Contributed by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and Collaborative Technologies

Geolocation, also called geotagging, is the practice of associating a digital resource with a physical location. A photographer, for example, might include the longitude and latitude coordinates for where a picture was taken, allowing others to pinpoint that location on a map. Increasingly, geolocation is being applied to infrastructure components and end-user devices for the purpose of knowing where people are. This additional layer of location data can make resources much more useful to a broad range of users.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries.

Multi-touch interfaces are input devices that recognize two or more simultaneous touches, allowing one or more users to interact with computer applications through various gestures created by fingers on a surface. Some devices also recognize differences in pressure and temperature. Multi-touch technology introduces users to swipes, pinches, rotations, and other actions that allow for richer, more immediate interaction with digital content. Multi-touch devices and supporting applications offer diverse ways of visualizing information to improve understanding, and they facilitate new ways to foster collaborative creation, permitting several users to work simultaneously on a single screen.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Ning is an online service that allows users to create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. No technical skill is required to set up a social network, and there are no limits to the number of networks a user can join. Users of Ning social networks have access to functionality similar to that of more well-known social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Various features allow users to read news or learn about related events, join groups, read and comment on blog entries, view photos and videos, and other activities as set up by the network creator. RSS feeds let users subscribe to updates from specific parts of the social network.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser. The applications include communication tools (Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar), productivity tools (Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations), a customizable start page (iGoogle), and Google Sites (to develop web pages). Google stores all of the files and content centrally and keeps a record of the different versions of a file. With Google Apps, sharing content is as simple as granting someone access, which facilitates collaboration, peer review of academic materials, and the collective generation of knowledge.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) jointly produced Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. The 2008 report focuses on the following topics;

• Grassroots Video
• Collaboration Webs
• Mobile Broadband
• Data Mashups
• Collective Intelligence
• Social Operating Systems