Thanks to @starryhope01 for sharing the link to the Horizon Report 2010 Edition last week!  This post is number one of a four-part series on the Horizon Report 2010.

I prepared this summary to share with a “Future Thinking” group that is part of my district’s Technology Future, Global and Technology Mission Team.   My  approach to this summary is from the perspective of our K-12 educational institution.  Because of the length that the post was getting I decided to break up the post into four sections, an overview here and three subsequent posts looking at the emergent technologies for the three time horizons identified by the report.  Our group’s charge is to answer the following questions:

• Where are we going?
• In a year?  In five years?
• (How will we get there?)

It is fun (and challenging) being part of a group with such a broad task, as we can think freely about what might be.  Hopefully this report and my reflections on it (which are purely my take on what I read) help us to think (and imagine) about the future role that “technology” will play in the next five years and beyond in out schools.

Background of the Horizon Report 2010:

The Horizon Report is a summary of emerging trends in technology that will impact education in the coming years.  The Report’s main concern is on technology as it impacts Higher Education.  While this is the main focus of the report, K-12 educators can look to the emerging technologies here to see two things:  the skills students need to work with in their post-secondary learning, and to look to the opportunities that are coming to K-12 Education.  The New Media Consortium (NMC) produces a K-12 version of the Horizon Report, but the 2009 K-12 version wasn’t released until March last year.

The report tries not to just focus on the tech itself, but also looks at the impact and relevance of emergent technologies for Teaching, Learning and  Creative Inquiry.

The Four Key Trends (key drivers of tech adoptions)

• Abundance of resources and relationships made possible via the internet.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, study whenever and wherever they want to be.
• Technologies are increasingly cloud-based, and out notions of IT support are decentralized
• The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative in nature, cross-campus collaboration between departments.

Critical Challenges

• Changing role of the academy
• New forms of publishing
• Digital Media Literacy
• Economic Challenges

I think that whether we like it or not, all four of these challenges are clear and present in the K-12 world.  There is a cacophony of criticism of the American school model, whose school-year is based on an agrarian calendar and often scheduled like a factory floor.  Testing pressures put strain on the teaching of skills like creativity, entrepreneurship, self-branding, and lifelong learning.  I’m not yet convinced that the type of radical change that some suggest is the answer, but flexibility will be key to continued success.

We are so used to a traditional publishing model that we find it hard to imagine the use of an electronic textbook, but those opportunities are on their way sooner than we think.  Will we know enough about it to ask the right questions of publishers?

On a related note, the skills that students (, teachers and administrators) need to have navigate all types of digital media in an informed way are being taught in small pockets, but not tied together on a global scale.

Unlike Higher Ed institutions we can’t rely on any other major source of funding other than local tax revenue, and to a far lesser extent state and federal money.  We feel the blow from economic difficulties in times like these, but public schools should never expect to be entirely free of the pressures of budgeting challenges.

Technologies to Watch

The following posts focus on the specific technologies as they might impact education in our schools.  I’ve taken the liberty to both report what the report says in summary and to editorialize on their thoughts.

• 1-Year or Less Horizon
  • Mobile Computing
  • Open Content
• 2-3-Year Horizon
  • Electronic Textbooks
  • Augmented Reality
• 4-5-Year Horizon
  • Gesture-Based Computing
  • Visual Data Analysis

Past Horizon Reports

I thought that it might help to know where the Horizon Report is coming from.  Fortunately @Profdebock did the work for me already in the form of this chart:

2010 Horizon Report Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, Smith, Rachel S. and Stone, Sonja. 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2010.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 9:54 am and is filed under Summary, reflection, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.