2009 Horizon Report

The Horizon Report is published yearly and identifies emerging technologies or practices likely to be mainstream within the next 5 years. Not many surprises here: mobiles and the cloud dominate in the short term, geo-everything and the personal web in the 1 -3 year period and semantic aware applications and smart objects all emerging.

"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." more>>