Technologies to Watch

The technologies featured in the 2007 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their widespread adoption on university campuses. The first adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of broad adoption within the next year; the second, adoption within two to three years, and the third, adoption within four to five years.

The two technologies that appear on this year’s nearest adoption horizon, user-created content and social networking, are already established on many campuses, and examples are readily available. Those in the mid-term horizon, mobile phones and virtual worlds, are not hard to find on campuses with leading-edge technologists and adventuresome faculty. Naturally, the farthest horizon contains the two least-adopted topics: new scholarship and emerging forms of publication, and massively multiplayer educational gaming; but even in this horizon practical examples exist, though they are still in development or in experimental stages.

In the body of the report, each featured technology includes specific examples, but as the horizon moves farther out in time these tend to be more isolated. Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

• User-Created Content. It’s all about the audience, and the “audience” is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.
• Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.
• Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.
• Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world—or diverge wildly from it—present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.
• The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like—and how new scholars might work.
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones.

Not unlike last year, some of these topics will seem familiar to regular readers of the Horizon Report. Educational gaming, a mid-term horizon topic last year, appears here in two variants: virtual worlds and massively multiplayer educational gaming. Over the past year, it has become clear that these topics, while related, are not simply two sides of the same  coin. Virtual worlds are not games, but spaces where many sorts of activities might occur, most of them social. Massively multiplayer games sometimes take place in virtual worlds, but not always. They are more structured, with clear goals and objectives built in, and players interact with the setting in ways that are generally very different than the ways one might interact with the elements of an open-ended virtual world.

Mobile phones also make a reappearance, in the same horizon as last year but nonetheless a year closer. The networks to support them have arrived (or very nearly so), and the capabilities of phones have continued to increase at a rapid pace. Campuses are beginning to implement programs that provide every student with a cell phone, much as they have done with computers in the past. Clearly, the use of the mobile phone as an educational tool is becoming more widespread and accepted.

Social computing and personal broadcasting, topics from last year’s report, have ties to this year’s social networking and user-created content, but there are important differences. Social networking is more about connecting with the wider community, whereas social computing (now so well established that it has all but lost its name) has to do with tools that facilitate collaborative work. Personal broadcasting is one facet of user-generated content, and is likewise so commonplace just one year later that it is widely found on campuses in the form of scholarly blogs and podcasts.

We have watched these returning and related technologies move closer, develop offshoots that have moved faster or slower than their parent topics, and become so much a part of daily life that the technology is transparent and the content shines through. In the coming years, the same changes will influence the six topic areas selected for the 2007 Horizon Report, and we will watch with interest their effect on campuses.