EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Networking and Emerging Technologies

"Over the next two years, the New Horizons department will contribute to the reframing process. Within the context of innovation in learning in higher education, we will be looking not only at emerging
technologies but also at emerging practices that make innovative use of those technologies."

Focusing on “imagining the future,” the EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee looked at seven technologies and trends of 2007: the Web, Google Apps, Web conferencing, m-learning, 3D printing, virtualization, and information lifecycle management and physical storage technologies for digital.

"How much longer can colleges and universities continue to rely on packet-shaping as the fundamental way of dealing with bandwidth-intensive applications? From a purely technical point of view, the answer is, of course: Indefinitely...."

The future is set for convergence—for the integration of the communications and computing resources and services that seamlessly traverse multiple infrastructures and deliver content to multiple platforms or appliances. Campus IT organizations need to understand the trends in order to structure their services as the future evolves.

"Informatics support has some elements of IT knowledge, some elements of library and information science expertise, and some elements of data management skills.... This calls for a team approach including both libraries and IT organizations but also going beyond both at some level."

The technology-driven disruptions of the knowledge economy offer higher education an enormous opportunity to remake ourselves - this time around collaboration, exploration, and engagement with the wider world.

Web 1.0 has demonstrated immense powers for connecting learners, teachers, and materials. How much more broadly will this connective matrix grow under the impact of the openness, ease of entry, and social nature of Web 2.0?

This article discusses how the explosion of "RONs" (Regional Optical Networks), spawned by NLR (National LambdaRail), now holds the potential to redefine many aspects of business and higher education in the United States today.

The shifts toward an integrated cyberinfrastructure and toward pervasive and personalized intelligence and communications have enormous and exciting implications for networking in higher education.

The authors discuss campus cyberinfrastructure and it's importance to future networking developments.