On our horizon: Horizon.au
Dr Larry Johnson is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC) , an international consortium of nearly 300 colleges, universities, and museums working together to explore the use of new technologies to expand the boundaries of teaching, learning, and creative expression.
Dr Jonhnson is an acknowledged expert on the effective application of new media in many contexts and the author a number of books and articles exploring related emerging trends and issues. The NMC’s annual Horizon Report has become one of the leading tools used by senior executives in universities and museums to set priorities for technology planning.
Larry will be launching, for the VET sector, the Australian Horizon Report, at eLearning08 on 4 - 5 December 2008. This launch will be part of a series of activities happening around the country.
“The Horizon report is a very useful tool for practitioners. One response to the deluge of information teachers face is 'I don’t have time'. The Horizon Report is written for non-technologists. It aims to reduce the fire hose of new information to a manageable trickle”.
Larry Johnson used this analogy to describe the usefulness to TAFE teachers of the 2008 Horizon Report, Australia and New Zealand Edition (or Horizon.au as it is called informally). In our interview, Larry discussed the report, exploring what’s on the horizon for us and what’s impacting on that picture.
The report is in the final stages of completion. It will provide a perspective of which technologies are emerging to impact most critically on education unique to Australia and New Zealand over the next five years. The report, the result of a process of intense consultation with Australian and New Zealand experts and educators, technology professionals, industry personnel and others will be of value and interest to teachers and their managers in shaping their planning.
To start with, a couple of definitions taken from the New Media Centre’s website:
The Horizon Project, as the centerpiece of NMC's Emerging Technologies Initiative, charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report. Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, the NMC has held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations.
Each year, an Advisory Board considers the results of these dialogues and also looks at a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, and websites to generate a list of technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.
Each edition of the Horizon Report is released with a Creative Commons License and may be freely replicated and distributed for noncommercial purposes provided that each is distributed only in its entirety.
The Australian Horizon Report
In 2008, the NMC introduced several new Horizon Projects focused on specific program areas, including Horizon.au, which will focus on emerging technologies and their impact on education through a uniquely Australasian lens. Horizon.au applies the process developed for the Horizon Project with a focus on emerging technologies for learning institutions in Australia and New Zealand.
Q: What was the process of developing the Australian report?
A: A consultation group, was drawn together to meet in Melbourne on 9-10 July 2008. The starting point for decision- making was a list of 100 new technologies likely to impact on education in the next one, three and five years. These were discussed and voted upon, and reduced to a list of twelve. Following further research and consultation, this twelve has been whittled to a final six.
Q: Were you surprised by the findings?
A: Yes, I was. The initial list of about 100 was the same as the Global edition’s list (the Horizon Report has a large international component – 12 countries outside North America were represented in the global edition). This was no surprise given that the manufacturers and technologies are global. However, what did surprise me was that the uptake of these technologies in education is so very different across the two continents. In fact, there is only one area of overlap between the topics.
Q: Why does the Australian picture differ so much?
A: This is as much a factor of local policy and government regulation as anything. This was identified as one of the largest constraints.
1. Broadband is continuously a challenge for Australian educators. I’m aware there are exciting initiatives coming up which will be trying to remedy that. But for now it’s been a challenge for Australian schools and universities to jump on board. This impacts, for instance on the uptake of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds require a solid internet connection.
2. Broadband in itself is not much different to the US situation, however, what is truly influencing is the pricing structures. In Australia you use a metred pricing system, which is more costly than the system used in the USA. There we pay a fee based on the capacity of the connection, but for you, the more you use the Internet, the more you pay. This acts as a disincentive to uptake. I understand this may change, but for now it’s a challenge.
3. The challenge that floated to number three in Australia, we also face here in the US, but it’s not amongst the top few. This is the challenge of assessment. What I mean here is the need people have for data on whether the new tools work – what proof do we have these work? what research is there? I believe though, that it is like the chicken and egg conundrum -- and sometimes you need to experiment and try first in order to get the data.
4. Protectionism and security – policies and firewalls - is an issue - often to the exclusion of allowing, for example, social networking or digital materials. In the US our universities have the same issues. They have now determined that they need to have more than one network. Clearly you need to protect important private material, such as student data. But you also need a place where researchers can collaborate.
“My son was going on the backpacking of Europe trip. We asked him to send us emails and he said,
“Oh Dad, emails are for OLD people”.
Emails are now considered more formal, a thing of the previous generations. Young people prefer to communicate in text, short bursts, or alternatively just be with their friends”.
5. The increasing gap between the skills of teachers and those of students. Students now are familiar with, and think of the web as a just a thing in their life. I see two groups of upcoming students – both are now either adults or coming into adulthood.
- Post 1983 – grew up with computers
- Post 1992 - grew up with the internet
They have always had computers there, in their lives, as a “thing you do”.
I relate this to my own experience of radio. I grew up with it, my father didn’t. He was fascinated with the technology, played with it, pulled radios to bits, built new ones all the time. I just wanted it to play music on it. Didn’t think about how I knew to search for stations or whatever, I just knew. It was just there. I think of the web in the same way for younger people. They just think of it as a thing you do, not a technology.
Many of our teachers simply lack the technical skills to make use of emerging technologies and are out of step with their students. The early experimenters have still to enter the mainstream of teachers. The good news is that this self-corrects over time. Teachers will step up if they need to learn something new. They need to have a good reason, but if they do have good reason they do it in droves.
Q: What trends are happening world wide?
A: The value of the Horizon report is attained over a period of years. Over a period of time you get a real picture of meta-trends. We are in the 6th year of the global edition of the Horizon Report we have just completed the research for the report of next January. The meta-trends we’ve seen over these years are not fundamentally different in Australia:
The increasing connectedness of people around the globe has and continues to dramatically reduce the costs of collaboration. The decline in these costs is paralleled by tremendous growth in the sorts of free and/or very-low-cost tools available to bring people together in real time, to share assets and resources, and to communicate.
Extract from Draft version of the 2008 Horizon Report, Australia and New Zealand Edition
- The network has become more ubiquitous and is now overlapping the cellular network. If you look at an overlay of the earth at night with GSM networks you can see the networks are truly global.
- We will see increasingly more devices like the iPhone – with more power and more connections. There are 1.2 billion phones are produced each year. The competition to be the most attractive to a consumer is enormous. So the pace of innovation in this area is outstanding. The impact for educators will be a shift in the ways learning spaces are designed and the places and ways students will be able to access resources.
- There will be an increasing use of 3D – computers will be able to process information in a multi-dimensional way and 3D printers have been developed to aid. This is impacting on research, for example, In biology and medicine.
- Virtual worlds – the move to a three dimensional web (eg Second Life) is continuing. People will increasingly communicate in virtual space. I do every day.
Implications for teachers.
As both computers and the network increase in connectedness and capability, the set of technologies available to educators grows ever richer. The ubiquity of these tools has lowered the cost of entry to use them, and is in turn opening up a range of new opportunities for e-learning and other forms of technology-mediated learning.
Extract from Draft version of the 2008 Horizon Report, Australia and New Zealand Edition
Q: How is the Horizon Report useful to teachers and educational leaders?
- Reduces the manageability and size of the task teachers face in responding to new technologies
- Allows implications to be discussed
- Iterative process and involves ongoing conversations
- Informs policy making and research
- This then informs decision makers
- It also informs us and leads to undertake projects as a result.
Q: What happens now in the process?
A: What happens with the global edition, especially in North America is that the report becomes a matter for discussion, particularly around the policy implications. Educational leaders get their faculties together and talk about the report, what it means for their planning, their practice, and what policy implications they see.
We ask for, and expect, the feedback to be given – the process is truly iterative. The new technologies themselves enable to the process to be iterative, through the use of wikis etc. We hope the same process will continue in Australia.
The next step will be to collectively develop a research agenda to help identify and explore remaining issues. It will be a source for colleges, educators, researchers to find vetted topics of importance. Before TAFE and VET teachers can adopt and implement these new ideas, they will need to sort through a range of questions.
The next phase is an acknowledgement that the Report is not the end of the process, but the beginning. So keep your eye on http://horizon.nmc.org/australia to see developments.
Q: Next…the world?
A: Yes, we are looking to do a European version of the Horizon report down the road and after that an Asian version. The experience of considering similarities and differences has been exciting and very worthwhile.
And the predictions for Australia for the next 5 years for uptake of new technologies in education?
The following summary comes from the source, the Horizon.au report itself:
Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Virtual Worlds/Immersive Environments
They are: Virtual worlds, 3D environments created on computers, which people enter as an avatar. Example: Second Life
Implications for education:
- professional development activities eg conferences and meetings
- alternative learning experiences them to stimulate critical thinking, exploratory learning, experimentation
- distance learning and access to expertise
- allowing students to take part in activities that are difficult to host in real-life classrooms
- scenario-based learning, allowing learners to interact with – or even construct – places and objects of historical or scientific significance.
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Cloud-Based Applications
They are: powerful, often free tools that run from, and store data on, remote servers instead of local computers. Documents and other content created with these tools are easily sharable. Examples Google Docs, zoho.com, Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger.
Implications for education:
- Reduction in overall cost of computing
- ease of groupwork and collaboration at a distance
- can provide students and teachers with free or low-cost alternatives to expensive, proprietary productivity tools
- accessible for a variety of computer and even mobile platforms, making these tools available anywhere the Internet can be accessed
Geolocation
This is: not new technology but appearing in a range of common devices like mobile phones, cameras, and handheld devices. New also is the ability to
easily create map mashups online using multimedia and geotagged data.
Implications for education:
- Quick, easy to use, low cost or free and effective applications emerging to capture and display geolocative data are available online
- Researchers can study migrations of animals, birds, and insects or track the spread of epidemics using data from a multitude of personal devices uploaded as geotagged photographs, videos, or other media plotted on readily-available maps.
- Many free or very low-cost tools, and are much much easier to use than previously.
- Opens up opportunities for learning and data acquisition in the field for the sciences, social observation studies, and other fields.
- Mobile learners can receive context-relevant information about nearby resources, points of interest, historical sites, and colleagues, connecting all this with online information for just-in-time learning. Geotagged information can also be mined for research purposes
- Geotagging is being used to annotate maps with individual experiences and memories of a place.
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Alternative Input Devices
These are: devices that allow users to manipulate content intuitively, using natural gestures like flicking the wrist or sweeping the fingertips over a display. (eg Wii, iphone)
Implications for education:
- engage the user on multiple levels, creating more immersive experiences for learners.
- Input devices that behave like instruments or artists’ materials enhance the transfer of real-world skills to computer-assisted music and art, enabling artists to experiment with a wider range of forms for creative expression.
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Deep Tagging
This is: the next generation of tagging allowing creation of a direct link to a small part of a larger piece of media, eg an image or a video. Others who search for those tags would be able to retrieve specific content via these tags,
Implications for education:
- Ability to retrieve specific content through search for these tags facilitating just-in-time learning
- Ease of capture of images, video and audio clips
- Capacity to create thematic resource collections as more rich media goes online
- video and audio libraries that would be as easy to search and tag as text-based resources are now.
- Tagging within video and audio clips could also facilitate the organisation and description of rich media in social software environments and enable users to co-create content by annotating the media.
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Next-Generation Mobile
This is: mobile phone with technologies, including digital photography and videography, instant messaging, email, web browsing, geolocation, and voice calling.
Implications for education:
- applications of mobile technology to teaching and learning are virtually limitless
- Nearly every student carries a mobile device, making it a natural choice for content delivery and even field work and data capture
- Language learners can install applications on their mobiles that let them look up words and even hear the word pronounced in the language they are learning
- An application for the Apple iPhone shows the sky layer of Google Earth, providing a pocket astronomy atlas that can be used in the field to identify stars and planets
- the capabilities of mobiles will soon rival those of a computer with a web browser. The continuing pace of innovation around mobile devices and software promises that even greater capabilities are on the way, and ensures that mobile will continue to be a space to watch
Dr Larry Johnson will be launching the 2008 Horizon Report on 5 December 2008 at eLearning08
See also
Being there ... in the unevenly distributed future, Alan Levine, CogDog | eZine December 2007