2009: another interesting year

What’s the next big thing in IT? Each year, the New Media Consortium develops a list of emerging technologies for the coming year (http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page)

The 2009 report has not been published yet but here is the short list.

For more detail of relevance to education go to: http://horizon.nmc.org/wdata/xdocs/2009-short-list.pdf

1. Mobiles
2. Cloud computing
3. Collaborative environments
4. Paperless publishing
5. Geo-everything
6. The personal web
7. 3D virtual worlds
8. Alternative input devices

Critical challenges:

1. There is a growing need for formal instruction in key skills – information literacy, visual literacy and technological literacy
2. There remains a generational skills gap between teachers and students
3. Educational material, assessment and learning models needs to reflect current student needs
4. There are significant shifts in scholarship and research
5. Data collection for students performance will need to be collected in large scale
6. Higher education is expected to deliver content and services via mobile devices

Key trends:

1. Increasing globalisation continues to affect all aspects of our lives
2. Collective intelligence and mass amateurisation is affecting how we think about content and knowledge
3. Gaming continues as a universal phenomenon influencing social interaction and learning environments
4. Visualisation tools are making information more meaningful and intuitive
5. Huge increases in content make filtering the ‘noise’ more difficult
6. Massive production of mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation.

Very interesting stuff!