2008 Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies

The 2008 Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media
Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. Each year the report
"describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant
impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next
one to five years." Some key trends that this year's report calls
attention to include:

Grassroots video: "What used to be difficult and expensive, and often
required special servers and content distribution networks, now
has become something anyone can do easily for almost nothing."

Collaboration webs: "The newest tools for collaborative work are small,
flexible, and free, and require no installation. Colleagues
simply open their web browsers and they are able to edit group
documents, hold online meetings, swap information and data, and
collaborate in any number of ways without ever leaving their
desks."

Mobile broadband: "New displays and interfaces make it possible to use
mobiles to access almost any Internet content -- content that
can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a
local wireless network."

Data mashups: "The availability of large amounts of data . . . is
converging with the development of open programming interfaces
for social networking, mapping, and other tools. This in turn
is opening the doors to hundreds of data mashups that will
transform the way we understand and represent information."

Collective intelligence: "In the coming years, we will see educational
applications for both explicit collective intelligence --
evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community
tagging -- and implicit collective intelligence, or data
gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people,
including search patterns, cell phone locations over time,
geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively
obtained."

Social operating systems: "Social operating systems will support whole
new categories of applications that weave through the implicit
connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our
lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking
around the people we know."

The complete report is available at
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf.