2008 Horizon Report

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Key Emerging Technologies

The technologies featured in the 2008 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative applications. The first adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of entry within the next year; the second, within two to three years; and the third, within four to five years.

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The two technologies placed on the first adoption horizon in this edition, grassroots video and collaboration webs, are already in use on many campuses. Examples of these are not difficult to find. Applications of mobile broadband and data mashups, both on the mid-term horizon, are evident in organizations at the leading edge of technology adoption, and are beginning to appear at many institutions. Educational uses of the two topics on the far-term horizon, collective intelligence and social operating systems, are understandably rarer; however, there are examples in the worlds of commerce, industry and entertainment that hint at coming use in academia within four to five years.

Each profiled technology is described in detail in the body of the report, including a discussion of what it is and why it is relevant to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Specific examples are listed there for each of the six topics, consistent with the level of adoption at the time the report was written (December 2007). Taken as a set, our research indicates that all six of these technologies will significantly impact the choices of learning-focused organizations within the next five years.

• Grassroots Video. Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software. Video sharing sites continue to grow at some of the most prodigious rates on the Internet; it is very common now to find news clips, tutorials, and informative videos listed alongside the music videos and the raft of personal content that dominated these sites when they first appeared. What used to be difficult and expensive, and often required special servers and content distribution networks, now has become something anyone can do easily for almost nothing. Hosting services handle encoding, infrastructure, searching, and more, leaving only the content for the producer to worry about. Custom branding has allowed institutions to even have their own special presence within these networks, and will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are.
• Collaboration Webs. Collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation. Colleagues simply open their web browsers and they are able to edit group documents, hold online meetings, swap information and data, and collaborate in any number of ways without ever leaving their desks. Open programming interfaces allow users to author tools that they need and easily tailor them to their requirements, then share them with others.
• Mobile Broadband. Each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured¹ a new phone for every six people on the planet. In this market, innovation is unfolding at an unprecedented pace. Capabilities are increasing rapidly, and prices are becoming ever more affordable. Indeed, mobiles are quickly becoming the most affordable portable platform for staying networked on the go. New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content—content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network.
• Data Mashups. Mashups—custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are “mashed up” into a single tool—offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets. The availability of large amounts of data (from search patterns, say, or real estate sales or Flickr photo tags) is converging with the development of open programming interfaces for social networking, mapping, and other tools. This in turn is opening the doors to hundreds of data mashups that will transform the way we understand and represent information.
• Collective Intelligence. The kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence. In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained. Data mashups will tap into information generated by collective intelligence to expand our understanding of ourselves and the technologically-mediated world we inhabit.
• Social Operating Systems. The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content. This simple conceptual shift promises profound implications for the academy, and for the ways in which we think about knowledge and learning. Social operating systems will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know.

As might be expected when studying emerging phenomena over time, some of these topics are related to, or outgrowths of, ones featured in previous editions of the Horizon Report. Grassroots video (2008), for example, reflects the evolution of user-created content (2007); it has been singled out this year because it has emerged as a distinct set of technologies in common use that has broad application to teaching, learning, and creative expression.

Similarly, we have followed mobile devices with interest for the past several years. In 2006, multimedia capture was the key factor; mobiles became prolific recording devices for video, audio, and still imagery. Personal content storehouses were the focus of mobile in 2007; calendars, contact databases, photo and music collections, and more began to be increasingly and commonly stored on mobile devices over the past year. Now for 2008, we are seeing the effect of new displays and increased access to web content taking these devices by storm. Nonetheless, while there are abundant examples of personal and professional uses for mobiles, educational content delivery via mobile devices is still in the early stages. The expectation is that advances in technology over the next twelve to eighteen months will remove the last barriers to access and bring mobiles truly into the mainstream for education.