On the Horizon

The 2009 Horizon Report, the annual report on the state of play of learning technology, predicts that there will be three key horizons of important development in the near future. In the executive summary the report authors suggest there are six technology groups we should watch:

In the first adoption horizon we find mobiles and cloud computing, both of which are already well established on many campuses — and still more organizations have plans in place to make use of these technologies in the coming months. Institutions at the leading edge of technology adoption are also already applying the two clusters of technologies we have placed on the mid-term horizon, geo-everything and the personal web. All four topics on the first two horizons are already in common use in other sectors, including entertainment, commerce, and the world of work. The two technologies placed on the far-term horizon, semantic-aware applications and smart objects, are not yet commonly found in an educational context, although research is being conducted in both areas and the rate of development seems to indicate that these topics are well worth watching.


This is much in keeping with the views of many leading experts in the fields of e-learning and m-learning, so it comes as no surprise. I even suggested something very similar in my recent blog post entitled e-Learning 3.0. What is important though, is that we appear to be moving more quickly toward the use of personal web type learning environments, where the use of mobile, handheld and semantically enabled 'smart' technologies will play an increasingly important role in all sectors of education. We will now wait to see 'when', not 'if', these applications become mainstream in education.


Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.


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