2009 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

Executive Summary

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that aims to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry within education around the globe over a five-year time period. The project’s central products are the Horizon Reports, an annual series of publications that describe promising emerging technologies and highlight their relevance to education. This edition, the Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition, is the second in the ANZ series and focuses on emerging technologies as they appear in and affect education in Australia and New Zealand particularly.

The report follows a specific format to describe six areas of emerging technology that will impact education in Australia and New Zealand within three adoption horizons over the next five years. Each topic opens with an overview describing the technology at hand, followed by a discussion of its relevance to teaching, learning, or creative inquiry. Examples of how the technology is currently employed, or how it could be applied to education, illustrate its potential. Finally, an annotated list of materials for further reading is provided for those who wish to explore a topic in greater depth.

In selecting the six topics, the project draws on an ongoing conversation among leaders in the fields of business, industry, and education, informed by a review of published resources, by current research and practice, and by the expertise of educational technology communities in Australia, New Zealand, and around the world. The report is guided by the Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board, a body of experts representing a range of perspectives in Australia and New Zealand. The Advisory Board engages in a discussion framed by a set of research questions that are intended to uncover significant trends and challenges and to identify a broad field of potential technologies for the report. The process by which the Advisory Board arrives at consensus about the final six topics presented in the Horizon Report is detailed in the methodology section.