Technology Forecasting

With information technology evolving at a seemingly breakneck pace, trying to predict the future of IT seems every bit as daunting as predicting movements of the stock exchange. Yet we as IT professionals must plan appropriately for new and emerging technologies that have relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression. The Horizon Report, a project of the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, is one of many tools we have to help us map the future to the present. In this presentation we will consider ways tools like the Horizon Report can help us chart our course.

In this article, first published in 1999, the author looked to past trends in hardware, software, networking, and education, presciently extrapolated where these trends were going and what their broad implications might be for higher education, and predicted some still-to-be-realized models for the future.

Progress on the hardware side of computer engineering has been impressive, but software has lagged behind. Security continues to be troublesome at the operating system level, network level, and various application levels in computer networks. Some collections of computers (called "bots" or "bot armies") are used in abusive ways to send spam by launching distributed denial-of-service attacks. We may not be configuring the hardware of our basic computing platforms to assist in improving security. Where should we be spending time, money, and brainpower to significantly enhance our ability to provide deeper roots for computer, system, and network designs for the future?

The author discusses how three IT "subrevolutions" have changed higher education scholarship.