Opportunity Horizon: Perhaps the Horizon reports are overly optimistic …..
I reviewed the New Media Consortium 2012 Horizon Report for Higher Education. At first glance of the website, I was impressed as they have the report not only in English but also in four other languages: Catalan, German, Japanese and Spanish. Also, they have two shorter documents: The Project Preview and The Project Short List. I found the Project Preview to be a short concise version of the main report categorized into three time Horizons: one year or less, two to three years and four to five years. Each time horizon has two technologies each. However the Project Short List has four technologies listed in each of the three time horizons, with no explanation as to why the difference.
How, and how much, is it useful and valuable to the broader community of educators, as well as learning technologies specialists and venturers?
Overall the report and its attempt to forecast emerging technologies in education is a great idea as it annually presents a summary and a best guess of what is new and innovative based on current research. The report uses different Time-to-Adoption time frames to categorize the technologies. The term “adoption” is troublesome as it is a subjective term as adoption of a technology is really a broad spectrum depending on the many factors of the global user and individual higher education institute.
The Oxford dictionary defines adoption as: “the action or fact of adopting or being adopted” and gives the following example: “the widespread adoption of agricultural technology” Thus the extent that a technology is adopted or will be adopted widely, is very subjective. In other words how do we know when an emerging technology has been adopted? The Horizon report suggests fairly short adoption periods based on their time horizons. I am not convinced that technologies can and are adopted in these short time frames.
So to test the idea that perhaps the Horizon report is overly optimistic on the adoption time frames, I decided to go back three years to the 2009 Horizon Report when I first started the MET program, to see what emerging educational technologies they were predicting would be adopted over the next year (2010), two to three years (2011-2012) and four to five years (2013-2014). Here is what I found.
Time-to-Adoption: one year or less
· Mobiles
· Cloud Computing
Time-to-adoption: Two to Three Years
· Geo-Everything
· The Personal Web
Time-to-Adoption: Four to five years
· Semantic-Aware Applications
· Smart Objects – AKA the Internet of things
So without going into great detail as we can all surmise there are many similarities between 2009 and 2012. The term adoption in reference to many of these technologies seems to be on-going and beyond when they were predicted to be adopted. For example in 2009 it was predicted mobiles would be adopted by 2010, they probably were but for the most part were very limited as the diversity of apps had not been developed. Now mobile Apps are in the 2012 report for adoption by 2013. Cloud computing was in the 2009 report for one-year or less adoption and it is again in the 2012 report for one year or less adoption. Semantic aware applications were predicted to be adopted by 2013-14, perhaps, but maybe it has morphed into learning analytics now predicted for 2014-2015 adoption. And finally the Smart objects in the four to five year window from the 2009 report has changed to the Internet of things in the four to five year window from the 2012 report.
I also took a look at the emerging technologies in the 2009 report to see if any of the technologies have been adopted at my Institute: SAIT Polytechnic. Mobile Apps, to some extent in limited courses. I tried to help a student today who was trying to find his way to class. (Interesting as it was the second week of classes and he did not know where his class was!) He knew he had to be in building DD and he had the campus map on his i-phone. Unfortunately the campus map which was developed for a mobile application was unreadable. So all I could do was point on a blurry blob on the map approximately where the building was, and wished him luck. There may be a few instructors using cloud computing, but I would say it has not been adopted in my School. Geo-Everything seems to have disappeared or perhaps it has been adopted everywhere and I missed it. The personal web; has that morphed into personalized learning, I don’t see the widespread adoption of either of these technologies on campus. We have a learning management system that has an analytical module, but we did not purchase it so if this is related to sematic aware applications, it may not be possible. And finally smart objects/the Internet of things; yes I do see this around campus through the use of RFID tags and readers, only because this is an interest of the institutes’ applied research group.
Can you say any of these 2009 Horizon predicted technologies have been adopted or are close to adoption in your situation?
So for anybody using this or other reports, especially for risky venture projects, be careful as the prediction timeframes may be overly optimistic.
Do you expect to seek out future versions of this report to help drive your own professional success, and also to recommend it to others in this regard?
Yes I will check future versions of these reports to keep abreast of emerging learning technologies. I will also send the Academic Chairs and Dean in my school as well as my Curriculum Coordinator colleagues across SAIT the links to these sites for reference.
References:
New Media Consortium. (2012). Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-horizon-report-HE.pdf Accessed September 11, 2012
New Media Consortium. (2012). NMC Horizon Project Preview: Higher Education Edition. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-horizon-HE-preview.pdf Accessed September 11, 2012
New Media Consortium. (2012). NMC Horizon Project Short List: Higher Education Edition. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-horizon-HE-shortlist.pdf Accessed September 11, 2012
Oxford Dictionaries. (2012). Adoption. Retrieved from: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/adoption?q=adoption Accessed September 11, 2012
Posted in: Week 02: The Edtech Marketplace
adi 3:18 pm on September 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Doug,
You’ve done a very thorough job, and it was a great idea to go back to previous reports to see if their predictions come about. They do actually say it is “not a predictive tool”, but rather it is meant to “highlight emerging technologies” (p.7). However, when I read predictions thrashing the Kindle Fire and writing wonder of Ipads, I knew there was something more. I checked them out, and though the NMC is a non for profit organization, it was nevertheless founded by Adobe, Apple, Macromedia and Sony, because the realized that “realized that the ultimate success of their multimedia-capable products depended upon their widespread acceptance by the higher education community ” (NMC.org). They concluded “that a community of innovators embedded in leading colleges and universities would amplify the impact of their tools in a wide range of disciplines” (NMC.org).h They went on to identify institutions and schools where their investment could “bear fruit”. So are these predictions of what the market or educators will need or what they hope they will buy? Either way, there is some truth in what they write. Like the OECD, they recognize a changing world of work and roles. People work anywhere and collaboratively, opening way for the need for clouds and collaborative communication tools. And I think the other thing they may be right with is the growth in tablet computing and Apps. We’ll have to wait and see.
Adriana
kstackhouse 1:39 pm on September 14, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I was also interested to see that they were a bit optimistic in their reports about what would be in use down the road. I think that the report is helpful in looking at what might be a resource to watch for. I also don’t blame them if their predictions were a little off. The technologies have been in place for say Mobile Apps long enough to have been “adopted”. Adoption though is up to the institutions and policy makers. I’m sure that the learners and many educators have been waiting for some of these tools to be adopted.
jhodi 4:01 pm on September 14, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I also found that the timelines to adoption may be a little ambitious, but I focused more on the ideas than the time to adoption. The technologies and ideas provided are get at inspiring thoughts about future technologies and potential technologies to follow and keep an eye on. Several of these technologies have popped up here and there over the years, but have yet to become a staple in every institution. ‘Adoption’ is hard to pinpoint, but it is interesting to observe the examples and see which institutions have adopted various technologies with success and failure.