Many years ago, I recall reading the New Media Consortium’s annual Horizon Report for the very first time. I remember getting the same feeling inside me that I used to get when I’d walk home from school and discover the scent of freshly baked cookies wafting from the kitchen where my mom was. As a diehard chocoholic, I guess that’s when I realized I had been bit by the edtech bug. You can imagine how I felt this fall when I received an invitation to participate on the Advisory Board for the 2014 Higher Education Horizon Project!
What is the Horizon Report?
If the Horizon Report is new to you, it is a valuable, thought-provoking collection of significant trends in educational technology that are most likely to impact education over three horizons: 1 year or less, 2-3 years, and 4-5 years. While nobody can predict the future, the report captures a collaborative vision of the dynamic ways emerging technologies are expected to impact higher education around the world. The trends are identified by the global, 52-member advisory board through a multi-step, collaborative wiki process that is facilitated by the impressively organized Samantha Becker of the New Media Consortium.
2014 Trends
Here are the six technology areas identified for this year’s report — and more information, including a description of each topic, is provided in the attached Preview (PDF).
Time to Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
• Flipped Classroom
• Learning Analytics
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
• 3D Printing
• Games and Gamification
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
• Quantified Self
• Virtual Assistants
How to Participate
If you know of examples of the trends noted above that could be included in the 2014 Horizon Report please use the brief web form at http://go.nmc.org/projects to share them with the New Media Consortium. The form asks for a title, a URL, and a one- or two-sentence description; you also will need to select which of the six topics your example falls under. The process takes about two minutes.
Example submissions are requested by Monday, December 16, but no matter what, we’d love to hear about what you are doing! All we really need is a sentence of description and a URL — we’ll do the rest.
