Wir haben noch gar keinen Trendausblick zum neuen Jahr gemacht. Passend kam nun der Horizon Report 2009 durch meinen RSS-Reader, und nun lassen wir doch einfach die Experten sprechen.

Was wird sich in den nächsten fünf Jahren durchsetzen? Hier nennen die Experten folgende Technologien

• Mobiles. (…)
• Cloud Computing. (…)
• Geo-Everything. (…)
• The Personal Web. (…)
• Semantic-Aware Applications. (…)
• Smart Objects. (…) (Quelle und Erläuterung)

Vor allem der Trend zum Mobilen wundert mich nicht, kann ich diesen doch seit der rasanten Verbreitung des iPhones in meinem Bekanntenkreis auch hautnah verfolgen. Folgende Key-Trends nennen die Experten:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate. (…)
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision. (…)
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce. (…)
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive. (…)
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition. (…) (Quelle und Erläuterung)

Doch am spannendsten sind für mich die kritischen Herausforderungen, die der Report aufzeigt:

• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy. The skills involved in writing and research have changed from those required even a few years ago. Students need to be technologically adept, to be able to collaborate with peers all over the world, to understand basic content and media design, and to understand the relationship be- tween apparent function and underlying code in the applications they use daily.
• Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not. Schools are still using materials developed decades ago, but today’s students come to school with very different experiences than those of 20 or 30 years ago, and think and work very differently as well. Institutions need to adapt to current student needs and identify new learning models that are engaging to younger generations. Assessment, likewise, has not kept pace with new modes of working, and must change along with teaching methods, tools, and materials.
• Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy. A challenge cited as critical now for several years running, academic review and faculty rewards are out of sync with ship and research to be static and “dead” as a way of collecting, analyzing and sharing results.
• We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning. Data collection and mining of student information systems for such evidence is being considered as a component of accreditation, and institutions increasingly are expected to collect, manage, sort, and retrieve an expanding mountain of data related to not only learning, but the entire spectrum of their activities. Current systems are not capable of managing and interpreting real time information flows on the scale that is anticipated.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices. This challenge is even more true today than it was when it first appeared in the Horizon Report two years ago. As new devices continue to make content almost as easy to access and view on a mobile as on a computer, and as ever more engaging applications take advantage of new interface technologies like accelerometers and multi-touch screens, the applications for mobiles continue to grow. This is more than merely an expectation to provide content: this is an opportunity for higher education to reach its constituents in new and compelling ways, in addition to the obvious anytime, anywhere benefits of these ubiquitous devices.

Hier kommen einige Aufgaben auf Schulen und Hochschulen zu. Was mich aber erstaunt, war der Trend hin zu formalen Lernsettings (vgl. z.B. Punkt 1), wo doch in letzter Zeit vor allem das informelle Lernen betrachtet wurde. Kann man media literacy also nur in formellen Lernsettings erwerben?