2009 Horizon Report: The K12 Edition

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The Horizon Project

Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, the NMC has convened an ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations from more than two dozen countries. For the past six years, these conversations have resulted in the publication each January of a globally focused report on emerging technologies relevant to higher education. Each year, as the report is produced, an Advisory Board engages in focused dialogs using a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, scholarly blogs, and websites. The result of these dialogs is a list of the key technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.

Last year, for the first time, the NMC embarked on a new series of regional and sector-based companion editions of the Horizon Report, with the dual goals of understanding how technology is being absorbed using a smaller lens, and also noting the contrasts between technology use in one area compared to another. This report, the Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition, is the second of these new publications; the Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition, released in the fall of 2008, was the first.

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Like the global effort from which these emerged, the K-12 project, referred to informally as Horizon.K12, used qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in the report, beginning with a survey of the work of other organizations and a review of the literature with an eye toward spotting interesting emerging technologies. When the cycle started, little was known, or even could be known, about the appropriateness or efficacy of many of the emerging technologies for these purposes, as the Horizon Project expressly focuses on technologies not currently in widespread use in schools. For the current report, nearly 80 of these were initially considered.

The 45 members of this year’s Advisory Board were purposely chosen to represent a broad spectrum of K-12 education, as well as key writers and thinkers from business and industry. They engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, blogs, and interviews; discussed existing applications, and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of candidate technologies for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Much of this work took place in and around a remarkable face-to-face gathering in Dallas in January 2009, using a variety of tools specially purposed for the project; additional work took place online from January through the end of February 2009. Work from the meeting as well as the online discussions were captured and may be reviewed on the project wiki at http://horizon.nmc.org/k12.

For additional background on the Horizon K-12 project, please see the section on methodology at the end of the report.