — and more — used by the Horizon Project Advisory Board. It is a dynamic, customizable, and powerful tool for individuals who want the ability to chart the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry through their own set of needs and interests. The platform provides a fully dynamic online version of the Horizon Report created for the emerging technology professional.
Dynamic reports can be adapted and modified to suit the needs of individual users, and Navigator itself provides a space within which anyone can participate in the gathering, sifting, and sharing of ideas related to the trends and challenges of emerging technologies in the context of formal and informal learning. The Horizon Project Navigator includes all the research materials, project information, and other ephemera that has been created from the intensive and collaborative process used in creating each annual Horizon Report. The 2011 Horizon Report was the first of the series that was able to draw on the resources of the Horizon Project Navigator in its creation, and marks a new epoch in the history of the project.
The Horizon Project Wiki. The Horizon Project uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in each report. The process begins with a comprehensive survey of the literature, technology news reports, and the work of other organizations. The 43 members of this year’s Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, blogs, and interviews; discussed existing applications, and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of candidate technologies for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. This work took place entirely online and may be reviewed on the project wiki at
The effort to produce the report and the findings detailed within it began in mid-September 2010 and concluded in early January 2011, a period of just under four months. Most of the work on the project took place in and is preserved on the wiki. All of the interim materials and rankings used to create the report can be found there, as well as the discussions of the Advisory Board around each topic. The six technologies and applications that emerged at the top of the final rankings — two per adoption horizon — are detailed in the chapters that follow.
Each of those chapters includes detailed descriptions, links to active demonstration projects, and a wide array of additional resources related to the six profiled technologies. Those profiles are the heart of the 2011 Horizon Report, and will fuel the work of the Horizon Project throughout 2011-12. For those wanting to know more about the processes used to generate the Horizon Reports, many of which are ongoing and extend the work in the reports, we refer you to the report’s final section on the research methodology.
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