The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium have released the Horizon Report: 2010 Edition.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Today, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC) released the 2010 Horizon Report, the seventh edition of this annual joint publication. Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years.

The report identifies six technologies that are expected "to enter mainstream use in learning-focused organizations." Each of the six is assigned to one of three adoption horizons: one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. For 2010, mobile computing and open content are identified in the one-year horizon; electronic books and simple augmented reality in the two- to three-year horizon; and gesture-based computing and visual data analysis in the four- to five-year horizon.

The advisory board for the project identified these technologies through comprehensive review, analysis, and discussion of research, articles, papers, and interviews. It then drafted a roster of over 110 candidate technologies, which it gradually refined to the six key technologies appearing in the 2010 report. This year, the advisory board consisted of 47 experts from numerous fields and was more internationally diverse than it has ever been. It included representatives from 10 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The Arcadia Programme at the Cambridge University Library has released M-Libraries: Information Use on the Move.

Here's an excerpt:

Developing m-library services is usually expensive and resource intensive, requiring expertise that existing library staff may not have. Before committing funding and staff time to such projects, it is important to try and ensure, as far as possible, that such investments are targeted at meeting actual needs, and are adding value to existing library services.

The Information Use on the Move project was undertaken in that spirit—to scope the information requirements of academic library users on the move in order to inform future development of library services to mobile devices. The aim was to identify trends in the way people currently interact with information using their mobile phones, and then extrapolate ways that libraries could support those mobile information needs.

A recent article in Nano Letters describes an experimental nanotechnology-based storage device that could last for a billion years and store up to one terabyte per square inch.

Read more about it at "New Memory Material May Hold Data For One Billion Years."

NISO will form a single sign-on authentication working group.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

NISO is pleased to announce the approval by the NISO Voting Members of a new work item to focus on perfecting single-sign-on (SSO) authentication to achieve seamless item-level linking in a networked information environment. A new working group will be formed under the auspices of NISO's Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee to create one or more recommended practices that will explore practical solutions for improving the success of SSO authentication technologies and to promote the adoption of one or more of these solutions to make the access improvements a reality.

This work item is the outcome of NISO's new Chair's Initiative, an annual project of the chair of NISO's Board of Directors. NISO's current Chair, Oliver Pesch (Chief Strategist, EBSCO Information Services), has identified single-sign-on authentication as an area that would benefit greatly from study and development within NISO, with a focus on a solution that will allow a content site to know which authentication method to use without special login URLs in order to provide a seamless experience for the user. Possible solutions include providing a generic mechanism for passing the authentication method from site to site; use of cookies to remember the authentication method that was used the last time the site was accessed by that computer; and/or providing a mechanism to discover if the user has an active session for one of the common SSO authentication methods. "By developing recommended practices that will help make the SSO environment work better (smarter)," said Pesch, "libraries and information providers will improve the ability for users to successfully and seamlessly access the content to which they are entitled."

Eric Knorr and Galen Gruman provide a concise overview of "cloud computing" in "What Cloud Computing Really Means."

Here's an excerpt:

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and New Media Consortium have released the The Horizon Report: 2009 Edition.

Here's the abstract:

The annual Horizon Report is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Each year, the report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years.

The areas of emerging technology cited for 2009 are:

• Mobiles (i.e., mobile devices)
• Cloud computing
• Geo-everything (i.e., geo-tagging)
• The personal web
• Semantic-aware applications
• Smart objects

Each section of the report provides live Web links to examples and additional readings.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released Future of the Internet III.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

At SuperComputing 2008, an international team headed by California Institute of Technology researchers demonstrated wide area network, multiple-country data transfers that peaked at 114 gigabits per second and sustained a 110 gigabit per second rate.

Read more about it at "High Energy Physics Team Sets New Data-Transfer World Records."

EDUCAUSE has published a new book, The Tower and the Cloud, which is freely available in digital form (a print version is also available).

The book is a wide-ranging overview of major information technology trends and their impacts on higher education, with essays written by prominent authors such as Clifford A. Lynch ("A Matter of Mission: Information Technology and the Future of Higher Education"), Paul N. Courant ("Scholarship: The Wave of the Future in the Digital Age"), and John Unsworth ("University 2.0").

The Association of Research Libraries has published Social Software in Libraries, SPEC Kit 304. The table of contents and executive summary are freely available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in February 2008. Sixty-four libraries completed the survey by the March 14 deadline for a response rate of 52%. All but three of the responding libraries report that their library staff uses social software (95%) and one of those three plans to begin using social software in the future.

Survey results indicate that the most broadly adopted social software—chat or instant messaging—was also the earliest implemented social software. While one respondent was using instant messaging for reference and another was using chat for internal communication as early as 1998, the earliest use of this type of social software dates back to 1993.

While chat and instant messaging have been in use for several years, use of other types of social software in libraries is very recent. Beyond isolated cases, a steadily increasing number of ARL member libraries began implementing social software in 2005, with the largest rate of adoption being in 2007.