(Thanks, Mari!)

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report, a collaboration between Educause and NMC is available (PDF):

The four major trends that emerged are identified below and reflect significantly changing attitudes toward technology and communication that surfaced again and again in the research. The significance of critical thinking skills and participatory media literacy is mentioned.

Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted. No longer in their infancy, tools for working collaboratively at a distance are easier to use and more commonly available than in previous years. It is no longer unusual to attend a conference online or to contribute to a project wiki. As the tools have matured, the practice of online communication and
collaboration has increased. This trend is at the heart of social computing and is driving personal broadcasting as well.

Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds. Devices such as cell phones or mp3 players are almost everywhere; delivering content to those devices simply makes sense. This trend is growing in the consumer arena and is beginning to be felt in education as well. The ubiquity of these devices has enabled personal broadcasting (podcasting and vlogging) to take off almost overnight, and that is just the first wave of broadband content that will be ported to these devices, especially phones, in the next few
years.

Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning. The demand for personalized content and services, increasingly met by savvy retailers and service providers, and greatly enabled by the ability of the Internet to allow marketers to meet individualized needs, will surface with increasing frequency in the world of academia. Scholarly and cultural institutions are already beginning to differentiate themselves
along these dimensions and that dynamic can be expected to continue and accelerate for some time.

Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope. As the ways in which researchers, students and teachers can collaborate with each other increase, knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge is becoming a community activity. A renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is
leading to an exploration of the science of gaming, context-aware environments and devices, and their application for teaching and learning.