The next best thing

Technological innovation and Internet exchange happen at such breakneck pace, some of us need help keeping up. Luckily, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative produces an annual Horizon Report, which, through an advisory board and a research-based project, identifies emerging technologies likely to have an impact on teaching, learning or creative expression within higher education. The fascinating 2007 edition, the project’s fourth, provides a heads-up on these:

User-created content. Anyone can become an author, a creator or a filmmaker using blogs, photostreams (e.g., YouTube), wikibooks and machinima clips. The use of tagging and social bookmarking tools makes it easy for “collective wisdom to float to the top and be found,” says the report, and students are totally into it. For teachers, they’re tools for collaboration.

Social networking. Second nature to students, community-building sites like Facebook and MySpace hold application to learning as well. Allegheny College has gone with the flow, with its own MySpace page. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, a Social Computing Lab is exploring social networking in education. It’s an avenue to forming robust learning communities.

Mobile phones. In two years, the report predicts, mobile phones will be tools as accepted for educational use on campus as personal computers are now. That’s because of their increasing capacity to store the digital map of our lives.

Virtual worlds. Corporations are now offering courses in the 3-D environment of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where many users can interact with each other in real time. Settings can be created and physical tools virtually created to allow all kinds of learning scenarios.

The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication. New ways of creating scholarly products pose the challenge of protecting the scholarly integrity of the work. At the same time, wikis and blogs provide the opportunity for scholars to reach out to a wider scholarly community and the public.

Educational gaming. In the world of computer gaming, one tool that is intriguing educational gamers is massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, which bring many players together in collaborative or competitive activities. In four to five years, says the 2007 Horizon Report, we’ll see more MMOs like the one coming out of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University, in which students are virtually transported to a 3-D world in William Shakespeare’s time.

Access the 2007 Horizon Report at www.nmc.org/horizon/.