Somewhere over the rainbow

every year at this time of year like the days getting longer comes the Horizon Report an annual guide to hi-tech trends to watch in higher education. And whats gonna have us jumpin in 2010? - open content they say - as a direct reponse to rising educational costs, the desire for access to learning and that expression of choice from students about when and how to learn. Also in the near term, mobile computing and devices will continue their relentless march - so we can say goodby to pc labs in the library. E-books should finally start to benefit from better interfaces, graphics and increased choice. Certainly up to now the readers have been dull and disappointing. On the further horizon they tip augmented reality, already being tried in the commercial sector, having useful educational potential. And in the long, long 5 year term how about gesture based computing becoming mainstream in the clasroom (what was so wrong with just putting your hand up) . And visual data analysis - "a way of discovering and understanding patterns in large data sets via visual interpretation." But as you know even a week is a long time in computing and prediction is not yet a precise science. It's fun though