Via Derek Wenmouth, this link to the 2006 Horizon Report. This annual report focuses on emerging technologies that are expected to have an impact on higher learning within the next few years. It also provides some insight as to how these technologies may be applied to teaching and learning.

Some of the less technically confident teachers I know seem to feel that they need to follow the route taken by those who caught an earlier techie bus. I disagree. This view is inevitably going to be discouraging. Rather than going back over old ground, it is possible to short-circuit the process, and a publication like the Horizon Report can prove very helpful in this regard.

The six focus areas this year in order of their expected “time to impact” are:

• social computing (less than a year)
• personal broadcasting (less than a year)
• the phones in their pockets (2-3 years)
• educational gaming (2-3 years)
• augmented reality and enhanced visualisation (4-5 years)
• context-aware environments and devices (4-5 years)

I strongly recommend this report to anyone intending to do the ICT in Teaching and Learning module later this year.