2010 Horizon Report - Digital Media Literacy

The 2010 Horizon Report was released last week. This year is the seventh year the report has been released and in past years I have found it to be both intuitive and insightful.  The Horizon Report is a good summary that "identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within higher education".  It is published by a couple of organizations I believe truly "get it" when it comes to the impact of technology on education, the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative. 

The format of the report is easy to understand.  The authors choose six technologies and look at them in time-to-adoption horizons of one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years.  While their past "success" is difficult to define, the discussion about key trends, various technologies and their views on technology usage are excellent "data points" to help make technology investment decisions.  The six emerging technologies highlighted in the 2010 report were:

• Time Horizon of One Year or Less 
• Mobile Computing
• Open Content
• Time Horizon of Two to Three Years
• Electronic Books
• Simple Augmented Reality
• Time Horizon of Four to Five Years
• Gesture-Based Computing
• Visual Data Analysis

The point that most caught my eye, however, was not in any of the technologies, but rather in the Critical Challenges section.   The section pointed out that "Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession", yet, it continued, the challenge is that "training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in any discipline, and especially rare in teacher education programs."  This observation helps emphasize the important role that ITS can (and I would argue must) play in helping develop the "digital media literacy" of instructors. 

The Horizon Report does not discuss what constitutes digital media literacy.... and there is some debate over just what does.  But the important take away in my mind is the need to 1) get faculty informed about the many digital tools and services available, 2) help faculty to understand what these tools and services can do to improve student learning, and then finally 3) help faculty get up to speed on using and applying these tools to their instruction through training.  It is a challenge that internal IT organizations within higher education can help meet, but it requires a shift in thinking about what the traditional IT organization is about.  Within IT we sometimes lament the seeming lack of urgency about the coming technology changes to education.  Here is an area where we can help the organization prepare for those changes.