NMC Horizon Report from down under

New Media Consortium (2010) 2010 Horizon Report – Australia-New Zealand Edition Austin TX: New Media Consortium

The NMC brings out its main projections for the future early in the new year, but the Australia-New Zealand edition published late November this year gives an advanced glimpse of what’s likely to be in their 2011 report.

Although the projected technologies are not surprising, the real value to me was in the four trends and four challenges they identify:

Trends

1. traditional textbook and general publishing is undergoing a profound and permanent change due to e-publishing.

2. open peer review and scholarship is slowly gaining academic credibility and acceptance

3. learning occurs everywhere now, not just in class or on campus

4. there is increasing amounts of content available for mobile devices with a greater range of interactivity.

Challenges

Overall there ‘was a pervasive sense that individual organizational constraints are likely the most important factors in any decision to adopt — or not to adopt — any given technology.’ [which is exactly what my forthcoming book with Albert Sangra addresses]. In particular NMC identifies:

1. A clear need for more professional development around emerging technologies

2. There is a mis-match between instructors’ understanding of teaching and the affordances of emerging technologies. In my words, instructors don’t see the the affordances of emerging technologies (ubiquitous, constructivist, collaborative, learner controlled) matching the instructors’ concept of what teaching should be (presumably classroom based, didactic, competition between students, and teacher controlled).

3. Students need – and generally are not getting – formal instruction in media and digital literacy.

4. Young people believe it’s more important to know where information is and how to find it, than know the information itself, whereas instruction and assessment is still mainly based on knowing information.

Technologies

Next 12 months Electronic books and mobile learning

In two to three years Augmented reality and open content

Five to six years out Gesture based computing and visual data analysis.

You will have to wait until mid to late January to see my predictions for the future, but they will certainly be different from NMC’s for the period beyond the next 12 months.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend that you read the full NMC report.