Monday 26 January 2009

Time for the HORIZON REPORT 2009

This important annual report is here again! Each edition brings out 6 emerging technologies or practices likely to be mainstream in learing focused organisations within the next 3-5 years.
Ths year we have mobiles ; cloud computing ; geo everything ; the personal Web ; semantic aware applications ; smart objects.

In the key trends they note that "visual literacy will become an increasingly important skill in decoding, encoding, and determining credibility and authenticity of data. Visual literacy should be formally taught...". In the critical challenges they note "there is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy".
All useful ammunition for IL supporters!

Finally, they say in the Executive summary :

"As in past editions of the Horizon Report, we have again found that some topics have carried forward in one form or another from one edition of the Report to the next. Mobiles, a family of devices characterized by unprecedented advancement, have appeared in both of the past two editions, and appear in this edition yet again. This year’s analysis finds mobiles firmly in the near-term horizon as the capabilities of phones have continued to develop rapidly. Innovations over the last year have brought third-party applications, easy GPS, and intuitive interfaces to mobile devices, blurring the boundary between phone and computer.
Cloud computing, placed on the near-term horizon this year, has emerged as the unifying technology supporting grassroots video, collaboration webs, and social operating systems, all described in the 2008 edition. It has become obvious that cloud computing has the potential to change the way we think about computing, and even as we come to recognize how profoundly different it is, new applications that take advantage of cloud computing as an infrastructure are continuously arising. Its clear disruptive potential led to cloud computing’s selection this year as a technology to watch on its own merits."

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