Horizon Report Redux

My last post was about the key issues facing higher education as perceived by the writers of the Horizon Report. In this post I'll discuss the critical challenges facing higher education and will mention the technologies to watch from the 2007 Horizon Report. Because of my interest in educational technology, I'll focus one whole post on the technologies portion of the report with commentary on how (or if) libraries are incorporating the technologies.

Challenges

Assessing new creative products and forms of work --
Academy leadership flexible enough to evolve with the changes in teaching, learning, and scholarship is a must. If academia doesn't adapt to the changes, it will distance itself from the actual conduct of scholarship.

Tackling intellectual property and copyright issues because they are barriers to scholarship -

With the extension of copyright terms, intellectual property (IP) and copyright laws are increasingly restrictive. Balancing the need to protect IP and the need to share and use works is difficult and the proliferation of digital material further complicate the matter. Many scholars interested in sharing their work are using less restrictive licensing and using the creative commons to design flexible licenses that allow more creator control and wider use of material.

Pressure for higher education to provide learning and services to mobile devices --
Cell phones and other mobile devices are ubiquitous and they have driven a need for instant "anywhere, anytime" access. Some universities are providing access to services and content via mobile devices and this trend will increase. Coping with this pressure and delivering mobile services will continue to challenge higher education.

Technologies

User-created Content

Social Networking

Mobile phones and devices

Virtual worlds

Massively Multiplayer Gaming

For a detailed discussion of the "technologies to watch" and their estimated time to adoption, check out my next post...

On the Horizon...

For the past few years the New Media Consortium has collaborated with the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) to research emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on higher education. The report is divided into sections by time to adoption and includes technologies that will be adopted for educational use in a year or less up to five years. The 2007 Horizon Report discusses a number of technology and trends, but rather than summarizing them all, I'll point out a few I think are most significant or have an impact on academic libraries.

Key Trends

1. Changing higher education environment --

• less students overall because of declining enrollment
• Increased need for distance education
• More non-traditional and non-residential students

2. Academic review (including peer review) , merit, and tenure processes are not adapting to new forms of scholarship. As faculty are using digital mediums for expression and increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, their work is moving towards a new type of peer review, but "traditional" ideas of academic status are presenting barriers to change.

3. Information Literacy should not be considered a given. The IL skills of students are not increasing proportional to technology usage. Today's students are using various types of technologies, but that does not make them more information literate. This is why many academic libraries are boosting their efforts at IL instruction.

The three trends discussed above impact higher education as a whole, and are issues that effect academic libraries provision of services and instruction. The changing nature of the academic environment and student body contribute to the services offered by academic libraries and the amount and types of instruction we provide, while the new forms of academic review have a potential impact on the scholarly publishing crisis. I was pleasantly surprised to see that information literacy was one of the key trends. Many times the misperception is that netgen students are information literate because they are technologically literate. Libraries have been teaching information literacy skills for years, but I would like to see more an institutional emphasis and initiative for information literacy. Many universities are emphasizing IL, but many are not. Institutional support and interdisciplinary collaboration with libraries to include IL instruction is increasingly important.

Stayed tuned to my next post where I'll continue the discussion of the Horizon Report by discussing the critical challenges and technologies to watch...