2010 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition

The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2010 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative enquiry wi [...]

The technologies featured in this edition of the Horizon Report are embedded within a contemporary context that reflects the realities of the time, both in the sphere of education and in the world at large. To assure this context was well understood, the Advisory Board engaged in an extensive review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research to identify and rank trends that were currently affecting the practices of teaching, learning, and creative enquiry. Once detailed, the list [...]

Any discussion of technology adoption must also consider important constraints and challenges, and the Advisory Board drew deeply from a careful analysis of current events, papers, articles, and similar sources, as well as from personal experience in detailing a long list of challenges institutions face in adopting any new technology. Several important challenges are detailed below, but it was clear that behind them all was a pervasive sense that individual organizational constraints are likely [...]

The six technologies featured in the 2010 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition are placed along three adoption horizons that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative enquiry. The near-term horizon assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for institutions within the next twelve months; the mid-term horizon, within two to three years; and the far-term, within four to five years. It should be noted at the outset that [...]

Since March 2002, under the banner of the Horizon Project, the New Media Consortium has held an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, museum professionals, teachers and other school professionals, and representatives of leading corporations from more than two dozen countries. In the ensuing years, these conversations have been the impetus for a series of annual reports focused [...]

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less As the technology underlying electronic readers has improved and more titles have become available, electronic books are quickly reaching the point where their advantages over the printed book are compelling to almost any observer. Already firmly established in the public sector, electronic books are gaining a foothold on campuses as well, where they serve as a cost-effective and portable alternative to heavy textbooks and supplemental reading selectio [...]

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less According to a recent Gartner report, mobiles will be the most common way for people to access the Internet by 2013. Perhaps more important for education, Internet-capable mobile devices will outnumber computers by 2011. The available choices for mobiles are many — smart phones, tablets, laptops, and the newest class of devices like the iPad that blends the functions of all of them. Access to the Internet is less and less dependent on location, as us [...]

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years While the capability to deliver augmented reality experiences has been around for decades, it is only very recently that those experiences have become easy and portable. Advances in mobile devices as well as in the different technologies that combine the real world with virtual information have led to augmented reality applications that are as near to hand as any other application on a laptop or a smart phone. New uses for augmented reality are bein [...]

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it. Open content embraces not only the sharing of information, but the sharing of instructional practice and experiences as well. Part of the appea [...]

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years For nearly forty years, the keyboard and mouse have been the primary means to interact with computers. The Nintendo Wii in 2006 and the Apple iPhone in 2007 signalled the beginning of widespread consumer interest in — and acceptance of — interfaces based on natural human gestures. Now, new devices are appearing on the market that take advantage of motions that are easy and intuitive to make, allowing us an unprecedented level of control over the [...]

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years New forms of analysis are making use of the visual centres in our brains and the ways of thinking described in Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller, Blink, to marshal the tremendous human capacity to discern and recognize patterns. Connections and insights that are not readily apparent in traditional tables of numbers, or in standard forms of quantitative study like correlations become obvious when portrayed visually using new techniques derived from th [...]

The process used to research and create the 2010 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition is very much rooted in the methods used throughout the Horizon Project. All editions of the Horizon Report are produced using a carefully constructed process that is informed by both primary and secondary research. Dozens of technologies, meaningful trends, and critical challenges are examined for possible inclusion in the report for each edition. Every report draws on the considerable expertise of an [...]

Larry Johnson Co-Principal Investigator The New Media Consortium Phillip Long Co-Principal Investigator University of Queensland Kevin Ashford-Rowe Griffith University Stephen Atherton Apple Australia Mark Brown Massey University Fiona Cameron University of Western Sydney Andrew Churches TiC Adventure Sports Michael Coghlan South Australia TAFE David Craven International Education Services Geoffrey Crisp University of Adelaide James Dalziel Macquari [...]