2007 Horizon Report Educause and The New Media Consortium have released the 2007 Horizon Report. It tries to assess the technological landscape and determine what technologies will be affecting higher education in the next few years. It also presents general trends and challenges facing the higher education environment when it comes to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Among the key trends that I found interesting:

• Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship. They conclude that these could get even more out of sync.
• The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Think Wikipedia, blogs, del.icio.us, etc.
• Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from faculty. Think about the way students use cell phones and iPods.
  

Among challenges, the report lists copyright and ip issues, the need to understand how to create meaningful multimedia content, and how collaborative work changes the nature of scholarship. The list the following technologies to watch. Each one gets its own couple of pages, which I highly recommend reading. They offer an overview, plus a discussion of the relevance of each technology to teaching and learning and include some real-world example as well as further reading.

• User-created content (YouTube, blogs)
• Social networking (Facebook, MySpace)
• Mobile phones
• Virtual worlds (Second Life)
• New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication (publishing digitally)
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming (like World of Warcraft and Halo for education)

The whole report isn't long and gives a good overview of the trends. It's written in a way that even the Luddites among us can understand. ¶ 9:15 PM, posted by Laura