ICTlogy

During the last 7 years, the New Media Consortium (NMC) has been publishing the Horizon Report, the main outcome of the Horizon Project, the centerpiece of NMC’s Emerging Technologies Initiative, [which] charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative inquiry.

To deepen in the characteristics of specific scenarios, the NMC engaged in 2009 in opening up the Horizon Report Series to thematic reports that addressed not the global landscape, but segments of the reality. Thus, there came the 2009 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition and 2010 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition in the area of primary education; 2008 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition and 2009 Horizon Report: Economic Development Edition for these two countries in Oceania; or the 2009 Horizon Report: Economic Development Edition as related to small to medium-sized businesses.

In a joint effort with the eLearn Center of the Open University of Catalonia, a new issue of the Horizon Report Series has been published, the Horizon Report: Ibero-American Edition 2010, this time zeroing in the region comprised by Latin American countries, Spain and Portugal.

The report, as its sibling reports, begins with a brief analysis of key trends and critical challenges, and then lists six technologies to watch in the short-run, 2-3 years and long-term horizons:

• Collaborative environments;
• social media;
• open content;
• mobiles;
• augmented reality;
• semantic web.

Unlike previous reports, the authors considered the inclusion of a brand new section, Policy Recommendations, so to go one step forward and suggest action lines for the future. The report has been so far published in Spanish, but English, Catalan and Portuguese versions are on their way.

More information

• Official page and downloads.
• Blog of the Horizon Report: Ibero-American Edition project.
• Wiki of the Horizon Report: Ibero-American Edition project, with plenty of additional information and resources.
• The micro and macro approaches of ICTs in Education, my own reflections on the meeting of the advisory board in April 2010 (disclosure: I am both co-author of the report and member of the advisory board).
• Composition of the Advisory Board.
• The report in slides:

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