The New Media Center (in collaboration with Educause) generates an annual prediction of emerging technologies that will influence education and learning. The idea is to identify influences during specific time periods – next year, two-three years, 4-5 years. The report is focused on higher education, but with the exception of technologies K-12 institutions might actively exclude or ignore (e.g., cell phones in second grade, faculty publication) I would think the trends would have general impact.
The predictions:
Coming soon
- User-Created Content (flikr, YouTube, blogs – and tags)
- Social Networking
2-3 Years
- Mobile Phones
- Virtual Worlds
4-5 Years
- New Scholarship (new models of publication and recognition for publication)
- MMEducational Gaming
They describe the identification process as research based (qualitative). It is in a sense – they comb the literature for themes. I would rather see some type of survey that quantifies how widely specific applications are used in actual classroom settings, but I suppose with the exception of the “coming soon” categories this would show very little. At some point someone needs to get beyond describing cool applications that exist here or there and attempt to identify trends that have encouraged a little higher level of adoption. Perhaps this organization should go back to the list of applications/activities identified a couple of years and now survey the frequency of adoption.
I found the wiki associated with this project to be more valuable than the actual report (no offense, but this is the same type of content that seems to be the focus of a couple of keynotes at most conference I have attended recently). The wiki offers plenty of links to examples, connects to del.icio.us links, and seems to develop the arguments in the report in more detail.
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