2009 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

Methodology

Every edition of the Horizon Report is produced using a carefully calibrated process that is informed by both primary and secondary research. Nearly a hundred technologies, as well as dozens of meaningful trends and challenges are examined for possible inclusion in the report each year; an internationally renowned Advisory Board examines each topic in rounds of progressively more detail, reducing the set until the final listing of technologies, trends, and challenges is selected. The entire process takes place online and is fully documented at http://horizon.nmc.org/anz.

About half of the thirty to forty members of an Advisory Board are newly chosen each year, and the board as a whole is designed to represent a wide range of backgrounds, nationalities, and interests. To date, more than 300 internationally recognised practitioners and experts have participated on one or more of the Horizon Project Advisory Boards.

Once the Advisory Board is constituted, their work begins with a systematic review of the literature — press clippings, reports, essays, and other materials — that pertain to emerging technology. Advisory Board members are provided with an extensive set of background materials when the project begins, and then are asked to comment, identify those which seem particularly worthwhile, and add to the set. A carefully selected collection of RSS feeds from some 50 leading publications ensures that these resources stay current as the project progresses, and they are used to inform the thinking of the participants through the process.

Following the review of the literature, the Advisory Board engages in the process of addressing the five research questions that are at the core of the Horizon Project. These questions are designed to elicit a comprehensive listing of interesting technologies, challenges, and trends from the Advisory Board, and are the same within each of the various Horizon Project research areas so as to facilitate longitudinal analyses. The questions used for the Australia-New Zealand Edition are:

1. What would you list among the established technologies that learning-focused institutions in Australia and New Zealand should all be using broadly today to support or enhance teaching, learning, or creative inquiry?
2. What technologies that have a solid user base in consumer, entertainment, or other industries should learning-focused institutions in Australia and New Zealand actively try to apply?
3. What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that learning-focused institutions in Australia and New Zealand should begin to take notice during the next 3 to 5 years? What organisations or companies are the leaders in these technologies?
4. What do you see as the key challenges related to teaching, learning, and/or creative inquiry that learning-focused institutions in Australia and New Zealand will face during the next 5 years?
5. What trends do you expect will have a significant impact on the ways in which learning-focused institutions in Australia and New Zealand approach the practice of teaching, learning, and/or creative inquiry?

One of the Advisory Board’s most important tasks is to answer these five questions as systematically and broadly as possible, so as to generate a large number of potential topics to consider. As the last step in this process, past Horizon Reports are revisited and the Advisory Board is asked to comment on the current state of technologies, challenges, and trends identified in previous years, and to look for metatrends that that may be evident only across the results of multiple years.

To create the 2009 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition, the members of this year’s Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, blogs, and interviews; discussed existing applications; and brainstormed new ones. A key criterion was the potential relevance of the topics to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.

Once this foundational work was completed, the Advisory Board moved to a unique consensus- building process based on an iterative, Delphi-based methodology. In the first step, the responses to the research questions were systematically ranked and placed into adoption horizons by each Advisory Board member in a multi-vote system that allowed members to weight their selections. These rankings were compiled into a collective set of responses.

From the more than 80 technologies originally considered, twelve emerged at the top of the initial ranking process — four per adoption horizon. Once this “short list” was identified, a significant amount of time was spent researching applications or potential applications for each of the areas that would be of interest to practitioners.

Each of the twelve semi-finalist topics 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, this time with a reverse ranking approach. The six technologies and applications that emerged at the top of the rankings — two per adoption horizon — are detailed in the preceding sections along with the challenges and trends also selected by the advisory board.

To anchor the report in a stream of timely and relevant information about the topics highlighted here, an ongoing component of the project generates an expanding set of web links, tagged on Delicious.com, which has been established to help extend the findings of the project and allow new information to be shared within the community. The Delicious.com tags used for the project 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.

For additional detail on the project methodology or to review the actual instrumentation, the ranking, and the interim products behind the report, please visit http://horizon.nmc.org/anz.