2008 Horizon Report from The New Media Constortium and ELI

Top Six Key Emerging Technologies
"The technologies featured in the 2008 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative applications. The first adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of entry within the next year; the second, within two to three years; and the third, within four to five years."

1. Grass Roots Video/DIY Video
2. Collaboration Webs
3. Mobile Broadband
   
4. Data Mashups
5. Collective Intelligence
6. Social Operating Systems

See the Full Report (PDF)

Anecdotal/Observable New Technologies:

• Twittering was huge
• blogs remain strong
• wikis are strong and steady
• Second Life is still strong in discussions
• Apple looks good this year

Check out a map of where we really are and headed (PDF)

Feb 8-10 at USC - 24/7 a DIY Video Summit

Featuring Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, John Seely Brown, Joichi Ito, and many other great leaders and do'ers in the 'do it yourself' media movement.

Feb 8-10, 2008

To Register ($25 for Students; $50 for others) Click Here

Henry Jenkins ELI 2008 Podcast Presentation: What Wikipedia can Teach Us about New Media Literacies

Click for Podcast

Report from ELI 2008: Belle Wheelen

Currently presenting on 'Accountability in Higher Education,' Belle Wheelen (President, Commission on Colleges, Southern Association of Colleges & Schools and former Secretary of Education of Virginia) spoke of the enormity of 'twittering' while she presented - as a point of levity - in the context of student preparedness in IT coming out of high school and going into higher education. The key missing ingredient, according to Wheelen, is critical thinking skills. In order for this to happen - to change - we must change the way that faculty approach students.


Wheelen discussed the role of global competition, and our diminishing role and ability to keep up, including the types of jobs that American students are able to fill, versus students from other countries. One point here, that the blog poster makes, is that in the past years the New York Times reported on Sunday, 27 Jan 08 reports that "Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past."

Prescriptions:

1. Service Learning: Students need to know what is happening in their community to appreciate the context of globalism. Course content and curriculum should be linked to local conditions to promote service learning
2. Basic strategies that assure that students actually matriculate. There are students who don't know how to ask questions, and who never get the strategies that lead to success in test taking.
3. Work with minority students while still in K-12 system to ensure they are college ready and prepared to enter higher education.

National Conversation - Spellings Commission:

• Access
• Affordability
• Private loans vs. federal aid
• Accountability (student learning outcomes; national tracking system)
  
• Transparency (grad rates; job placement rates)

According to Wheelen, these are at face value useful guidelines -- but the 'devil is in the details' and led a backlash because of the unrealistic uniformity of a single standardized set of tests. There was a major pushback from higher education because of the way that the Commission went about this. The Higher Education Act has not been reauthorized, thus the Commission Report (Sept 06) was the only guiding document. Accrediting community met with Spellings in Nov 2006 with 200 people were in the room. When it came time for questions, no one had questions -- so Wheelen said: Appreciation for being at the table; second -- accreditation is about continuous improvement -- 'you mentioned a summit, can you talk about that?' 'Yes,' said Spellings, 'That depends on what happens here today.'

Responses to the Spellings Report:

• ETS Report
  
• more -- all of the same issues originally identified by Spellings Commission, but with a different approach
• Truly focusing on student outcomes

"Your institution is one that students want to be ---"

Growing Up Online

In case you have missed this, PBS Frontline is running a program 'Growing Up Online' sponsored by the MacArthur and Park Foundations. The episode is available for viewing online.

I have yet to see it, and will post the review -- anyone who has seen this program -- reviews are welcomed!

Blogospheric Pressure - Reflection Paper #2

After all of the West Coast rains of this past week, including the deluge of bad news around the housing market and the concomitant Wall Street downpours, it's great to be in San Antonio, Texas reporting from the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI 2008) where Henry Jenkins of MIT will be keynoting tomorrow -- I expect that Dr. Jenkins will continue his dialog on the "YouTube University" that can be taken as a complete overhaul of higher education, or as a parallel, albeit, transformational model for higher education and how 'teaching, learning, and research' co-exist and interact.

This week's blog talk - something fairly new for me to scan in this way, that is, as I understand it for this class and program; seemed abuzz with the weekend victory in the South Carolina Democratic Primaries for the Barak Obama for President campaign. Indeed, no longer does this election seem to be a given in terms of the Democrats or Republican candidates. This too seems to resonate with the recent mainstream media coverage, notably the New York Times on a kind of pessimism in the United States amongst voters, and in terms of a possible seachange as American hegemony wains.

So is America - first the Democrats, and then the larger voting population, going with Obama? Clearly it's far to early to tell, and likely the Democratic nomination will be played down to the wire, where Hillary Clinton or even John Edwards could win the nomination due to unforeseen circumstances and certain developments in the weeks ahead. Indeed, it's not clear what the hell is going on out there anymore, and it feels more and more that the institutional foundations below us are quaking and shaking as the word 'change' echoes through the speeches and stumps featuring Barak Obama, and possibly next, more and more, John McCain on the Republican side.

If this kind of upheaval is to be realized in the polls in November, and if indeed the United States is in the fight of its short life to define itself as truly exceptional - then the rains of this month might prove to be an important harbinger for growth in the Spring and Summer. We shall see indeed, and this may prove to be an important unifying force for the next important candidate. Judging from the comments on YouTube, people seem jazzed about prospect of Obama. I checked DIGG for some interesting stories and came up empty. Please share if you have anything on the elections.

Here's a great set of shots and links on the rather stinky Web of 1996 -- enjoy.

Reflection Paper of January 22 2008, posted after the fact

Reflection Paper for Week of Jan 22, 2008: INTRO TO ONLINE COMMUNITIES CMGT 534 (North)

Favored Blog:

Of the different blogs available, I would like to propose the Movable Type (MT) blog available through USC's Web Services (currently in beta). The reasons for this are as follows:

· MT is a robust blog environment that is hosted by TypePad already, but that is also in beta locally at USC and hosted by Information Technology Services (ITS). This local hosting allows for direct feedback for the nuances of usage here at USC toward a robust set of options available to the wider USC community.

· MT is already used by the School of Cinematic Arts' Interactive Media Division (SCA's IMD) for their 'active' or 'live' website (http://interactive.usc.edu/). This same model can be applied to the APOC program.

· MT was used by the Annenberg Center and managed by the Annenberg School. Thus expertise lies with the IT department at Annenberg, and this may provide impetus to migrate the Center's old site(s).

· Given the above, there is a local 'community of practice' already in place, consisting of end users and IT support persons. This CoP around MT can be developed toward reaching a critical mass that embraces the benefits of a blog environment - one that exposes the student to the outside world of experts.

As a runner up, I would propose Blogger.com because it is known to many users and also enjoys a wide and local 'community of practice,' especially in light of the Google Apps at USC rollout that will likely include blogger (and the JotSpot Wiki very soon).

But here I am ... a week later using Blogger.com ... in the end, it's just easier to use and available.

Favored Wiki:

Having used Confluence, WikiMedia, and WetPaint, I am partial to these. However, I have no real preference and I am eager to learn about other wikis, especially PBWiki. However, when it becomes available, I was very pleased with the JotSpot Wiki before it was purchased by Google. As part of Google, it is under wraps but is rumored to be very robust as a collaborative environment.

Blog Sites:

OK -- I clearly didn't get this assignment the first time ... I got it now. Having missed some key information the first day of class made it crazy.

1. TechCrunch: An excellent business oriented feed that covers the social software aspects of corporate America (and the world) without abandoning the essential ingredients of openness and modularity associated with Web 2.0.

2. PaidContent.org: Another business oriented blog feed, but with a more social economic bent and a more global bent. I am only getting oriented with this site, but appreciate the business models that are made clear on this site. For example, the recent earnings report from Apple that looks at the granular details of where the earnings are coming from, and why these are likely to decline or at least forecast to decline in the year ahead.

3. Engadget: I use this site often for reviews on the latest and greatest electronic gear, from computers to handhelds, from projectors to rear-projection monitors; and into the realm of camcorders, digital cameras, and more. This site is invaluable for understanding and comparing different electronics for specific applications and uses.

4. Mashable: I read this feed daily, and have this on my Facebook site. It is a great overview of what is happening in the world of Web 2.0 as companies and widgets collide. Mashable is my favorite Web 2.0 feed, and never fails to be first -- well, most of the time!

5. Digg: I am not a regular of Digg, and do understand its principles. I am drawn to its founder, Kevin Rose, who has persevered despite his 'age' (not so old here, but in Web 2.0 terms, he's ancient) and succeeded! Rose debunks the overarching Gen X traits of base greed and shallow commitments to principles and ideas. Digg itself seems very time consuming -- I need to revisit it more often to build a better understanding.

Next Generation Media: The Global Shift:

While this paper is an excellent statistical overview and inspiring textual review of the "Internet" and how the next generation of media, including Web 2.0/social software, mobile technology, and e-commerce is 'transforming' how we interact and share knowledge; alas, it remains largely hyperbole filled with references and 'expert' assessments from persons who only recently accepted the significance of what they claim to prognosticate.

The pinnacle of this contradiction comes with the concluding remarks from former FCC Chair Reed Hundt, who concludes that 'new media are creating a new vision of the relationship between the individual and society.' It is extremely difficult to take Mr. Hundt seriously when one considers (and having lived through) his tenure as FCC Chair during the explosion -- ground zero -- of the Internet and World Wide Web during the early 1990s and extending through into the new Millennium. At that time, as with Vice President Gore, Mr. Hundt was focused primarily on cable television and accommodating the old media guard, especially the networks. With respect to the Web or Internet (or the Information Superhighway or National Information Infrastructure, as it was called then), Mr. Hundt and Mr. Gore were primarily interested in the 'clipper chip' and in providing the United States federal government with the ability to monitor all data flows on the Web or Internet (or NII). Indeed, their 'vision' was one that was very much in favor of government control, and this was clearly also borne out by the types of regulatory decisions and ideas proposed by Mr. Hundt. What is more, once he left his post, Mr. Hundt immediately provided consultation services to the cable and private sector entities that he and the FCC had (and the FCC continues to) control.

To be sure, while Bill Clinton was clearly a visionary and understood the significance of the Web; he certainly did not support the idea of a direct democracy via the Web or in the form of the "Open Source Democracy for the Digital Age." And arguably with good reason; perhaps best underscored when one considers that it was Ross Perot who supported such a move in the 1992 US presidential elections -- and no other candidate.

As with the Perot proposals of the early 1990s around such a direct democracy system supported by Web technology, the debate and discussion completely skirts the critical essence of the foundations of the United States republic and democracy -- which is founded on the principle of representational democracy. This principle was alluded to as a kind of bullet point made by Reed Hundt (again, discrediting much of its meaning) but not as a historical tenet of the United States democracy and republic. It does seem essential that first the topic of direct democracy versus representational democracy be exhaustively debated and discussed before the technology is literally thrown at this question without regard to who we are and where we came from as a nation.

Aside from these observations and criticisms, I found the data on the mobile technology to be somewhat misplaced. Clearly we should not be seeking more hyperbole -- at the same time, the data suggests a sea change and it would have been helpful to the reader to understand more about the implications of mobile technology rather than as an afterthought for the 'magnificence' of the Web.