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Mar182009

At last - a Horizon report for K-12

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 09:18PM

The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. -Wm Gibson

Horizon reports have been a part of my regular reading diet for a number of years. Although aimed at a post-secondary audience, these prognostications of what technologies will have the biggest impact on education I've felt were applicable to K-12 as well. I just added a few years to the timeline.

Happily, there is now a Horizon report just for K-12. Following the same format, the New Media Consortium uses a panel of illustrious experts (Hi, Kim, Hi, Julie!) from around the world to identify and organize new technologies by "adoption horizon."

This first issue for K-12 lists collaborative environments and online communication tools as now being adopted; mobiles and cloud computing as 3-4 years out; and smart objects and the personal web on the farthest our at 5 years.

The report also identifies 5 trends and 5 challenges in educational technology. I thought it interesting that assessment of student work and filtering were singled out as factors slowing technology adoption. Yup. What was not mentioned (or I missed it), was the "test-score-as-sole-measure-of-educational-success syndrome working against the constuctivist use of technology that the authors of this report clearly favor.

In fact, I am surprised that online testing and data-driven decision making didn't make the cut as impactful technologies in the immediate horizon. (They are influencing what's happening in the classroom right now far more than "collaborative environments.") I'd have added more mundane technologies like interactive white boards, student response systems, student/parent portals, audio enhancement technologies, and even gaming - less sexy or technologically PC (no pun intended) - as having far bigger impacts than wikis and Sype and such on today's classrooms. Or maybe these were all considered old hat.

I personally would have reversed the first two "horizons" in terms of likelihood of large scale adoption since the mid-range technologies are about stuff (mobiles) and just tweaking what we've always done (cloud-computing) rather than changing actual teaching styles. Given the state of educational budgets, cloud computing may get real popular, real fast for financial reasons.

Anyway, this is an interesting and worthwhile read. Always fun to gaze into somebody else's crystal ball.

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Reader Comments (5)

Do you think assessment of student work is singled out because the standardized testing industry has done a complete job of numbing the minds of even competent educators? In other words, if it is not multiple choice, have we forgotten how to grade it?

March 19, 2009 |

Scott S. Floyd

Hi Floyd,

That is certainly a possibility. I also think that teachers are having a hard time evaluating performance demonstrated skills and the profession is discovering assessment can be used to help learning, not just sorting.

All the best,

Doug

March 22, 2009 |

Doug Johnson

So we need to move to evaluation that is qualitative and performance based and away from our standardized testing mentality. While that is not a new idea, it will be difficult to train educators nation-wide how to do this and convincing them that they are capable of doing this. Too many years of A, B, C, or D.

Texas took a stab at this several years back. It was called Performance Standards. You can find more about it here: http://www.texaspsp.org/

Sadly (and predictably) they declared it too time consuming and too costly. Go figure. We abandon the good in education because of cost and time on the state's part.

March 22, 2009 |

Scott S. Floyd

Minnesota had "The Profiles of Learning" that was performance/authentic assessment based. Then the conservative movement swept through our state legislature and it was back to normed-tests and content-based standards.

The pendulum will swing again...

Doug

March 22, 2009 |

Doug Johnson

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