Where are they now? The technologies highlighted in the 2005 Horizon Report
Listed below are the six technologies highlighted in the 2005 Horizon Report, with a short description of each. Where are they now? Are the horizons associated with them still accurate? What may have changed? Let us know your thoughts...
Near Term: Mainsteam campus use within a year.
Extended Learning
On some campuses, traditional instruction is augmented with technology tools that are familiar to students and used by them in daily life. Extended learning courses can be conceptualized as hybrid courses with an extended set of communication tools and strategies. The classroom serves as a home base for exploration, and integrates online instruction, traditional instruction, and study groups, all supported by a variety of communication tools.
- It may be happening in a vague hard to gauge manner. All of this is a transformation of what we term a "course". Educational institutions are still bound into the limiting silos of "course", "semester" and even as technologies are deployed, they are done so vertically not across subjects, classes. AL
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Ubiquitous Wireless.
With new developments in wireless technology both in terms of transmission and of devices that can connect to wireless networks, connectivity is increasingly available and desired. Campuses and even communities are beginning to regard universal wireless access as a necessity for all.
- Perhaps we are a bit more ubiquitous as more institutions are providing comprehenzive access within their walls. With the exception of a few progressive locales, the courts are still out on the wider scale movement into city/community available nets. And what will the scale if ubiquity be? Will there be a seamless handoff from city net to university net? AL
- Just a comment to agree with Alan here. I read last week that some large (Tele)Com companies are attempting to stop WiMax (wireless metropolitan areas) NN
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Mid-Term: Mainsteam campus use within one to three years.
Intelligent Searching
To support people's growing need to locate, organize, and retrieve information, sophisticated technologies for searching and finding are becoming available. These agents range from personal desktop search "bots," to custom tools that catalog and search collections at an individual campus, to specialized search interfaces like Google Scholar.
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Educational Gaming
Taking a broad view of educational gaming, one finds that games are not new to education. Technology and gaming combine in interesting ways, not all of which are about immersive environments or virtual reality. What is evolving is the way technology is applied to gaming in education, with new combinations of concepts and games appearing on the horizon.
- I think this is more likely to be on the 3-5 year horizon if we are talking about more mainstream adoption. NN
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LongTerm: Mainsteam campus use within three to five years.
Social Networks and Knowledge Webs
Supplying people's need to connect with each other in meaningful ways, social networks and knowledge webs offer a means of facilitating teamwork and constructing knowledge. The underlying technologies fade into the background while collaboration and communication are paramount.
- We are seeing an interesting example of how this might work in this project (LJ)
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Context-Aware Computing/Augmented Reality
These related technologies deal with computers that can interact with people in richer ways. Context-aware computing uses environmental conditions to customize the user's experience or options. Augmented reality provides additional contextual information that appears as part of the user's world. Goals of both approaches are increased access and ease-of-use.
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