Technology & the Future of Higher Education

The 2007 Horizon Report on key tech trends in higher education has identified the following as the six technologies they think university administrators should be paying attention to:

1. User created content
2. Social networking
3. Mobile phones
4. Virtual worlds
5. New scholarship and emerging forms of publication
6. Massively multiplayer educational gaming

The ranking roughly reflect the order that the committee mostly of campus IT administrators (no librarians on the panel) expect the technology to impact schools. Probably nothing on the list is a surprise to readers of this blog, although I thought mobile phones was an interesting inclusion. The executive summary suggested that mobile phones will become (are becoming) the hardware that students will use to interact with digital material (sound, audio, internet etc).

I think it is important to not get too distracted by current applications of 2.0 technologies but rather to be thinking about how the underlying concepts may impact how we teach, how we grade, and the support that will be expected from University staff be they IT or library employees.