2012 NMC Horizon Report - Tech Trends

The annual NMC Horizon Report will be released in February 13-15 at the EduCause Conference in Austin, Tx and online. A shortlist of applications, trends and issues is posted on its wiki.  This is a good time to review and think about what higher education thinkers are thinking, and to share with K-12 educators so they can better prepare students and themselves.  NOTE:  The issue of digital literacy is identified as a "key skill in every discipline and profession", yet training is rare in teacher education and faculty preparation. 

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

 Cloud Computing

 Mobile Apps

 Social Reading

 Tablet Computing

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

 Adaptive Learning Environments

 Augmented Reality

 Game-Based Learning

 Learning Analytics

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

 Digital Identity

 Gesture-Based Computing

 Haptic Interfaces

 Internet of Things

Top trends and issues:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
• Computers as we know them are in the process of a massive reinvention because we increasingly expect media to be touchable and interactive. 
• Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models. [about time!]
• Increasingly, students want to use their own technology for learning. 
• Institutions are increasingly exploring technologies that allow teachers and students to better collaborate. 

• Lecture capture, podcasting, and cheap personal video recorders increasingly make it much easier to prepare lecture-style content for students to see/hear before coming to class. 
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. 
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized. 
• There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.
• The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.

   

• Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching. 
• The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices. 
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. This challenge, driven by a related trend, appears here because 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 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 a norm. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.
• Dividing learning into fixed units such as credit hours limits innovation across the board. 
• Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.

• Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies. 
• The global drive to increase the number of students participating in undergraduate education is placing pressure across the system. 
• Most academics are not using new and compelling technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research. 
• 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.
• Simply staying organized and current presents a challenge in a world where information, software tools, and devices proliferate at the rate they do today. 

Public Domain Mark

Press Release from Creative Commons:

 

San Francisco, California, USA; The Hague, Netherlands — 11 October 2010
Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark effectively increases the value of the public domain by making works that are already free of copyright readily accessible to the public. The Mark makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to re-use material. Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain.

Europeana – Europe’s digital library, museum and archive – is the first major adopter of the Public Domain Mark. The tool will become the standard mark for works free of known copyright that are shared via the Europeana portal, playing an important infrastructural role in the EU’s efforts to ensure that all works shared online are marked with rights information. Europeana, whose partners include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Germany’s Bundesarchiv (Federal archives), estimates that the millions of out-of-copyright works made accessible via its searchable database will be labelled with the Public Domain Mark by mid-2011. Europeana will announce the adoption of the Public Domain Mark at the upcoming Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference, to be held 14-15 October in Amsterdam.
“The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality,” said Michael Carroll, a founding board member of Creative Commons and a law professor at American University. “Marking and tagging works with information about their copyright status is essential. Computers must be able to parse the public domain status of works to communicate its usefulness to the public. The metadata standard underpinning the Public Domain Mark and all of CC’s licensing and legal tools are what makes this possible.”

“An important part of our mandate is to ensure that digitized works made available through Europeana are properly labelled with rights information, including when a work is free of known copyright restrictions so that teachers, students and others can freely use it in their work, changing it and remixing it as they wish,” noted Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana. “The legal and technical rigour applied by Creative Commons throughout the development process makes the Public Domain Mark the natural choice for Europeana’s infrastructure. We have also worked with Creative Commons and our content providers to develop a Usage Guide for public domain works to help users of cultural content use it responsibly – by crediting the provider, among other things.”

The Public Domain Mark in its current form is intended for use with works that are free of known copyright around the world, primarily old works that are beyond the reach of copyright in all jurisdictions. Creative Commons is mapping the next phases of its public domain work, which will look at ways to identify and mark works that are in the public domain in a limited number of countries.

Creative Commons worked closely with Europeana and several of its members throughout the development of the Public Domain Mark. That process also included a public consultation period and review by CC’s worldwide affiliate network comprised of legal experts from more than 70 jurisdictions. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons’ CC0 public domain dedication, which provides an easy and reliable way for adding new works to the public domain prior to the expiry of copyright.

More information about the Public Domain Mark can be found on the Creative Commons website.