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Since 2004, the New Media Consortium has published its annual Horizon Report, an overview of up-and-coming creative technologies for teaching and learning, issued under a Creative Commons license. Two editions of the 2010 Horizon Report were released on 12 April, one general report (pdf), and one addressing technology in K-12 (pdf). This is the second Horizon report that has focused on K – 12 education (overwhelmingly in technology-rich environments, mainly but not only in the U.S.). It was developed using a Wiki process and it has been released with an accompanying Toolkit, that is intended to create a dialogue at educational institutions on emerging technologies and their potential impact on "teaching, learning, research and creative expression."

The report classifies "technologies to watch" in three categories by what it sees as the "time for adoption," that is, less than a year, one to two years, and three to five years. It highlights trends and challenges related to adoption and enriches the text with numerous examples culled from its wiki process.

The critical challenges presented in introduction will strike a chord with observers and practitioners everywhere: the crucial importance today of digital literacy; the failure of schools to keep up with changes in society and among their learners; the recognition by the principal actors of the need for deep reforms and the difficulty faced by these same actors to effect them; and finally, the broad difficulty of of linking experience outside the classroom (particularly social networks) to what goes on inside.

The two first highlighted technologies (adoption over the next year) are cloud computing and collaborative environments. Both these technologies, of course, can thrive mainly if not exclusively in environments where online access is ubiquitous and inexpensive. The next tier (two to three years) is described as being game-based learning and mobile technologies. The third tier is augmented reality and flexible displays.

It is not the purpose of a report like this to evaluate impact on learning, or to examine cost-effectiveness. However, for many educators working with limited resources in traditional settings they cannot change much, it would be helpful to have more impact assessments and a closer link between the broad challenges presented and the difficulties of specific implementation. In this regard, it is slightly disappointing that Open Education Resources for education in general does not get special attention. While many of the experiences and resources quoted in the text are in fact open resources, it is the whole trend towards open resources (through collaborative environments) that has the potential to revolutionize all school content production and use, through cost-effective means.

Going back in time, the technologies presented in the 2004 report include learning objects, scalable vector graphics, rapid prototyping, Multimodal Interfaces, context-aware computing, and knowledge webs. The 2005 report presents a spectrum that is quite familiar in rich countries today: extended learning, ubiquitous wireless, intelligent searching, educational gaming, and social networks and knowledge webs, and augmented reality (three of these figure in the current report). It will be very interesting over time to see how the selection of technologies that figure in the various reports influence teaching and learning system-wide.