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corroboration are not yet well understood by mainstream faculty and academic decision-makers, creating a gap between what is possible and what is acceptable.
3
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. Despite the widespread agreement on the importance of digital media literacy, training in the supporting skills and techniques is rare in teacher education and non-existent in the preparation of most university faculty. As lecturers and professors begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as an expected norm for academic professionals, nor as a key part of degree programs.
4
Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies. Too often it is education’s own processes and practices that limit broader uptake of new technologies. Much resistance to change is simply comfort with the status quo, but in other cases, such as in promotion and tenure reviews, experimentation with or adoptions of clearly innovative applications of technologies is often seen as outside the role of researcher or scientist.
5
New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities. While the university library has traditionally housed collections of scholarly resources, social networks and new publishing paradigms, such as open content, are challenging the library’s role as curator. Students and educators are increasingly able to access important, historic research in web browsers on devices of their choosing. As such, libraries are under tremendous pressure to evolve new ways of supporting and curating scholarship. These trends and challenges are a reflection of the impact of technology that is occurring in almost every aspect of our lives. They are indicative of the changing
NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition
nature of the way we communicate, access information, connect with peers and colleagues, learn, and even socialize. Taken together, they provided the advisory board a frame through which to consider the potential impacts of nearly 50 emerging technologies and related practices that were analyzed and discussed for possible inclusion in this edition of the NMC Horizon Report series. Six of those were chosen through successive rounds of ranking; they are summarized below and detailed in the main body of the report.
Technologies to Watch
The six technologies featured in the NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition are placed along three adoption horizons that indicate likely timeframes for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. The near-term horizon assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for higher education institutions within the next twelve months; the mid-term horizon, within two to three years; and the far-term, within four to five years. It should be noted at the outset that the NMC Horizon Report is not a predictive tool. It is meant, rather, to highlight emerging technologies with considerable potential for our focus areas of education and interpretation. Each of the six is already the target of work at a number of innovative organizations around the world, and the projects we showcase here reveal the promise of a wider impact. Near-term Horizon On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile apps and tablets. These two topics have become pervasive in everyday life, at least in the developed world, and students at universities and colleges have ever-increasing expectations of being able to learn on these devices whenever and wherever they may be. This year tablets have been separated from mobiles as a distinct category, preserving mobiles as a descriptor used for typical hand-held devices designed to make calls. > Mobile apps are the fastest growing dimension of the mobile space in higher education right now, with impacts on virtually every aspect of informal life, and increasingly, every discipline in the university. Always-connected Internet devices using 3G