A conversation with Cole Camplese on his role in the 2010 Horizon Report

What was your role in developing the Horizon Report?

I have been a Horizon Project Advisory Board member for two years, and as a board member, you are asked to participate in a process of collecting, vetting, and sort of expanding on ideas from other advisory board members. So, in essence, the advisory board is really a shared authorship role.

How should a faculty member view the Horizon Report? What's in it for them?

'What's in it for a faculty member' is an interesting question. I don't know how many faculty members would be interested in sitting down and reading something like the Horizon Report cover to cover. Those who do take the time will find the report fascinating as it gives a snapshot view of the overall potential of technology as it relates to teaching and learning. The place in higher education where this can make a big difference is within the educational technology/learning design community. The report gives us a better sense of what is happening in our fields and how we should think about working with faculty going forward.

But back to faculty, I sent out the prerelease to about two dozen faculty, and they all thought it was really interesting stuff and has lead to some great follow up questions. I think you have to be predisposed to investing in integrating technology in the classroom for the Horizon Report to make sense to you as a standalone element, but it is great conversation starter.

What are some of the highlights of the Horizon Report?

One of the things that I think is really great that we do in this process is how we categorize things related to time to adoption. So, the first year I did this, I didn't really know what was really going on. I thought we just generate a new list every year. But what is nice is the late Horizon things that we identified last year as maybe 4-5 years beyond, they become earlier horizons and instantly fill up the front of the cue for this one. Something like open content, for example. Whereas last year it had a much deeper horizon, I was really happy to see that, with a lot of pushing from myself and a few others, it's now really in the one year or less category.

It's really exciting to see something that we care about deeply here at Penn State make it in the front end, things that we are working on now in a real way. Seeing what were thought to be late horizon things that were way out in the distance move their way up to the short-term horizon is really interesting to me. It's not really one technology in general, it's just another illustration of how quickly our space moves and changes, and what kind of influence we at Penn State can have on changing that horizon. Typically you view a horizon as a fixed point in the sky, and we have the ability here to speed up the arrival at that horizon. It's a great thing to see happen.

Is there anything in the Horizon Report that TLT is already working on, and if so, what is TLT doing?

I mentioned open content. Open content is something we invested heavily in. At this year's ELI conference, Allan Gyorke, ETS assistant director, and I did a talk on something we call incidental openness. This is the idea of bottom-up openness. It's not the "official, top-down, university provost saying you will have an open education initiative" type of thing. Instead it's just beginning to happen on its own. So platforms like the Blogs at Penn State project have encouraged faculty to do things in the open they wouldn't have done otherwise.

I just found out yesterday that the Biology 12 course that we designed with Richard Cyr in the Eberly College of Science, a course is delivered to 800-900 students this semester, is completely open. That's cool, we have an instant open education course with Creative Commons marks attached to it. So we are participating heavily in that.

We are not really doing any of these late horizon things. I am looking at simple augmented reality in the report, that's not something we are doing. I think we would have a hard time doing that.

I think we are going to be investing heavily in mobile computing, especially with the iPad announcement. You can make the argument we already do a lot in mobile computing because I think that laptops fit in the notion of mobile. I think we are already there, but the iPad is going to change our focus and our direction a little bit. We'll see how that plays out.

And you know, it's funny, because again, the late horizon stuff creates such a tension because there isn't enough of a demand for these things right now for us to change strategies so we could get involved. That's what's nice about something like the Horizon Report, it allows us to think about what our strategy so we can aggressively pursue something in a year or two.

How likely is it that some of the things the Horizon Report mentions will actually happen?

Well, I mean, I think a lot of them already happened. That's the other side of this that difficult to look at. Look at the 2-3 years out things, such as electronic books and simple augmented reality. While e-books have not gained popular adoption within the .edu domain, I have been traveling a lot lately and I see a lot of people with Kindles. So, e-books are happening, and I think the model of the e-book will become a little bit more acceptable. Meaning, they will get things like annotations, notetaking and bookmarking and such wired a little bit better.

Again, maybe the iPad will do that, and it becomes a need. A lot of times adoption is driven by need, asking simply 'what's a big need?' Well, a huge need on our campus is to reduce the overall cost of textbooks, we are talking $1,000 a semester for a lot of students. So, if you can do e-texts for half that cost, even $500 dollars is a huge amount to pay beyond tuition and fees but it's still less. I think you are going to see that happen because there is a huge need for it.

Another example is gesture-based computing, while that seems like it is 4-5 years away and way out on the horizon, what's multi-touch? It's gesture-based computing. We are used to using it in small forms, like iPod Touches, iPhones, the Droid, and other things. But again, we have the iPad. Instantly, overnight, the iPad will just change how people think about interacting with their machines. So I think on the time to horizon in the report, we may missed it on gesture-based. It may be closer thanks to the iPad. But when we were doing this, we didn't know about the iPad.

Visual data analysis, again, I think that is exploding already. It won't be commonplace until later. It's not that I don't think these will happen, it's again with that whole notion of how quickly do we get to that horizon. We could get to any of these horizons quickly. You know as well as I do if we put our mind to kicking butt on augmented reality, it'd be all over. We'd put a team of people together, we'd come up with a project, and we'd have a killer example. But I don't see the big practical need to for that to happen yet.

Anything else you would like to add?

This is an absolute honor to be a part of. I will tell you why, it's because of the people who are on there and the process. The document itself pales in comparison to how it was done. So this is all done in the open, and anybody who wants to watch what is happening with the Horizon Report literally can watch.

I will get an email in another month or two, if I am selected to be part of this again, that will say 'hey, it's time to start on 2011. Here's the wiki, here are the late horizon topics from last year already in the wiki, what are the things you see coming.' You don't have to be part of the advisory board to watch all that unfold, to subscribe to it. There will be a tag like "hz11". So, you will be able to watch for people tagging things "hz11" for the Horizon Report. Then there is this whole voting process where we go through trying to figure out what should be in the report and where does it fit in the horizon.

It's almost like a game. It's really pretty interesting. You are given a certain number of points to vote with, you have to allocate them carefully, it's all vetted very carefully. And then the staff of NMC and ELI then construct it into a narrative. I can read through the Report and see my words, it's really cool, even though there are all these people who have a hand in it.

It's really, really something to work with smart people and then be able to meet these folks. We have a shared common bond because we worked on something like this together. Part of the process is a real interesting exposure into next generation digital publishing, too. They are walking the talk in how they do this sort of stuff.

To learn more about the Horizon Report and to download the 2010 report, please go to http://www.nmc.org/horizon.