New tech trends in education presented in the 2009 Horizon Report
The Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition, giving an insight into new trends in the use of technology in education, was presented yesterday 11 March 2009 in Austin at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) annual conference. The 2009 report, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and CoSN, is part of a series produced by the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, an ongoing research project seeking to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an worldwide impact on education.
The six emerging trends in 2009 are listed in a three-horizon adoption perspective: collaborative environments and online communication tools will be of mainstream use by next year (short term adoption), mobiles and cloud computing in two to three years (mid-term adoption), and smart objects and personal web in four to five years (long term adoption). A chapter for each timeline and an overview on each technology followed by examples of good practice and related literature deeply explore the new trends.
eTwinning, the Lifelong Learning Programme community for schools in Europe whose Central Support Service is run by European Schoolnet (EUN), figures among the vanguard projects related to the development of personal web which should be adopted in long term perspective.
Two related issues, assessment and filtering, are addressed as well, as they closely concern the development and spreading of these technologies. The former is still a barrier to educators, because of the difficulty in setting up an evaluation scheme for new media and collaborative work such as blogs, podcasts, video and projects. The latter hinders the quality of tools and contents pupils are allowed to access during their learning process at school.
The research also identifies 30 key trends affecting teaching, learning and creativity in K-12 schools. The 5 most impacting on schools in the next 5 years are: technology as a strong influence on everyday life (study, work, socialisation, etc.); technology as a means for empowering students (and no more an isolating influence); the web as an increasingly personal experience (skinning); a new conception of learning environments, more and more interdisciplinary, community-driven and relying on collaboration and virtual communication; and a new perception of creativity and innovation as valued professional skills.
In another list of 30 potential inhibitors/challenges schools have to address, among the first 5 rank: a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills such as information, visual and technology literacy; old educational material and practice; an undervalued and rarely occurring learning process incorporating real life experiences; difficult change in the adoption of ICT in daily learning; and the basic educational structure, which hinders any major change.
The Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition (full text) is available in the Insight Library at:
http://resources.eun.org/insight/2009_Horizon_Report_K12.pdf
CoSN:
http://www.cosn.org/Default.aspx
US country reports produced in collaboration with CoSN:
http://blog.eun.org/insightblog/2008/08/country_reports_snapshots_from.html
http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/policy/policies/country_reports_2008.htm