2010 Horizon Report

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Executive Summary

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

In each edition of the Horizon Report, six emerging technologies or practices are described that are likely to enter mainstream use on campuses within three adoption horizons spread over the next one to five years. Each report also presents critical trends and challenges that will affect teaching and learning over the same time frame. In the seven years that the Horizon Project has been underway, more than 400 leaders in the fields of business, industry, technology, and education have contributed to this long-running primary research effort. They have drawn on a comprehensive body of published resources, current research and practice, their own considerable expertise, and the expertise of the NMC and ELI communities to identify technologies and practices that are beginning to appear on campuses or are likely to be adopted in the next few years. The 2010 Advisory Board, like those before it, considered a broad picture of emerging technology and its intersection with the academic world through a close examination of primary sources as well as through the lens of their own experiences and perspectives. The research methodology employed in producing the report is detailed in a special section that follows the body of the report.

The report's format is consistent from year to year, opening with a discussion of the trends and challenges identified by the Advisory Board as most critical for the next five years. The format of the main section closely reflects the focus of the Horizon Project itself, centering on the applications of emerging technologies to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. Each topic is introduced with an overview that describes what it is, followed by a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to education, creativity, or research. Examples of how the technology is being, or could be applied to those activities are given. Finally, each section closes with an annotated list of suggested readings and additional examples that expand on the discussion in the report and a link to the tagged resources collected during the research process by project staff, the Advisory Board, and others in the growing Horizon Project community.