Helping to predict the future - in technology terms

Staffordshire University has contributed to new a report which examines the technologies most likely to impact on learning and teaching worldwide.

Dave Parkes, the University’s Associate Director of Learning, Technology and Information Systems, was the only UK representative on the advisory board contributing to the 2010 Horizon Report.

He said: “The board is made up of experts from around the globe - discussing and identifying the global shifts in learning technologies which will influence HE over the next five years.

“We engaged in online discourse, sharing knowledge and experience, the virtues and misgivings we have about technology and the impact on the student experience.”

The findings of the 2010 Horizon Report, published by the New Media Consortium in the US, were reported in the Times Higher Education.

The report is predicting that mobile computing and open content will become more mainstream in the next 12 months.

It states: “The opportunity is great: virtually all higher education students carry some form of mobile device and the cellular activity that supports their connectivity continues to grow.”

Experts are also predicting that technologies like electronic books and simple augmented reality - blending virtual data with what we see in the real world - will become more widely used in the next three to four years.

This is anticipated to be closely followed by an increase in gesture based computing - which recognises and interprets body motions - and visual data analysis.

To read or download the full report visit: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/

• The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Corsortium’s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, an EDUCAUSE program. In the seven years that the Horizon Project has been underway, more than 400 leaders in the fields of business, industry, technology, and education have contributed to this long-running primary research effort.