2008 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

About the Horizon Project

Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, the NMC has convened 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 from more than two dozen countries. For the past five years, these conversations have resulted in the publication each January of a globally focused report on emerging technologies relevant to higher education. Each year, as the report is produced, an Advisory Board engages in focused dialogs using a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, and websites. The result of those dialogs is a list of the key technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.

This year, for the first time, the NMC embarked on the first of a new series of regional and sector-based companion editions of the Horizon Report, with the dual goals of understanding how technology is being absorbed using a smaller lens, and also noting the contrasts between technology use in, say, Australia, as compared to the rest of the world, or in museums compared to universities. This report, the 2008 Horizon Report: Australia–New Zealand Edition, is the first of these new publications.

Like the global efforts from which it sprung, the “down under” project, referred to informally as Horizon.au, used qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in the 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 started, little was known, or even could 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. For the current report, more than 100 of these were initially considered.

The 45 members of this year’s Advisory Board were purposely chosen to represent a broad swath of Australian education, as well as key writers and thinkers from business and industry. They 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. Much of this work took place in and around an extraordinary face-to-face gathering in Melbourne in July 2008, using a variety of tools specially purposed for the project. All of this work was captured and may be reviewed on the project wiki, at http://horizon.nmc.org/australia.

For additional background on the Australia–New Zealand project, please see the section on Methodology at the end of this report.