Pass the SoLT

The New Zealand edition of the 2011 Horizon Report was released today. The Report lists the 12 “technologies to watch” which are claimed to uniquely reflect the state of tertiary education in New Zealand. This is the first time that a New Zealand specific report has been released and the findings make interesting reading in comparison to reports from other regions. The table below provides a comparison of the "short list" between New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the Global Edition.

The differences between the rankings could reflect regional priorities and the relative evolution and maturity of new developments in different parts of the world. However, we should not rule out questions about the validity of the contrasting selections as they come from experts in the field who should have a local and global outlook.

I have to say the absence of learning analytics is a major omission in the New Zealand report as this area of technological innovation is one of the really 'hot' topics internationally and it has been described as the "next big thing". The second Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference is in Vancouver in May 2012. Arguably, learning analytics has already arrived and I would certainly place the development in the two to three year category.

But then I can hardly complain as I was left off the initial selection process by accident and pressures of work and travel commitment prevented me from participating in the identification and voting process. It is also surprising to see Open Content (i.e. Open Educational Resources) and Digital Scholarship missing from the New Zealand list as I believe these two developments are already reshaping the nature of academic work and the way institutions design and deliver courses.

In terms of scholarship, I encourage you to read Martin Weller's recent book on how technology is reshaping scholarly practice.

Although it seems everyone agrees 'The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators', I'm less convinced about the New Zealand panel conclusion that, 'The growing availability of bandwidth will dramatically change user behaviours in teaching, learning and research over the next five years'. This claim seems to be very technology-led and overly focused on the supply-side of internet provision. We know from the experience in other countries that more attention is required on the demand-side, especially in tertiary education, as it's naive to think that if we built it, they'll come.

Once again this year I'm a little critical of the failure to acknowledge that new technology is not neutral and more attention could be given in future years to the way technology will impact our lives--for better and worse. Digital exclusion would appear on my list of the major challenges facing tertiary education and New Zealand society at large. We need to be wary of the inherent technological determinism promoted by the annual Horizon Report exercise. But the New Zealand edition of the Report will no doubt generate further discussion and for this reason it serves a useful purpose.

However, it does make me wonder whether we need to start a regular horizon report for predicting the type of new pedagogies that we should expect to see in our tertiary institutions over the next one to five years. Of course the list of pedagogies could be quite short and may not change from one year to the next.

And in terms of pedagogy I'm reminded of the finding in the recent "Going the Distance Report" that less than one-third of chief academic officers believe that their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education. This percent has changed little over the last eight years.

The full report is available from the New Media Consortium website.