The 2007 Horizon Report

The core of the 2007 Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. The focus of the Horizon Project centers on the applications of emerging technologies to teaching, learning, and creative expression. The Horizon Advisory Board reviewed key trends in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity, and ranked those it considered most important for campuses to watch.

1. The environment of higher education is changing rapidly. Higher education faces demand by students for instant access and interactive experiences.
2. globalization of communication, entertainment, and information provides students with wider perspectives and resources than ever before, placing them in a new and continually changing learning space.
3. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college.
4. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication.
5. The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
6. Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty.

These trends result in critical challenges to higher education:

1. How to assess of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers.
2. How to navigate changes in scholarship research, creative expression, and learning
3. How intellectual property and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done
4. An apparent skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content
5. How renewed emphasis on collaborative learning pushes the education community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment
6. Growing expectation for higher education to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices

With all of these trends and challenges in mind, the 2007 Horizon Report highlights six technologies that research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years. A central focus of the discussion of each technology is its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression.

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

• Web 2.0 advanced file sharing

• Web 2.0 sites that make it easy to contribute ideas and content
• social networking
• Recording, editing, and distributing audio

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

• your phone is your personal digital repository
• creating and sharing short videos
• virtual worlds in education
• enabling customized information to be displayed on a map

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

• expand access to scholarship and new ideas with emerging forms of “the book”
• goal oriented massively multiplayer online (MMO) games
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)
• creating a single digital identity that can be used in any place where a log-in is needed

Does all this sound like science fiction?  Consider the time to adoption for each of these ideas. For those innovations listed in the “Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less” this use of technology is upon us. Our students are already engaged in activities and behaviors which embrace this technology. The question for advising has been, and continues to be, how to use these tools to better reach and teach our students in advising.

Have you and your collegues answered this question? Have you already discovered the possibilities of social networking, virtual worlds, cell phones as digital gateway, or content creation for academic advising?  Tell us about it!  We are calling for co-presenters for the December 12 Webinar entitled “On the Horizon: Future Scenarios for Academic Advising and Technology.” Your ideas and innovations will be explored in the Webinar…and don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself a presenter. We can also share ideas in our handouts. Use this SUBMISSION FORM to let us know about your future scenarios, even if your ideas are not fully developed or implemented. The future is emerging in academic advising with your help!