The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative recently released their annual Horizon Report, the product of a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to “identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.” The report groups six emerging technologies into three “adoption horizons,” predicting likely timeframes for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching and learning.

The first adoption horizon, which assumes the likelihood of entry within the next year, includes grassroots video and collaborative webs—two technologies that are already in use on many campuses. The Report asserts that, currently, virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software. Similarly, collaboration no longer requires expensive equipment and specialized expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free.

The mid-term adoption horizon, assuming the likelihood of entry within two to three years, includes applications of mobile broadband and data mashups. The Report suggests that mobiles are quickly becoming the most affordable portable platform for staying networked on the go, and new displays and interfaces make it possible to access almost any Internet content. Also visable on the mid-term horizon are data mashups—custom applications in which combinations of data from different sources are “mashed up” into a single tool.

The third adoption horizon includes collective intelligence and social operating systems, which are projected to become pervasive within four to five years. The Report claims that in the coming years we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people (search patterns, cell phone locators over time, geocoded digital photographs). Using these implicit connections and clues we leave behind as we go about our lives, social operating systems will organize our work and our thinking around the people we know; this will obviously have profound implications for the academy and for the ways in which we think about knowledge and learning.

For an detailed analysis of the future of new media in the academy, be sure to check out the full Horizon Report.