Horizon Report from NLII/NMC

The 2005 Horizon Report from the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative and New Media Consortium is now available. This is a nice concise overview of technologies expected to penetrate the educational environment on 1 year, 2-3 year and 4-5 year horizons. Here are some things I found interesting:
1) Dartmouth College students can check out ipods from the library for their language class
2) cell phone polling in class
3) within the next 12 months adoption of ubiquitous wireless and "extended learning" (basically hybrid or blended courses). I think that student demand will play a big part in how quickly this happens. The technology is not the bottleneck.
4) within 2-3 years: intelligent searching (RSS is a big part of this, blinkx.com, federated searching) With the flood of information, it becomes more important to know how to retrieve information quickly rather than aggregate. Also knowing with reasonable certainty that something has not been done becomes even more important.
5) gnooks.com displays a map of authors with proximity indicating similarity. (I am still thinking about why Ayn Rand is so close to Buckminster Fuller)
6) also within 2-3 years: educational gaming - I am not sure about this one. I think it will require a lot of time and testing and the right experience to pull off.
7) within 4-5 years: social networking and knowledge webs. Wiki's created collaboratively within a class. This is powerful stuff. Teacher as knowledge catalyst.
8) within 4-5 years: context-aware computing and augmented reality: Virtual Reality for medical students, computers making more assumptions about the user's intention in a specific context