Trend Watch 2009

The annual Horizon Report (pdf version or online version) is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Each year, the report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years.
The areas of emerging technology cited for 2009 are:
• Mobiles (i.e., mobile devices)
• Cloud computing
• Geo-everything (i.e., geo-tagging)
• The personal web
• Semantic-aware applications
• Smart objects


Gary Natriello in his paper, Imagining, Seeking, Inventing: the Future of Learning
and the Emerging Discovery Networks, identifies ten important education trends:

1. learning is becoming more diverse
2. learning is becoming more contextual
3. learning is becoming less discipline bound
4. learning is moving outside of institutional settings
5. learning is coming to span professional and institutional sectors
6. learning is moving beyond and between nation states
7. learning is moving online
8. learning is moving beyond humans to machines
9. learning is moving to machine/human blends
10. learning is becoming less solitary and more interactive