Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, the NMC has held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations. Each year, an Advisory Board considers the results of these dialogs and also looks at a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, and websites to generate a list of technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.

The project uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in each annual report, beginning with a survey of the work of other organizations and a review of the literature with an eye to spotting interesting emerging technologies. When the cycle starts, little is known, or even can be known, about the appropriateness or efficacy of many of the emerging technologies for these purposes, as the Horizon Project expressly focuses on technologies not currently in widespread use in academe. In a typical year, 75 or more of these technologies may be identified for further investigation; for the 2007 report, more than 100 were considered.

By engaging a wide community of interested parties, and diligently searching the Internet and other sources, enough information is gathered early in the process to allow the members of the Advisory Board to form an understanding of how each of the discovered technologies might be in use in settings outside of academe, to develop a sense of the potential the technology may have for higher education settings, and to envision applications of the technology for teaching, learning, and creative expression. The findings are discussed in a variety of settings—with faculty, industry experts, campus technologists, and of course, among the Horizon Advisory Board. Of particular interest to the Advisory Board every year is finding educational applications for these technologies that may not be intuitive or  obvious.

To create the 2007 Horizon Report, the 27 members of this year’s Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, and interviews; discussed existing applications, and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of candidate technologies for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Most of this work took place online over the fall of 2006, using a variety of tools, including a special wiki site and a set of del.icio.us links dedicated to the project. The del.icio.us tags are listed under the “Further Reading” section of each of the six topic areas, and readers are invited to view not only the resources that were listed in the report, but many others that were used in our research as well. Readers are further encouraged to add their own examples and readings to these dynamic lists by tagging them for inclusion in each category.

From the more than 100 technologies originally considered, the twelve that emerged at the top of the initial ranking process were further researched. Once this “short list” was identified, the potential applications of these important technologies were explored in greater detail by higher education practitioners who were either knowledgeable about them, or interested in thinking about how they might be used. A significant amount of time was spent researching applications or potential applications for each of the areas that would be of interest to practitioners.

Penultimately, each of these twelve was written up in the format of the Horizon Report. With the benefit of the full picture of how the topic would look in the report, the “short list” was then ranked yet again. The six technologies and applications that emerged are detailed in the sections that follow, and those descriptions are the final results of this process.