Tuesday, January 29

The Horizon Report 2008 - Six Emerging Technologies?

"The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium NMC’s Horizon Project, a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. The 2008 Horizon Report, the fifth in this annual series, is produced as a collaboration between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program."

This time around, I am not going to make any interesting reflections regarding this report, as there are already tons of other constructive (and critical!) ones out there. Click here to discover them for yourself :)

I suppose the only buzz word that seem to gain specific interest, is the future Social Operating Systems, which seems to already be here. The problem you might face when you get a lot of professionals around to discuss the future emerging technologies, is that they get stuck in the present and past, blurring their vision to really predict the next key disruptive technologies to emerge.

However, this 32-page horizon report is something that we should eat, digest and reflect. To me, the juiciest part of this report is not what it says, but what it links us to. Interestingly, they are using the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us to easily share resources related to these six (6) key emerging trends:

Near Horizon (Less Than 1 Year)

Mid Horizon (2-3 Years)

Far Horizon (4-5 Years)

In short, have fun discovering the six key emerging technologies! And if you don't find that interesting and valuable, I am quite sure you will discover some new tools or articles, which you haven't already explored. In other words, this report has value to our learning minds :)

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