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.

As a member of the Australasian Horizon Report Board, a recent article entitled "New technology trends in education: Seven years of forecasts and convergence", in the latest issue of Computers & Education, attracted my attention.

In brief, the paper analyzes the evolution of technology trends from 2004 to 2014 that correspond to the long-term predictions of the most recent Horizon Report. More specifically, 'the study analyzes through bibliometric analysis which technologies were successful and became a regular part of education systems, which ones failed to have the predicted impact and why, and the shape of technology flows in recent years' (Martin, et. al., 2011, p.1893).

A novel methodology is adopted in order to assess the level of technology adoption by searching in bibliographic databases the number of paper published every year around the predicted technologies. According to the results, social networks had the deepest impact on education-related research, with a very high rate of academic articles. In several cases the findings of the bibliometric analysis show that the predicted impact of emerging technologies were delayed one and two years.

Overall the paper claims to provide evidence that some of the predictions were right (e.g., social networks, user-created content, games, virtual worlds and mobile devices). In other cases there does not appear to have been a major impact based on the number of educational publications. (e.g., knowledge Web, learning objects and open content, context-awareness and ubiquitous computing). However, the terminology adopted in the original Horizon Reports may have a bearing on these data as examples like 'open content' have evolved and is better known now as the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement.

The other problem I have with the Horizon Report predictions is they are inherently technologically deterministic and take insufficient account the potential social or human impact on technology. For this reason I'm not convinced by Martin et. al., (2011, p.1905) claim that 'this work can help researchers to understand the past, current and future technology metatrends in education'.

We know from history that predictions of the future are highly problematic, as illustrated by the above video clip from the 1960s on the future of the computer. The video gets some things right but it also underscores how the social-politcial context of the time shapes and influences the nature of our predictions. We might laugh now about the way in which women were portrayed in the 1960s but future generations are just as likely to judge the inequities and power imbalances that are still deeply ingrained in today's society.

With this point in mind it might be a useful exercise for the authors to look at the gender and cultural representation of the respective Horizon Report boards around the world as the question needs to be asked: whose view of the future is being presented in these predictions?

The easy answer to the question of 'where is eLearning heading?' would be to report the findings of the recent Horizon Report. If you’re not familiar with this report then I encourage you to take a look at the predictions. The 2011 edition was released about a month ago and the Report makes the following predictions:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

Here is a useful link to a presentation which elaborates on these predictions.

Although I’m on the Horizon Report Board for the Australia and New Zealand edition, I find many of the predictions imply that technology is an entity and influence independent of external forces—a classic example of technological determinism. The predictions would benefit from taking a wider societal view of technology which recognises in the words of Postman (1993, p.5) that “Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that”.

Having said that, I'm not advocating for a socially deterministic or technological nightmare perspective as this is equally problematic. Such a view often reflects a level of moral panic about the influence technology is having on our lives. In unpacking the tension between competing conceptions of technology and views of the future, I often talk about the importance of thinking about Education for change rather than Education in change. Put another way, educators have a key role to play in being future makers rather than future takers.

Enough slogans for now! You may find the following video is a useful discussion piece in thinking about where eLearning is heading (or not heading). It was produced for the book the Tower in the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing.

The few months have been fairly hectic for me as I've been juggling the additional roles of acting Assistant Vice Chancellor (Academic & International) for all of September along with the position of Acting Stream Project Manager. Hence the long gap since my last blog posting.

Hopefully I can pick up my musings from where I left off as we count down to the busy Xmas period. To get the ball rolling here is the link to the last Horizon Report which I contributed to a few months ago as one of the expert panel members. Amongst other things the report identifies the rapid growth and impact of ebooks as I've discussed over the last six months.

http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report-ANZ.pdf 

Further musings and thoughts on other trends and implications as time permits over the next week or so.