I will be in esteemed company in Philly on Thursday April 30 at 2:15 PM, part of a panel entitled Museum Technologies and Trends On the Horizon – A Critical Review. Its a panel reviewing the upcoming Horizon Report for Museums based on New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report for Higher Education now in its sixth year.

If you have no idea what the f*** I’m talking about (see previous post on my recent desire to use swear words in my blog and presentations), good, please read on. If you do know what I’m talking about, good, please read on.

For the last six years New Media Consortium have released a report on emerging technologies for higher education. A panel of experts convene to make a valued predication on what technologies will be influential over three time-to-adoption horizons: 1 year, 2-3 years and 4-5 years.

To gauge the value of this report programme, here’s what the 2004 technological view of the next 5 years is, or “was”? (2004 Horizon Report)

1 Year Out – 2005
Learning objects – assemblies of audio, graphic, animation and other digital files and materials that are intended to be reusable in a variety of ways, and easily combined into higher-level instructional components such as lessons and modules. The primary purpose behind the development and use of learning objects is to increase access to quality content, and to avoid wasteful replications of effort by making that content usable in a variety of contexts.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - uses XML for describing two-dimensional graphics, holding the information needed to draw an image in a text file. Scaling is smoothly achieved without jagged edges. Graphical objects can be styled, transformed, grouped, or placed into previously rendered objects. Text is searchable and selectable. SVG is an especially powerful tool for instructional developers on college and university campuses, with potential applications in virtually any discipline, but especially the sciences and engineering.

2 to 3 Years Out – 2006-2007
Rapid Prototyping – refers to what amounts to 3-D printing, e.g., building three-dimensional physical objects from digital data files. These files may be created in a variety of ways, such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided tomography (CAT), or even X-ray crystallography, then output to a rapid prototyping machine that creates a physical model of the object. This technology already is widely used for a variety of manufacturing, design, and engineering applications, but as cost decreases, is finding new applications in the arts and the classroom.

Multimodal Interfaces – provide ways for humans to interact with computers beyond the traditional mouse and keyboard, using inputs and outputs that target not only each of the five senses, but also take advantage of nonverbal cues common in human conversation. Considerable development is taking place in simulations that use multimodal techniques (haptics or force feedback, for example) to great effect.

4 to 5 Years Out – 2008-2009
Context Aware Computing – refers to computing devices that can interpret contextual information and use it to aid decision-making and influence interactions. Contextual cues may include what the user is attending to, the user’s location and orientation, the date and time of day, lighting conditions, other objects and people in the environment, accessible infrastructure in the immediate vicinity, and so forth. Context-aware applications can make decisions based on such information without the need for user input.

Knowledge Webs – is a term that describes a dynamic concept of individual and group knowledge generation and sharing, with technology used to make connections between knowledge elements clear, to distribute knowledge over multiple pathways, and to represent knowledge in ways that facilitate its use. Work in knowledge webs overlaps considerably with that going on around communities of practice, and holds the potential to help such communities share, create, analyze, validate, and distribute existing and emerging knowledge.

So, is the horizon report as useful as a Swiss Army Knife or as useless as a Chocolate Teapot?

I’m trying to figure out whether the earlier predicted technologies are so embedded now as to be hidden from view, while the later technologies seem curiously more accurate or at least in more obvious view. Maybe Multimodal Interfaces (think Wii), Context Aware Computing (think Google) and Knowledge Webs (think wikis) are much more visible today but will just become part of the furniture in a few years time.

The following year, the 2005 report predicted Social Networks and Knowledge Webs in 2009-2010. Summarizing it as

… supplying people’s need to connect with each other in meaningful ways, social networks and knowledge webs offer a means of facilitating teamwork and constructing knowledge. The underlying technologies fade into the background while collaboration and communication are paramount.

In the event, it happened faster, but definitely a Swiss-Army-Knife moment for the team.

But here’s the rub. Is it a useful tool or just a useful read? If you had known about Social Networks and Knowledge Webs in 2005, what would you have done with that knowledge? Would it have influenced any of your strategic plans? Would you have done anything different? What would you have wanted to know in 2004 about the next 5 years, technologically speaking?

So this brings me to a request. In preparation for the panel, I’m interested in a straw poll of your view of the horizon report as a tool. While the current six years of reports are targeted to education, the forthcoming report is targeted specifically at museums, will you read it? Will you use it? Do you need to know what technologies are coming down the pike? Even if you’re not familiar with the report, I’d like to capture that fact too.

Just six easy multiple choice questions, taking moments of your time while you visualise pouring boiling water into a chocolate teapot or tinkering with the mother of all swiss army knifes…

plokta.com

swiss-army-knife-wenger.co.uk

Here’s the link: Horizon Report for Museums – Survey.

I’ll present the results at the session and post them here afterwards – many thanks.

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