According to the 2007 Horizon report, while user-created content and social networking are already facts of life on campuses across the world, mobile phones and virtual worlds will also be widely used in higher education by 2010.
Released today by The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program, this report is definitely a must-read as it offers a good picture of the current trends and technologies that are going to deeply impact the world of higher education:
“To create the 2007 Horizon Report, the 27 members of the 2007 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 more than 100 candidate technologies that emerged for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. The 2007 Advisory Board included representatives from eight countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, Japan, and China. Most of their work took place online over fall 2006, using a variety of collaboration tools, notably a special wiki site dedicated to the project.”
This 32-page report is available as a free PDF file under a Creative Commons license, which means that you can print it and makes copies for your VP’s and President.
What really makes this report a great resource is the way the highlighted technologies are presented:
- an overview
- why they are relevant to teaching, learning and creative expression
- current examples in different institutions (with links)
- online resources for further reading
I really think this is a great tool for any of those trying to make the case for user-created content, social networking, mobile phone or virtual worlds on their campus.
Haven’t delved deeply into the report yet, but it will be tough to convince me that phones or virtual worlds will be adopted (forget about WIDELY) in 3 years by higher ed. I see no real adoption on any significant scale at this point for those two. Most faculty see both as huge distractions to students. The meetup or class in Second Life seems to have no appeal to most academics.
Social networking & user-c content (which is a pretty broad catch-all term) at least have traction already.
Ken, I am not entirely sure if I agree with you. In my opinion, “virtual worlds” are the next step after the buzz-word “web 2.0”. With now 8 million people playing World of Warcraft, and another few millions playing other online 3D games, I think it can be assumed that higher education will tap into this market, and be it only for marketing purposes. Like you, I would not be so sure about having virtual classrooms in 3 years, but I have no doubts that higher education will utilise virtual environments in one form or another.
Interesting conversation.
I guess virtual worlds will change the face of distance learning. And, as the report explains more and more (adult but also college aged) students will become distance learners.
Then, Facebook was launched in 2004, just 3 years ago, and it has become central to the lives of millions of students. I’m sure that some faculty members will shy away from these technologies, but does it mean that virtual worlds and mobile phones won’t have a deep impact on higher education? What do you think?
“Haven’t delved deeply into the report yet, but it will be tough to convince me that phones or virtual worlds will be adopted (forget about WIDELY) in 3 years by higher ed. ”
Famous last words…