21 Feb 2012

2012 Horizon Report

It’s 2012 now and the 2011 Horizon Report is yesterday’s news.

The new 2012 Horizon Report suggests six technologies with considerable potential for our focus areas of education and interpretation.

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
  • Tablet computing (presents new opportunities to enhance learning experiences, i.e. for one-to-one learning, but also as a feature-rich tool for field and lab work, often times replacing far more expensive and cumbersome devices and equipment. Tablets supplement smartphones and are not considered a replacement. Ronan posted a piece a while back about Information literacy and the iPAD)
  • Mobile apps (the ubiquitous presence of always-connected mobile devices means that higher  education institutions are now designing apps tailored to educational and research needs across the curriculum. Check out Best of Mobile Higher EdWeb)
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
  • Game-based learning (research continues to demonstrate its effectiveness for learning, particularly with regard to its ability to foster collaboration and engage students deeply in the process of learning. An example is 3D Game Lab, a personalised learning platform that uses quest-based learning and game mechanics)
  • Learning analytics (is about joining a variety of data gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of using what is learned to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment in real time. An example is SoLAR's Open Learning Analytics Course, a free online course that provides an introduction to learning analytics)
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
  • Gesture-based computing (enables students to learn by doing, i.e. by moving the control of computers from a mouse and keyboard to the motions of the body, facial expressions, and voice recognition via new input devices. An example is Mudpat, which enables localised haptic feedback when interacting with a touchscreen device)
  • The Internet of Things (refers to a category of small devices or methods that enable an object to be assigned a unique identifier via IPv6. Smart objects are interconnected items in which the line between the physical object and digital information about it is blurred. An example is the use of RFID student cards for attendance tracking

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