The 2012 HigherEd edition of  the Horizon Report has been released.  It can be found here: http://www.nmc.org/publications/horizon-report-2012-higher-ed-edition.

Here is a summary compiled by my colleague at UIC, Ed Garay.

Some key trends:
1) People expect to be able to work, learn, and study  whenever and wherever they want to
2) The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized
3) The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured
4) The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators
5) Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models
6) There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning

Some significant challenges:
1) Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of higher education
2) Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching
3) Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession
4) Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies
5) New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities

Technologies to watch:
* Short-term (12 months):
a) Mobile Computing
b) Tablet Computing

* Mid-term (two to three years):
c) Game-based Learning
d) Learning Analytics

* Long-term (four to five years):
e) Gesture-based Computing
f) Internet of Things (small objects connectedness)

The 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) takes place this week in Las Vegas, NV.  (In fact, it starts in about 1 hour from the time this blog post is published). It is the preeminent tradeshow for the next shiny thing in consumer electronics and brings together the innovators on technology’s cutting edge.    Some of the speakers include Steve Ballmer from Microsoft and executives from pretty much every other big tech company out there.  It also features Hollywood stars (I use the term loosely) like Dennis Rodman, Jillian Michaels, Snooki, and even Justin Bieber. (more…)

Here we go again! Time to look at potential tech trends for the next year. While it has barely even snowed yet in Chicago nor really gotten that cold, it is definitely December.

This first set of tech trends comes from Jason Hiner at Tech Republic. He reported on the Gartner Group’s annual symposium where they revealed their list of the 10 most strategic tech trends of 2012. Drum roll, please:

1. Media tablets and beyond – the era of Microsoft and PC domination coming to a close
2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces – building user interfaces for multiple screen sizes
3. Contextual and social user experience – using information about an end user to improve the quality of the interaction with the device
4. Internet of Things – objects acting as user of other systems
5. App stores and marketplaces – a new term emerges: apptepreneurs
6. Next-gen analytics – mobile devices being able to self-analyze for full optimization
7. Big data – new and exotic technologies are required to manage the extreme volume of data created today
8. In-memory computing – faster response time in analytical operations
9. Extreme low-energy servers – new entrants to the server business proposing a radical way for future servers to work
10. Cloud computing – cloud computing was very recently number one and now is number ten. This is significant that it is viewed as not living up to its hype.

Pete Cashmore, the editor of Mashable, shares his list of the Top 10 Technology Trends for 2012.
As he points out, “Predicting what will happen in 2012, therefore, is a shot in the dark: A year is virtually a lifetime in the digital era.”

1. Touch Computing – we’ll be using our mice less often and increasingly using desktop computers in similar ways to how we use tablets and smartphones.
2. Social Gestures – ‘frictionless sharing’ – where with the click of a button you can share what you are doing from services like Spotify, to social networks (once you authorize it of course)
3. NFC and Mobile Payments – with the success of the Square Payment dongle for iPhone, and NFC (Near Field Communication) in 2011, awareness of this technology will likely make it more popular in 2012…it’s not without a lot of security concerns…
4. Beyond the iPad – the iPad costs $499′ the Kindle Fire is $199. There has been speculation that while the iPad is king today, it may lose the crown in 2012.
5. TV everywhere – with the rise of the tablet, it’s easier to have ‘TV in your hand’ but the cable companies have ways to keep you tethered to subscriptions.
6. Voice Control – thanks to the popularity of Siri and the iPhone 4S, voice recognition and voice search will show up on more devices.
7. Spatial Gestures – personally, I was fascinated with the technology in the movie Minority Report and hope I see it in my lifetime. Microsoft Kinect is an example of using spatial gestures in current technology.
8. Second-Screen Experiences – Cashmore says, “It refers to apps (mainly on the iPad) that listen to the audio output of your TV and display content related to the show or movie you’re watching.” An example from the music industry is Gracenote.
9. Flexible Screens – Can you imagine a phone that rolls up in your pocket, or one that you can slip into your wallet like a dollar bill? Bendable interfaces will be seen more in 2012, though it’s likely to not be fully implemented for a number of years.
10. HTML5 – this fifth version of HTML, could take the place of Flash on many mobile devices.

What are your predictions for 2012?

By the way, this blog post was written on an iPad using touch technology!

By Stacey Knight-Davis
Booth Library
Eastern Illinois University
Charleston, IL

Earlier this year, Booth Library received a Technology Improvement Award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Greater Midwest Region, under Contract No. N01-LM-6-3503 with the University of Illinois at Chicago. Booth Library provides services for programs in health physics, psychology, biology, health education, communication disorders, and nutrition. Booth also serves an online RN to BSN nursing program, and the library’s website is the only point of access to health information for these distance education nursing students. Along with programs directly related to heath and biomedical sciences, we serve the needs of our education students seeking information on school health and children with disabilities. We also provide general consumer health materials and reference services.

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Congratulations to the following sites who have received GMR funding for
the Friday, November 18, 2011, MLA Webcast:
Connecting E-science and Team Science: The Changing Nature of Research
For information on the webcast and a list of additional sites, visit:
http://www.mlanet.org/education/distance_ed/escience/escience_webinar.html
Note:  there will be no DVD available for this webinar. (more…)

This year, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) had a contest that challenged people to create apps that could use NLM’s vast collection of biomedical data.  The winners have been announced!  Thank you to all of the Entrants that participated in NLM’s first software challengeHere are the winners and honorable mentions.

USA.gov is hosting a National Dialogue on Improving Federal Websites from September 19-30. This two-week, online dialogue is your chance to submit, vote, and comment on ideas for improving various aspects of federal websites, such as: content, search, usability, accessibility, social media, multilingual content, and online services. Future changes based on these ideas could directly impact the work government agencies like the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health do every day. You can join the conversation at http://bit.ly/qCJxnQ. To learn more about the overall .gov reform effort, go to http://1.usa.gov/qzfHUd.

One of my biggest issues with the Internet is how there are still a lot of silos.  What do I mean by silo? Programs or applications that work ‘alone’ and don’t share well with other applications.  I am still a big user of RSS despite rumors of it’s demise.  I tend to star items in Google Reader so that I can read them later.  What if I also wanted to read it later and send it to Twitter – or maybe send it to Instapaper? Especially with Instapaper, I would have to go through the trouble of copying the url and then opening up Instapaper and pasting it in there so I could read it later.  It would be nice to have this kind of thing automated.  I’m not a programmer so I end up waiting and relying on much smarter and clever people to create a tool that can do this for me.

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In addition to face-to-face, email and phone conversations, the GMR employs Facebook, Twitter, our website, GMRLIST and the blog, The Cornflower, as communication tools. Some of our Network members are unable to access the blog because of firewall issues at their institutions. Now we think we have a solution to correct that disparity.

An email notify plugin allows automatic sending of new blog posts to GMRLIST, the GMR’s announcement email list. This tool should help us make sure that posts important enough to share with our members via the blog will also get to those who do not have blog access.

For those of you who might find this  redundant, you may wish to filter the messages with the subject: New posting from The Cornflower! Whether getting access to the blog posts for the first time or a long-time blog user, let us know how the new setup works for you.

The GMR Update for July 2011 is now available online at the following URL:
http://nnlm.gov/gmr/about/gmrupdate.html

Check the contract updates, new communication technologies and information about upcoming exhibits and training opportunities.

Happy summer!