3. Notes on Horizon 2014

-The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 K-12 Edition is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking. 

-The internationally recognized NMC Horizon Report series and regional NMC Technology Outlooks are part of the NMC Horizon Project, a 12-year effort established in 2002 that annually identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in every sector of education in some 65 countries around the globe.

-The NMC Horizon Project model derived three meta-dimensions from the CCR framework that were used to focus the discussions of each trend and challenge: policy, leadership, and practice. Policy, in this context, refers to the formal laws, regulations, rules, and guidelines that govern schools; leadership is the product of experts’ visions of the future of learning, based on research and deep consideration; and practice is where new ideas and pedagogies take action, in schools, classrooms, and related settings.

-Policy- 

          -It is widely agreed that expectations for teachers are evolving rapidly, especially as student centered learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly emphasized by departments of education and school administrations

           -The European Commission’s Creative Classrooms Lab recently convened a Policy Makers Workshop to develop standards for successful flipped classroom implementation and their consensus was documented in a report, Policy Maker Scenario: Flipped Classroom, which calls for teachers to use emerging technologies to support their roles as guides and coaches in the classroom.5

-Leadership- 

             -the rise of open educational resources (OER) is creating opportunities for schools to take advantage of high-quality, free content for both teaching and learning

-Practice- 

              -A widespread emphasis on integrating deeper learning approaches in the form of project-based and hands-on learning has already spurred more real world opportunities for students.

-the teacher’s role is becoming that of a mentor, visiting with groups and individual learners during class to help guide them, while allowing them to have more of a say in their own learning

              -Key to nurturing the new role of teachers is providing them with plentiful opportunities for professional development

-Deeper learning is a term increasingly used to describe a variety of approaches in which students gain knowledge and skills by investigating and responding to a complex question, problem or challenge

-A major component of this trend is the rise of students who are learning important lessons by creating projects, products, and services that directly benefit the world around them.

-The notion of sharing is inherent to the philosophy of open content, and in 2002, the non-profit organization Creative Commons began to address the need for alternative licensing so that people could legally share and adapt creative works.

-Resolving intellectual property issues has been crucial to supporting the movement toward OER

-In 2013, the EU identified the development of OER as one of three actions of the “Opening Up Education” initiative proposed to bring the digital revolution to schools and universities.

-To aid teachers with integrating OER into their classroom practices, the OER Commons is an online hub for content curation and training that was developed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.45 The OER Commons provides teacher education on the use and creation of learning materials with Open Author, a three-step online publisher that licenses and shares the content with the OER Commons community.

-Hybrid learning models, which blend the best of classroom instruction with the best of web-based delivery, place a strong emphasis on using school time for peer-to-peer collaboration and teacher-student interaction, while online environments are used for independent learning

-By categorizing hybrid learning as either sustaining or disrupting the traditional classroom, the Christensen Institute report provides school leaders with an underlying structure to consider as they gauge the effects of their efforts

-In practice, hybrid learning is seen as a way to level the playing field for rural schools by providing more access to a variety of high-quality courses

-Rapid Acceleration of Intuitive Technology: The appeal of this innovation is that a learner can experience information presented in a variety of modes without the distance that traditional interfaces impose; in other words, nothing gets in the way between the user and the information. Students have the opportunity to truly interact with the content

-Electrovibration refers to the process when a finger is dragged across a conductive, insulated surface, creating an electrostatic force that results in a rubbery, sticky, bumpy, or vibrating sensation

-While the traditional model prevails in many classrooms, there are initiatives now that award funding to schools for their work toward innovative redesigns of the school day. Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), for one, allocates funding for Breakthrough School Models, which put personalized learning first through flexible learning environments that leverage time, space, roles, and instructional modes to meet the needs of each student.

-In 2013, U.S. President Obama announced an initiative to rethink the high school experience with the goal of preparing students with relevant, real-world course work that would pave the way to college and then into the competitive workforce.

-Authentic learning, as defined by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, typically focuses on real-world, complex problems and their solutions, using role-playing exercises, problem-based activities, case studies, and participation in virtual communities of practice.

-EDUCAUSE’s report, Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, suggests that authentic learning prepares students for the skills and knowledge demanded by universities and the workplace

-learning by doing in science, students gain the foundational skills, knowledge, and understanding of real scientists and technicians, as well as important related skills such as critical thinking, research and writing methods, and presentation techniques

-Virtual Enterprises International is an example of how authentic learning experiences can connect students with the world of business and entrepreneurship, preparing them for continuing their education and entering the workforce

-The goal of integrating more personalized learning into schools is to enable students to learn with their own strategy and pace, and demonstrate their knowledge in a manner that is uniquely their own

-Though the term “personalized learning” may conjure images of students working alone, the school encourages collaborative activities in which students share ideas and create materials together, based on their learning similarities and differences

-The term “complex thinking” refers in this report to the ability to understand complexity, a skill that is needed to comprehend how systems work in order to solve problems. Complex thinking could be described as an application of systems thinking, which is the capacity to decipher how individual components work together as part of a whole, dynamic unit that creates patterns over time

-Computational thinking entails logical analysis and organization of data; modeling, abstractions, and simulations; and identifying, testing, and implementing possible solutions

-With more people concerned about sharing their data through social media sites and their mobile apps, initiatives that aim to aggregate massive sets of student data and then work with third-party providers and vendors to develop educational solutions are experiencing an unexpected backlash that has all but stalled progress in this area. Ensuring the security of student data is important, but solutions are complicated because it requires an orchestration of modernized government policies, updated third-party agreements, and most importantly, a greater awareness of the issues.

-These new models often tout smaller classes, more personalized attention from teachers, and better access to high-caliber tools and technologies. While innovative new pedagogies and ways of thinking are challenging traditional paradigms, some pundits are concerned that the competition is not being fueled by the altruistic desires to improve learning experiences, but instead by where more money is being invested

-Unschooling rejects conventional methods of learning and instead emphasizes education through natural means, such as gameplay, work experience, and household responsibilities, while encouraging the freedom for learners to pursue their personal interests

-Society’s expectations about what skills students should learn in schools and how they should learn them are changing. The focus is drifting further away from traditional academics — language arts, mathematics, sciences, and social studies — toward the conception of more modern, interdisciplinary curricula that reflect real world work environments

-The technologies, which the members of the expert panel agreed are very likely to drive technology planning and decision-making over the next five years, are sorted into three time-related categories — near-term technologies that are expected to achieve widespread adoption in one year or less; mid-term technologies that will take two to three years; and far-term technologies, which are forecasted to enter the mainstream of education within four to five years.

-There are currently seven categories of technologies, tools, and strategies for their use that the NMC monitors continuously

-Consumer technologies are tools created for recreational and professional purposes and were not designed, at least initially, for educational use — though they may serve well as learning aids and be quite adaptable for use in schools

-Digital strategies are not so much technologies as they are ways of using devices and software to enrich teaching and learning, whether inside or outside of the classroom.

-Enabling technologies are those technologies that have the potential to transform what we expect of our devices and tools

-Internet technologies include techniques and essential infrastructure that help to make the technologies underlying how we interact with the network more transparent, less obtrusive, and easier to use

-Learning technologies include both tools and resources developed expressly for the education sector, as well as pathways of development that may include tools adapted from other purposes that are matched with strategies to make them useful for learning

-Social media technologies could have been subsumed under the consumer technology category, but they have become so ever-present and so widely used in every part of society that they have been elevated to their own category

-Visualization technologies run the gamut from simple infographics to complex forms of visual data analysis

-The integration of personal smartphones, tablets, and PCs into the workflow supports an on-the-go mentality, changing the nature of work and learning activities so that they can happen anywhere, at anytime

-Adoption of BYOD policy into the corporate sphere has provided a model for educational contexts, and the practice is gaining acceptance in schools all over the world

             -For schools, BYOD is less about the devices and more about the personalized content that users have loaded onto them. Rarely do two devices share the same content or settings, and BYOD enables students and educators to leverage the tools that make them most efficient and productive.

             -BYOD has profound implications for primary and secondary education because it creates the conditions for student-centered learning to take place

-Cloud computing has become widely recognized as a means of improving productivity and expanding collaboration in education.

-Gamification may be the new idea that moves this set of ideas and supporting technologies into broader use. The idea is to integrate game-like elements and mechanics, including quests, experience points, leader boards, milestones, and badging, among others, into non-game environments.

-School leaders are just beginning to understand which data is useful for advancing learning, as well as the scope of privacy and ethics issues; however, the potential of using data to improve services, retention, and student success is already becoming evident

-New kinds of visualizations and analytical reports are being developed to guide administrative and governing bodies with empirical evidence as they target areas for improvement, allocate resources, and assess the effectiveness of programs, schools, and entire school systems.

-The Internet of Things, a concept advanced by IP cocreator Vint Cerf, is the next step in the evolution of smart objects — interconnected items in which the line between the physical object and digital information about it is blurred

-While there are many examples of what the Internet of Things might look like as it unfolds, it is still today more concept than reality

            -While Internet-enabled appliances are gaining traction in the consumer industry, concrete and well-documented implementations for teaching and learning are difficult to find, particularly in the K-12 sector, though potential applications are easy to imagine

-It is no longer far-fetched to envision a world where all objects and devices are connected to act in concert.