2009 Horizon Report

I’m sure some of you have seen mention of this (or the Comment Press version) around the ‘net, but for those who haven’t and who can’t be bothered to log in to get to the report, I’ve pulled out the highlights – this is also handy for those non Edu-folk who read, looking for insight into what technology in education might be doing.

So here is what EduCause/NMC thinks is going to be coming up:

  • Mobiles (about a year)
  • Cloud Computing (about a year)
  • Geo-everything (two – three years)
  • Personal Web (two – three years)
  • Semantic Aware Application (four – five years)
  • Smart Objects (four – five years)

The first couple of technologies are going to change the way that we think of computing, especially spacially – ubitious networks, powerfull enough handsets and powerful “cloud” backends. The second set seem to point to an increasingly “non-line” world that will integrate more data from the real world into the online systems. Regardless of how “plugged in” one gets, there will always be the need to interact with objects that would not otherwise have data associated with them… by giving them data. The last two will then allow users to do something with that data in a more simplistic manner. These are of course my interpretations of what they wrote, so feel free to create your own paragraph summary. But, if these come to pass I think there will be an increasingly gap between the academy and the “real world” and if education doesn’t step up and at least get one step behind, in four years, education will be in an even bigger world of hurt.


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