2008 Horizon Report

About the Horizon Project

Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, the NMC has held 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. Each year, an Advisory Board considers the results of these dialogs and also looks at a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, scholarly blogs, and websites to generate a list of technologies and practices, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.

The project uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in each annual report, beginning with a survey of the work of other organizations and a review of the literature with an eye to spotting interesting emerging technologies. When the cycle starts, little is known, or even can 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 academe. In a typical year, 75 or more of these technologies may be identified for further investigation; for the 2008 Report, more than 80 were considered.

By engaging a wide community of interested parties, and diligently searching the Internet and other sources, enough information is gathered early in the process to allow the members of the Advisory Board to form an understanding of how each of the discovered technologies might be in use in settings outside of academe, to develop a sense of the potential the technology may have for higher education settings, and to envision applications of the technology for teaching, learning, and creative expression. The findings are discussed in a variety of settings—with faculty, industry experts, campus technologists, and of course, the Horizon Advisory Board. Of particular interest to the Advisory Board every year is finding educational applications for these technologies that may not be intuitive or obvious.

To create the 2008 Horizon Report, the 36 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; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of candidate technologies for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Most of this work took place online over the fall of 2007. From the more than 80 technologies originally considered, the twelve that emerged at the top of the initial ranking process—four per adoption horizon—were extensively researched and cast in the format of the Horizon Report. Once these semifinalists were 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.

With the benefit of the full picture of how the topic would look in the report, the list of semifinalists was then ranked yet again. The six technologies and applications that emerged at the top of the final rankings—two per adoption horizon—are detailed in the sections that follow. Those descriptions are the heart of the 2008 Horizon Report, and will fuel the work of the Horizon Project throughout 2008-09. The research aspects of the project, many of which are ongoing and build on the work in the Report, are detailed in the section on methodology which follows the descriptions of the six emerging technologies that are profiled in this year’s report.