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Emerging Technology Initiative

How can NMC and its members keep abreast of emerging technologies that may be important to our collective work?

This initiative focuses on identifying and understanding promising emerging technologies, with the goal of applying them to the creative process and to learning. The initiative is designed to stimulate systematic thinking about the future and its possible impacts, and is a fertile source of new ideas and major projects for the organization, several of which have themselves emerged as NMC initiatives. The Horizon Project is the centerpiece of the Emerging Technology Initiative, and its most visible product, the NMC’s annual Horizon Report, has become one of the most widely read publications in higher education, with a readership in the tens of thousands every year.


  • Focus on: emerging technologies and how to apply them
  • Stimulate: systematic thinking about the future and its possible impacts

Catalyze
dialog and new ideas

Build Community
engage people

Contribute
produce things

 

The content below is related to this initiative and comes from various places across the NMC web site. Items are listed in reverse chronological order.

Emerging Technology Initiative

Reflections on the Horizon.au Project Meeting

Posted July 28th, 2008 by Alan Levine
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Horizon.au Advisory Board, Melbourne Meeting

After a full day of brainstorming and discussion to generate the first short list of topics for the first Horizon.au report, participants gathered at the University of Melbourne for an evening reception. We took the opportunity to ask several participants what they thought were highlights of the day, which you can hear in this podcast.

Horizon.au refelctions preview

We also hade made a version of this as an enhanced podcast with pictures of the participants who spoke to us - you can watch/listen in iTune:
http://media.nmc.org/2008/07/horizon-au-reflections.m4a

See Also: http://horizon.nmc.org/australia

Twelfth NMC Virtual Symposium

Posted June 27th, 2008 by NMC
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Creative Commons flickr Photo by Kevin Lim Revolutionary practices are breaking apart old models of teaching and learning; students are using new tools to construct meaning and contribute to the design of their own education; teachers are sharing the power that has traditionally been theirs alone. Examples of unconventional, yet highly effective, methods of teaching and learning may be found in pockets all over the world, at all levels of education. When the multitude of examples are taken together, we begin to sense a profound change in the making that will alter our concept of education itself.

Rock the Academy!

New Frontiers in Nanotechnology

Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
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Wole Soboyejo, 2008 NMC Summer Conference
sobojeyo.jpg

Noontime Plenary, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Wole Soboyejo, Princeton University

This keynote presentation gives an overview of new frontiers in nanotechnology. Starting from the origins of modern nanotechnology about 50 years ago, nanotechnology is shown to have the potential to impact almost every aspect of our daily lives. These range from technologies for the early detection and treatment of cancer, to the next generation of solar cells, television screens, and filters for water purification. In each of these cases, the underlying scientific ideas are presented as well as some of the challenges that must be overcome prior to future applications in the developing and developed worlds. The presentation concludes by exploring ways in which nanotechnology can be used to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers in the developed and developing worlds.

Presentation available as:

Technology and the Global Commons

Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
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Diana Oblinger, 2008 NMC Summer Conference
oblinger.jpg

Opening Keynote, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE

The days of walled-off learning, where students are separated into grades, disciplines and physical locations, are giving way to programs in which students are encouraged to look beyond lecture halls, labs, and textbooks. Technology offers opportunities to bring together people, tools, and data in a global commons . Creating a global commons requires more than removing barriers posed by subject matter, geography, economics, or age. It requires a new set of models that may challenge many of our historic assumptions about authority and education. This presentation explores principles and examples that hint at a future global commons .

Presentation available as:

NMC Talks To Talis About Horizon Report

Posted March 31st, 2008 by NMC
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NMC's Larry Johnson, Rachel Smith, and Alan Levine were interviewed recently for a podcast now available on the Panlibus site. Speaking via telephone with Paul Miller in the UK, they shared the process and outcomes for the 2008 NMC Horizon Report .

NMC is quite honored, particularly since Miller's previous interviewee was Sir Tim Berners-Lee- what an act to follow!

Listen to the hour long podcast for the entire conversation.

See Also: http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2008/03/talis_talks_wit_1.php

More Ways to Engage with the 2008 Horizon Report

Posted February 4th, 2008 by Alan Levine
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Following up on our press release on the announcement of the 2008 Horizon Report, we have many more Horizon resources and ways for you to actively engage with the process of the Horizon Project.

We have tracked a steady flow of downloads of the report in PDF format and continuing our exploration of web publishing, today we are excited to share a new web version for the 2008 Horizon Report using the CommentPress format. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CommentPress is a template for the WordPress platform that provides a functionality for readers to post comments at the paragraph level. You can read and add to the report by commenting at http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2008.

NMC Announces Howard Rheingold's Symposium Presentation in a New Model for Online Publication

Posted January 16th, 2008 by Alan Levine
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The December 3-5 2007 NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication was designed to consider the way technology is not only changing the modes of communication, but even the whole notion of how we communicate and think about it. And in our continued effort to explore new means of hosting online conferences, this event took place entirely in the virtual world of Second Life.

We were very excited to offer a keynote presentation by Howard Rheingold on Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action where he surveyed the big picture/long view of the way technologies, communication media, and collective action has co-evolved.

NMC releases "Horizon Project: Call to Scholarship"

Posted October 12th, 2007 by Larry Johnson
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The New Media Consortium is pleased to announce today the release of the first Horizon Project Call to Scholarship . This document represents a synthesis of the ongoing dialog throughout the academy related to the six practices and technologies featured in the 2007 edition of the Horizon Report.

Participate in Horizon Project 2008 Simply By Tagging

Posted July 3rd, 2007 by NMC
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The process and effort on the 2007 Horizon Report is archived on the Horizon Wiki. Our research and resource sharing among thhe Advisory Board was greatly enhanced this year by active use of social bookmarking via the del.icio.us web service, and the resources tracked there became very valuable on the writing of the final report.

Adding a new resource takes less than a minute by anyone actively browsing the web, simply using the del.icio.us browser tools and tagging resources with our hz07 tag - the collection is available at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07 and is also collected here in the NMC web site via our RSS aggregation tools

And people continue to add to the collection.

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