The Gartner Report: A Crystal Ball?

As the new Director of Technology at Fraser Academy, I am in charge of creating and developing an equally new e-Learning program for our senior school. I selected the Gartner report on Strategic Technologies for 2012 because knowing where and what technologies are developing will enable my team and I to build a dynamic and flexible e-Learning program, which can embrace the developments and affordances of new technologies while still creating learning platform based on sound pedagogy.

The report was reasonably useful in that it provided an initial quantification of how they selected and defined Strategic technologies along with a brief note of the target population, thus enabling a reader to quickly surmise if the report was relevant to them. While the technologies are grouped into broad categories (Media Tablets, Mobile-Centric Applications, Internet of Things…) and generalized to reach a larger audience, the topics were still on task and there was enough details to be useful in terms of assessing the impact of the application or inclusion of a particular technology by an IT Leader (such as myself) or an organization (School, business, etc).

As well as providing diversity, their particular selection also includes various technologies which compliment and or add on to one another and thereby provide answers to follow-up questions about how a series of tools maybe used either individually or in tandem with other new technologies to create complete systems. I found this quite useful as we are going to be using iPads for all our senior students next year and need to know options for storage, context, User Interface interactions, and evaluations of how the technology is being used and where it is going. The report is not limited to only the positive assessments of the strategic technologies, but also identifies some of the potential risks and or drawbacks associated with these new ventures. Addressing not only the positive, but also the negative aspects of any technology or venture increases the value of a report to a consumer. Ultimately it is of course up to us, the buyers and consumers to do our due diligence and make sure that we have adequately evaluated any new technology.

Overall, I do look forward to reading further reports from Gartner and would recommend it as a resource to other Technologists. With a healthy grain of constructive evaluation of course.

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