Your clasroom in the future

The 2009 Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within Higher Education.

You can also view the reports for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004 if you'd like to check how accurate their predictions were.

So expect more of the following in your classrooms in the next:

One year or less:

• Mobiles
  Mobiles are already in use as tools for education on many campuses. New interfaces, the ability to connect to wifi and GPS in addition to a variety of cellular networks, and the availability of third-party applications have created a device with nearly infinite possibilities for education, networking, and personal productivity on the go; almost every student carries a mobile device, making it a natural choice for content delivery and even field work and data capture.

• Cloud Computing
  The emergence of cloud-based applications is causing a shift in the way we think about how we use software and store our files. Educational institutions are beginning to take advantage of ready-made applications hosted on a dynamic, ever-expanding cloud that enable end users to perform tasks that have traditionally required site licensing, installation, and maintenance of individual software packages. Email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, collaboration, media editing, and more can all be done inside a web browser, while the software and files are housed in the cloud.

Already, cloud-based applications are being used in the K-12 sector to provide virtual computers to students and staff without requiring each person to own the latest laptop or desktop machine; a handful of basic machines, provided they can access the Internet and support a web browser, are all that is needed for access to virtually unlimited data storage and programs of all kinds.

Two to Three years:

• Geo-Everything
  Everything on the Earth’s surface has a location that can be expressed with just two coordinates. Using the new classes of geolocation tools, it is very easy to determine and capture the exact location of physical objects — as well as capturing the location where digital media such as photographs and video are taken. The other side of this coin is that it is also becoming easier to work with the geolocative data thus captured: it can be plotted on maps; combined with data about other events, objects, or people; graphed; charted; or manipulated in myriad ways.

A sampling of location-aware applications across disciplines includes the following:

Literature
Geotagging and virtual geocaching can be used to create annotated maps and real-world locations related to works of literature, enhancing the experience of reading the story. For instance, out of personal interest, one reader created a map of the course described in The Travels of Marco Polo, including passages from the text, photographs of the places mentioned (historical and contemporary), annotations and links, and other information
Medicine.
The University of Florida has used a 2-dimensional web-based Transparent Reality Simulation Engine to teach students how to operate medical machinery for several years. Recently, the addition of a GPS-enabled tablet device has allowed learners who are spatially challenged to experience the transparent reality visualization overlaid directly onto the real machine, enabling them to use the machine’s controls rather than a mouse as input to the simulation. Geolocation is used to track the tablet and align the physical machine with the visualization on the tablet.
Games-based Learning
The Local Games Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is developing "local games," learning experiences set in real-life neighborhoods and ecological habitats. Combining geolocation and alternate reality games, local games immerse the learner in a physical space as they explore the unique characteristics of the location and its inhabitants.

• The Personal Web
  Armed with tools for tagging, aggregating, updating, and keeping track of content, today’s learners create and navigate a web that is increasingly tailored to their own needs and interests: this is the personal web.

The tools that enable the personal web are also ideal toolsets for research and learning. The ability to tag, categorize, and publish work online, instantly, without the need to understand or even touch the underlying technologies provides a host of opportunities for faculty and students. By organizing online information with tags and web feeds, it is a simple matter to create richly personal resource collections that are easily searchable, annotated, and that support any interest.

Four to Five Years:

• Semantic-Aware Applications
  The idea behind the semantic web is that although online data is available for searching, its meaning is not: computers are very good at returning keywords, but very bad at understanding the context in which keywords are used.

The capability of semantic-aware applications to aid in searching and finding has implications for research, especially in light of the rate at which web content is being created. As semantic search tools continue to develop, it will be more common to see highly relevant results that display desired information in the hit list summary itself, saving time that is now spent clicking through to each page in turn. Semantic search also promises to reduce the number of unrelated or irrelevant results for a given search and to facilitate natural-language queries, both potentially useful features for researchers.

• Smart Objects
  Smart objects are the link between the virtual world and the real. A smart object "knows" about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, who owns it and how they use it, what other objects in the world are like it — and about its environment. Smart objects can report on their exact location and current state (full or empty, new or depleted, recently used or not).

There are very few examples of smart objects in use in academia, although significant research is being done into how to create and track smart objects and how they might eventually be used. A sampling of applications for smart objects across disciplines includes the following:

Archaeology.
The way that a single smart object connects to a network of information is useful for many disciplines. Consider a student or researcher examining a group of objects from an archaeological dig. A tag attached to the label of each object, when scanned with a mobile device like a camera-enabled phone, would instantly bring up photographs of other objects from the dig, video of the dig site, maps, and any other media or information associated with the area.
Health Care.
Researchers and students at the University of Arkansas have created a simulated hospital environment in the virtual world of Second Life to test the practical and social implications of tagging and tracking patients, hospital staff, supplies, and locations.
Oncology
At Purdue University, researchers have developed a tiny smart object designed to be injected into a tumor. Once placed there, the device can report on the doses of radiation received at the site where it is implanted and indicate the exact location of the tumor during treatment.

Strategic technologies for 2009

Gartner Inc., a technology research and advisory company, has ranked virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for next year, not for its "tremendously obvious" ability to virtualize servers, but for its increasing capability to virtualize just about everything else in a data center.

Here's Gartner's list for 2009:

1. Virtualization. (Ranked No. 5 last year)

In forecasting the impact of the economy on IT spending, Gartner put virtualization near the top of must-have technologies. But to make the strategic technology list, it had to have other characteristics as well, namely a Swiss Army Knife-like capability to be applied beyond servers.

Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said that in storage, for instance, virtualization allows users to "to combine different kinds and generations of storage technology." That gives them the freedom to mix and match storage technologies based on competitive bids, he said.

2. Cloud computing. (New to the list.)

If there was a technology hype list, cloud computing would have been the top choice, said Cearley. He got some audience chuckles with this line: "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody that's talking about cloud computing these days."
But Gartner sees cloud computing as having a massive game-changing role, not only as the platform for software as a service, but as a computing and storage infrastructure provider, as well as a platform for information and business processes.

3. Computing fabrics. (No. 8 last year.)

Server technology is evolving to a point where you buy the physical resource you need, whether that is memory, I/O or processor, and fashion them together to create resource pools.

A computing fabric "combines those [resources] as you need them," said Claunch. IT shops will, potentially, be able to dispense with their separate pools of small, medium and large servers under this model. Blade servers have some of this capability -- the ability to move memory and processor capability -- but it's limited to what's inside the chassis, he said.

4. Web-oriented architecture. (New but similar to "the Web platform" -- No. 7 last year.) Gartner talked last year about how the Web will be the model for services delivery. This year, it discussed in terms of an architectural approach, how Web models will influence service-oriented architectures. The architecture, as the name implies, uses Web standards, identifiers, formats and protocols

5. Enterprise mashups. (No. 6 last year.)

Mashups, a fun word, are becoming a serious enterprise tool, allowing users to use public APIs to combine various services and capabilities quickly. The content aggregation tools give business users the flexibility to combine data inside and outside the enterprise.

6. Specialized systems. (New to the list.) A Cisco router is an obvious example, but there are specialized appliances for Java, data warehousing and other processes. It's an approach that could lead to some cost savings, and "could be wide open" as an emerging trend, said Claunch.

7. Social software and social networking. (No. 10 last year.) The tools offer "the ability to work across the organization in dynamic fashion," said Claunch.

8. Unified communications. (No. 2 last year.) Gartner said that over the next five year, "the number of different communications vendors companies may be reduced by at least 50%," thanks to unified communications.

9. Business intelligence. (New.)

This is hardly new to enterprises, but increases in computing power is giving companies the means to expand business intelligence capabilities, such as applying BI analytics directly into business processes.

10. Green IT. (No. 1 last year.)

Already a strategic technology that will not melt away, Green IT has not diminished in importance. For IT, green is everything, and that includes anything that can help cut the energy bill and reduce fuel use.

CIO published an article on What Gartner didn't say about virtualisation which goes into more detail about client virtualisation.

Looking towards the future

Copyright:Marzie

Every year The Futurist makes some forecasts on changes and trends we can expect in the following year. This year they have released an article: OUTLOOK 2009: Recent Forecasts from World Future Society for 2009 and Beyond .

The forecasts is not “predictions” of what the future will be like, but rather glimpses of what may happen or proposals for preferred futures.

So what can you expect?

In a nutshell: more sex, fewer antidepressants; more religious influence in China, less religious influence in the Middle East and the United States; more truth and transparency online, but a totally recorded real life.

The forecasts are divided into sections:

• Business and Economics

China will most likely become the world’s largest economy within the next three decades.

Tourism is expected to nearly double worldwide, from 842 million international tourist arrivals in 2006 to 1.6 billion in 2020

Retirees in the United States will increasingly return to the workforce. (The report is large US-based, however, this is a global trend)

Socioeconomic disparities will become more pronounced in aging societies.

Social safety nets will get cut. Governments across the industrialized world will pare down or scrap altogether their pension and health-care programs for retirees.

• Computers

Watch out! HAL from 2001 is on the way. Selfaware machine intelligence could be achieved by midcentury.

Search engines will become humanlike by 2050. With the “semantic” Web, AI-based search engines will comprehend users’ questions and queries just like a human assistant.

Rainbow traps may improve computing abilities.

“Serious gaming” will help train tomorrow’s health workers.

• Demography

Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.

Workforces on the move will exacerbate social conflicts. Increased migrations of workers from developing countries to developed countries will help offset worker shortages in host countries.

• Energy

Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.

Architects will harness energy from the movement of crowds.

Pursuit of alternatives to oil could help stabilize gas prices.

• Information Society

Everything you say and do may be recorded. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere.

Identity theft and other Internet crimes will increase at a faster pace.

You’ll have more friends whom you’ll never meet, and cyberfriends may outnumber real-life friends. (This has already happened in places like Facebook and MySpace, even perhaps Linked-In?)

• Technology and Science
  

The Internet will become more factually reliable and more transparent.

TV in 3-D.

Optical clocks may enable us to measure time much more precisely.

• Transportation

The car’s days as king of the road may soon be over.

Mobility is becoming a priority to more people in rising economies: More people will travel farther faster. Personal mobility is increasing in rapidly expanding economies.

Research labs are coming closer to “beaming” us up. Star Trek–type transporters may soon be possible for data transmission, but not for sending people places.

• Values and Society

People will have more sex. With women’s growing economic power around the world, arranged marriages are becoming less likely. As a result, women will feel freer to express their sexuality.

U.S. cultural hegemony may be over. The days of U.S. and First World dominance over the world’s culture and economy may soon be over.

New generations, new values. Self reliance and cooperation will become prevalent societal values as Generation X and Generation Y replace the baby-boom generation.

More people will consume ethically.

• Work and Careers

Succeeding in future niche careers may mean choosing an unusual major.

Tomorrow’s high-tech cowboys will telecommute.

Professional knowledge will become obsolete more quickly.

• World Affairs

The world’s legal systems will be networked. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a database of local and national laws for more than 50 participating countries, will grow to include more than 100 counties by 2010.


Militaries will use neuroscience breakthroughs to win future wars.



Climate change is already spurring armed conflict.

All the better to see you with

A new experimental web site, Many Eyes gives users a place to share technical data: maps, graphs, charts, word clouds etc. You can upload your data and create interactive displays.

The heart of the site is a collection of data visualizations. You may want to begin by browsing through these collections—if you'd rather explore than read directions, take a look!

On Many Eyes you can:

1. View and discuss visualizations
2. View and discuss data sets

3. Create visualizations from existing data sets

Emerging Technologies impacting on YOUR classroom

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education.

The report tracks the emerging technologies and their impact over a 5 year span. So, expect more of the following in your classrooms in the next ...

year:

• Grassroot Videos - 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 Web - 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

2-3 years:

• Mobile Broadband -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.
• Digital 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 that will transform the way we understand and represent information.

These are evident in organizations at the leading edge of technology adoption, and are beginning to appear at many institutions.

4-5 years:

• 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.
• 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.

To paraphrase the movies ... Horizon Reports has seen the future, and the future is now.