Six Technology Trends on the Horizon for Higher Education

The Horizon Report is a collaborative project done by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Since 2005, the Report identified emerging trends of technologies each year based on research. The New Media Consortium is a not-for-profit consortium that is dedicated to exploring and developing applications of emerging technologies for learning, research, and creative inquiry.

The 2011 Horizon Report has identified the following emerging trends:

Time to adoption: One year or less
Electronic books
Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to three years
Augmented reality
Game-based learning

Time to adoption: Four to five years
Gesture-based computing
Learning analytics

For the technologies mentioned above, maybe electronic books are most familiar to us. The report mentioned that the most interesting aspect of electronic books is neither the devices they are accessed with nor the texts themselves. “What makes electronic books a potentially transformative technology is the new kinds of reading experiences that they make possible” (p.8). “Electronic books have the potential to transform the way we interact with reading material of all kinds, from popular titles to scholarly works” (p. 8). You can read the full report from here.