2010 Horizon Report

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The Horizon Project

Since March 2002, under the banner of the Horizon Project, the New Media Consortium 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 from more than two dozen countries. In each of the past six years, these conversations have resulted in the publication each January of a report focused on emerging technologies relevant to higher education. As the report is produced, an Advisory Board engages in lively dialogs using a wide range of articles, published and unpublished research, papers, scholarly blogs, and websites.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 learning-focused organizations are thinking about.

In 2008 and 2009, the NMC convened additional advisory boards to engage in 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 with another. To date, companion editions have been prepared that center on Australia and New Zealand (2008, 2009), on the K-12 sector (2009), and on small- to medium-sized businesses (2009).

Each time a report is undertaken, the NMC uses qualitative research methods to identify the technologies selected for inclusion in that 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 2010 report, more than 110 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 inquiry. 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.

Increasingly the Horizon Project is a global effort. Each year at least a third of the members of the advisory board represent countries outside of North America. Since 2007, with the aid of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the Horizon Report has been translated into Spanish and Catalan. In 2008, the Horizon Project expanded with the publication of its first-ever regional report, the 2008 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition. The 2009 Horizon Report was also translated into Japanese, German, and Chinese, as well as Spanish and Catalan, and plans are in place to add to those translations for the current report. In 2010, in partnership with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, a new Spanish-language report is planned especially for Iberoamerica that will look at the entire body of work from the project.

Each Horizon Report is produced over a period of just a few months so that the information is timely and relevant. This year, the effort to produce the report began in September 2009, and concluded when the report was released in January 2010, a period of just over four months. The six technologies and applications that emerged at the top of the final rankings — two per adoption horizon — are detailed in the chapters that follow.

Each of those chapters includes detailed descriptions, links to active demonstration projects, and a wide array of additional resources related to the six profiled technologies. Those profiles are the heart of the 2010 Horizon Report, and will fuel the work of the Horizon Project throughout 2010-11. For those wanting to know more about the processes used to generate the Horizon Report, many of which are ongoing and extend the work in the report, we refer you to the report’s final section on the research methodology.