2009 Horizon Report: The K12 Edition

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Executive Summary

The Horizon Report series is the product of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe. This volume, the Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition, is the second in a new series of regional and sector-based reports, and examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative expression within the environment of pre-college education. The hope is that the report is useful to educators worldwide, and the international composition of the Advisory Board reflects the care with which a global perspective was assembled. While there are many local factors affecting the practice of education, there are also issues that transcend regional boundaries, questions we all face in K-12 education, and it was with these in mind that this report was created.

Each edition of the Horizon Report introduces six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use in the educational community within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. To identify these areas, the project has drawn on an ongoing conversation among knowledgeable persons in the fields of business, industry, and education; on published resources, current research, and practice; and on the expertise of both the NMC community and the communities of the members of the Horizon Project’s K-12 Advisory Board, an international body of experts in education, technology, and other fields. The Advisory Board, chosen to broadly represent a range of perspectives in K-12 education, engages in a discussion around a set of research questions intended to surface significant trends and challenges and to identify a wide array of potential technologies for the Report. Using a process detailed in the methodology section, the Advisory Board comes to a consensus about the six topics that will appear here. The examples and readings under each topic area are meant to provide practical models as well as access to more detailed information. Wherever possible, an effort was made to highlight the innovative work going on among elementary, middle, and high schools around the world.

The format of the Horizon Report reflects the focus of the Horizon Project, which centers on the applications of emerging technologies to teaching, learning, research, and creative expression. Each topic opens with an overview to introduce the concept or technology involved and follows with a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to education or creativity. Examples of how the technology is being — or could be — applied to those activities are given. Each description is followed by an annotated list of additional examples and readings which expand on the discussion in the Report, as well as a link to the list of tagged resources collected by the Advisory Board and other interested parties during the process of researching the topic areas. Many of the examples under each area feature the innovative work of NMC member institutions and their school partners.