On the Horizon

The “2007 Horizon Report,” published by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, identifies six technology areas expected to have a significant impact on campuses over the next five years.

1. User-Created Content: This includes blogs, wikis and videos created and downloaded by users.
2. Social Networking: These sites that allow students to connect with friends increasingly drive online traffic.
3. Mobile Phones: According to the “Horizon Report,” “the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.”
4. Virtual Worlds: Interest in customized worlds such as Second Life, Active Worlds and There is growing quickly, and they offer rich learning opportunities if used correctly.
5. The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication: This category includes online collaborative digital book projects, online scholar consortiums and video libraries of lectures, interviews, documentaries and other content.
6. Large-scale Multiplayer Educational Games: These remain rare and difficult to produce, but new tools and open-source game engines may change that soon.

Source: “2007 Horizon Report”

The Changing Face of Campus Computing

College classrooms with wireless connections became the majority in 2006, according to the Campus Computing Survey. In the 2006 National Survey of Information Technology in U.S. Higher Education, wireless networks reached 51.2 percent of college classrooms. That was up from 42.7 percent in 2005 and 31.1 percent in 2004.

In private research universities, 58 percent of the classrooms had wireless capabilities in 2006, compared with 52.8 percent in 2005 and 47.4 percent in 2004.

The survey also found that 60.5 percent of colleges and universities increased campus IT budgets for wireless for the 2006–2007 academic year.

Other interesting findings include the following:

• 24.7 percent of public universities reported major computer virus problems, down from 46.1 percent in 2005.
• 55.7 percent of institutions reported a strategic plan for IT disaster recovery.
• 53.9 percent said open source “will play an increasingly important role” in their IT strategy, but only 28.2 percent say open source “offers a viable alternative” for key applications right now.

Source: The Campus Computing Project