2008 Horizon Report

Posted on | January 26, 2008 | Comments Off

Judy O’Connell alerted me to the publication of the 2008 Horizon Report, the highly fruitful joint venture between Educause and the new media consortium, part of the output from, “…a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.”

The 2007 Report offered immense value for anyone involved in thinking about, and speaking about, such issues. My own talks and presentations during the last year were peppered with ideas, predictions and findings from it.

I’ve only had time so far to glance through the pages of the 2008 report, but already I want to go back and follow in detail the report’s thinking on topics such as: Grassroots Video, Collaboration Webs, Mobile Broadband, Data Mashups, Collective Intelligence and Social Operating Systems. Each of these is described in terms of a specific ‘time-to-adoption horizon’, from just one year ahead up to a 4-to-5 year horizon.

The concept of the Social Operating System is one that is especially interesting in the light of recent and ongoing discussions about the benefits or otherwise of social technologies, social networking, learning networks and social networking sites to education. Taking recent developments such as Xobni, an Outlook extension that gathers and presents information available about your email contacts (read ‘xobni’ backwards!), and a proof of concept from Yahoo, called Yahoo Life!, the report looks to the potential for increasing levels of trust and depth of knowledge about your social (learning?) networks, and the implications of all of this for teaching and learning. As the report notes:

“Social operating systems will also address the issue of trust in virtual collaborations. It is not difficult to envision applications that will help fill in the spaces of our knowledge about a person we encounter in an online collaborative space or virtual world, displaying at a glance the contacts we have in common (including how deep those connections actually are), recent writing or other work the person has done, and other online locations where the person is active.”

Maybe such developments will cause the inherent shallowness (in every sense) of sites such as Facebook to founder beneath arrays of self-organizing communities built around complex interests and connections revealed and matched and meshed on the fly by the social operating system. Are Google’s OpenSocial APIs a step towards this?

I will certainly enjoy getting my teeth more deeply into this latest report.

Technorati Tags: 2008 horizon report, educause, new media consortium, nmc, grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, social operating systems, xobni, yahoo life!, opensocial, facebook