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Beyond the Horizon Report: towards a new project
Bryan Alexander, January 3, 2018
Like many of you I suspect, I was shocked to see the sudden ceasing of operations of the New Media Consortium last month. The NMC Horizon Report is something that I consider a must-read each year. It helps to synthesize the zeitgest of the EdTech field, thanks to the modified Delphi method used that brought together many of my EdTEch peers in a collaborative, consensus making project.
While the report has had its share of critics over the years, I have also found it useful to help move projects forward. I have often cited it in project proposals, and used to to help support testing out new methods and technologies that may not yet have an established empirical base. It was a good tool.
Which makes me happy to see that there are efforts to keep something similar to the Horizons report live in the wake of the NMC demise. Bryan Alexander, who has had a hand in more than a few of the Horizon Reports in the past, has written a post that begins to ask the wider community if there is value in creating something new. Not necessarily a re-creation of the Horizons Report, but instead using the demise of the NMC as an opportunity to examine the value of the report to our community & imagine what might be. As Bryan states:
What’s next? Will the Horizon project become a historical artifact and recede into the past? Or can we create a new project, one that explores the future of education and technology, using some of Horizon’s strengths while building a fundamentally new effort? Put another way, if we wanted to create a new project from scratch in 2018, what would it look like?
It's an invitation to the community to participate in the creation of something new that could deliver the same kind of value to our field that the Horizon Report has.