The Horizon Report, co-published by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), describes emerging technologies thought likely to impact teaching, learning and creative expression in higher education. This report was the topic of a recent NERCOMP event, documented in an Emerging Technology wiki. Speakers were Phil Long, Bryan Alexander and Cyprien Lomas.
There was much discussion about social computing and personal broadcasting, both of which have flourished in the last year, with examples of various types of blogs and podcasts. Enabling these forms of expression has been technologies such as search, RSS, tagging and folksonomies as exemplified in web applications such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, Bloglines and more recently, Podzinger.
Further out on the horizon was the delivery of educational content to cell phones, still nascent in the US but now commonplace in Japan where cellphones are used to communicate in classes and even to take exams. Also on the horizon was educational gaming, particularly massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and context-aware environments and devices.
A major obstacle to adopting many of these new technologies in education has been integrating them with curricular systems in use as most institutions. It was noted that most course management systems including Blackboard and WebCT did not support blogging, podcasting, tagging or RSS.