2009 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

Key Trends

Each year, the Advisory Board reviews key trends, examining current articles, papers, interviews, and published research to discover patterns that are affecting the practice of teaching, learning, and creative enquiry. The Advisory Board listed the four trends described here as those most likely to have a significant impact in education in Australia and New Zealand over the next five years. They are presented in priority order as ranked by the Advisory Board.

• The perceived value of innovation and creativity is increasing. Innovation is valued at the highest levels of business and must be embraced in schools if students are to succeed beyond their formal education. Many jobs that will be sought and filled by educated young people require the ability to improvise, though this skill is neither taught nor prized in school. The ways we design learning experiences must reflect the growing importance of innovation and creativity as professional skills if students are to succeed beyond the classroom.
• Technology continues to impact how people work, play, gain information, and participate in communities. Once seen as an isolating factor for those who use it, the Internet has now become firmly established as a key medium through which people connect with one another. It provides virtual spaces where people who share interests can congregate; it facilitates serendipitous connections between people located in very different parts of the world; it connects colleagues, families, friends, and communities no matter how widely scattered they may be. The Internet is blurring the boundaries between online and real-world, between work and play, and between near and distant, affecting every part of our lives.
• Technology is increasingly a means for empowering students, a method for communication and socialising, and a ubiquitous, transparent part of their lives. For many students, technology is a primary means of socialising and managing one’s own learning. In a natural extension of the previous trend, it permeates teaching and learning as it does the rest of our activities. It is an integral part of everyday life for students and teachers, and increasingly, an indispensible tool for learning. It places the power to communicate firmly in the hands of students, connecting them to experts, to information, and to one another in powerful and immediate ways.
• The way we think about learning environments is changing. Because technology is so pervasive in our lives, the learning environment is no longer limited to a physical space. Today, the notion of a “classroom” includes experiences, experts, collaborators, peers, and resources located all over the globe and available twenty-four hours a day. To take advantage of this trend, institutions must reflect and support the transformation of the learning environment by embracing the means that make it possible: social networking tools, semantic applications, mobile devices, virtual worlds, and other emerging technologies that facilitate collaboration, communication, and learning.