2008 Horizon Report

After Five Years: The Metatrends

This is the fifth edition of the Horizon Report, and it seems appropriate after five years to reflect on the sorts of patterns in the recent evolution of emerging technology that can only be seen over time. After five years, it is clear that the 175 people who have served on the Horizon Project Advisory Boards over that time have been remarkably prescient—without exception, the topics in the past five Horizon Reports have proved to be worthy of our attention. At the same time, we have seen many of the technologies and practices highlighted in this series converge, morph, and shift over the years, evolving in ways that continue to keep them in our sights as they move to nearer and nearer adoption horizons. Some of them have already become quite commonplace and are integrated into our everyday activities; others are clearly still with us, their current form influenced by parallel developments that are pushing them in one direction or another. While the currents and eddies of emerging technology are complex, it is clear that the Report has been following at least seven metatrends with some regularity.

These seven metatrends (view graphic version as PDF) include the evolving approaches to communication between humans and machines; the collective sharing and generation of knowledge; computing in three dimensions; connecting people via the network; games as pedagogical platforms; the shifting of content production to users; and the evolution of a ubiquitous platform. What is remarkable is that each year the Advisory Board is reconstituted; more than half are new every year, with Advisors chosen from many industries, countries, and backgrounds.

Nonetheless, after five years, it is quite easy to see clear conceptual threads that this diverse and changing group has returned to time and time again. We believe it indicates a sustained interest and continued belief that these pathways of innovation and technological evolution will affect the long-term practice of teaching, learning and creative expression. Some of them already have.

While there is not room here to discuss them all, three metatrends are discussed in the paragraphs that follow. One that seems especially notable is the collective sharing and generation of knowledge, which was discussed in the very first Horizon Report, and has appeared in one form or another in every report since. Learning objects were an early attempt at this, but advances in intelligent searching eclipsed the need for complex metadata schema in the eyes of many, and laid the foundations for what we called knowledge webs, a topic that also first appeared back in 2004. In the larger picture, it is clear that this metatrend is mapped over nine years (2004-2012), and the current Report reaches into the future to describe technologies that we will not see entering mainstream use for learning for some time yet, such as mashups, new scholarship, and collective intelligence. By considering the pattern over these several years, it is easy to see that tools to aid and enhance collective sharing and generation of knowledge have been present for many years and continue to develop.

Connecting people through the network is a second metatrend that should be highlighted here. Ubiquitous wireless enabled a host of technologies like extended learning, social computing, and social networking—all of which have been fueled by the emergence of anytime, anywhere access provided by wireless networks. In turn, the practice of extended learning contributed to the development of global learning communities. Extended learning approaches, so commonplace today, were the first steps at the time toward the application of social computing and social networking to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Social networking has steadily continued to be a major influence, retaining ties to knowledge webs and social computing while remaining distinct from both. The next phase for connecting people through the network has been identified as the emergence of social operating systems—tools that not only recognize our social connections, but will expose information in entirely new ways that will make these networks richer and more fluid.

Moving the computer into three dimensions has been an equally interesting and recurring theme that is now clearly a metatrend, with a mapping currently spanning the years between 2004 and 2010. In this case, development has been extensive, with the emergence of vector-based animation tools allowing simple 3D representations in 2004, and the growth of physical 3D outputs in the form of rapid prototyping over 2005 and 2006. Virtual and augmented reality began to find traction around that time as well, and today nearly every learning organization is exploring some form of virtual reality, either in direct learning applications taking place in platforms like Open Croquet or Second Life, or in research settings, where enhanced visualization tools are probing the depths of rich data sets for new learning and knowledge.

Each edition of the Horizon Report to date has targeted technologies or practices that fall somewhere along the path of one of these metatrends. With the benefit of time, it is easy to see that often one technology’s adoption paves the way for others down the road. Technologies that feel natural today now have roots in those that appeared on the mid or far horizons in earlier editions of the Report. It is likely that those that appear on the far horizon today will similarly influence the development of technologies that will be the focus of future Horizon Reports.

The seven metatrends are described in more detail on the Horizon Project wiki (horizon.nmc.org/wiki), where you are invited to participate in an ongoing discussion taking place about them.