The Horizon Report 2008

The Horizon Report for 2008, looking at emerging technologies predicted to hit mainstream take-up in the next 5 years in education, is out.

It looks at six technologies which are spread along three "adoption horizons" over 5 years.

It predicts that grassroots video and collaboration webs will hit the first horizon which is in the next 12 months. Grassroots video is almost a non-brainer - already easy to create and edit, videos are being nudged into mainstream use in education with services such as YouTube which eliminate the need to invest in expensive infrastructure. Collaboration webs are small inexpensive tools which facilitate collaboration in terms of exchanging information, data and ideas. Of these two, collaboration webs are more interesting in their potential to disrupt and transform educational practice. Grassroots video is arguably only an additional medium which will leave the basic structure of the HEI untouched.

The second adoption horizon brings in two further technologies predicted to achieve mass educational takeup in 1-2 years. These are data mashups and mobile broadband. Mobile technology is about as significant than grassroots video, in the sense that it still doesn't threaten the fundamentals of HE, but it does make education more portable and ubiquitous. Data mashups may clarify some ideas and enable some imaginative re-presentation of data, but again no real change.

The third adoption horizon, a couple of technologies about 4-5 years away, is quite different though. First up is collective intelligence, knowledge and understanding derived from large groups of people, which may be explicit (stand up wikipedia and community tagging) or implicit (such as search behaviour online by large groups of users, or purchasing behaviour on sites such as Amazon over time). And secondly, and more controversially, I think, are social operating systems, sort of next generation social networking. The underlying premise is that networks of the future will be people-centred rather than content-centred. I'm struggling to see how true this is for scholarly output, and I don't think (I hope) that I'm being some sort of luddite.

For example, the report states:

“Every idea, paper, experiment and artefact is, in reality, attached to a person or group of people who helped to bring it about. Imagine the impact of tools that place those people and relationships at the center of any research inquiry: concepts clearly linked to people; connections between those people and others clearly indicated; a much more complete picture of the topic would emerge.”

How much value is this really expected to yield over and above a traditional content-based approach? Isn’t it the idea that has primacy, rather than the underlying relationships. For half a century now we've had citation data. The beauty of citation networks is that they remain idea-centred whilst allowing for the deep and meaningful links that only humans can create. In fact, most of the criticism of citation data is focused on the subjective relationship between the citer and the cited, which is usually seen as a drawback of citation in information retrieval terms. Nevertheless they are more about the academic subject than they are about the surrounding human relationships. I can only see limited applications for such as relationship-based approach. I can appreciate the fact that to have access to more human-based intelligence would have its uses in the collaborative research arena, in terms of helping to make judgements around trust. But surely, even in this intellectually-impaired era in which we live, the idea still has primacy in scholarly life? Or am I missing something?