Shortlist 3b

From Horizon Project

2008 Short List [edit] Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less Webware Collaborative Workspaces Simple Video Capture and Sharing Community Tagging [edit] Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years Mobile Geotagging Socially-Centered Virtual Worlds Scholarly Mashups [edit] Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years Collective Intelligence Social Operating Systems Open Education Resources Alternative Interaction Devices [edit] Key Trends Growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking tools is changing our ideas of scholarly contribution and community Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship As the amount and variety of content increases, it is becoming more difficult to filter the noise to find the signal Smaller, more powerful devices are offering increased access and portability The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to grow The environment of higher education continues to change, with a growing trend toward open innovation [edit] Critical Challenges Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy There is a growing need for formal instruction in 21st-century literacies, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

[edit] Social Operating Systems

The continuing growth of social networking systems indicates that they supply a popular need; currently, Facebook alone has 55 million active users (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet). As anyone knows who has signed up for one of these sites—or received an invitation from a friend who has done so—the key to social networking is to declare your relationships to people that you know, and then share information with them by means of little applications or widgets. These relationships, both personal and professional, make up a network known as the social graph.

A downside of current social networking systems is that they don’t recognize the social graph—every time you join a new social networking site, you have to recreate your relationships—and you can generally only declare a relationship with someone else if they are registered on the same site. Over the next few years, social networking systems will become social operating systems, which will allow connections to be more fluid and dynamic; a key characteristic of social operating systems will be that they know about the social graph and can tap into it to find out who you already know. Your relationships will be carried with you into any new online social system you join—2D or 3D. Social operating systems will include a user-centered set of tools that allow people to own and manage their own social ties and personal information while allowing automated discovery of relationships by web applications.

[edit] Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• Your personal and professional connections would move with you throughout your career, no matter what social networking platforms you use now or in the future.
• It becomes easier to create custom widgets that know who people are—there is no need to develop profile and contacts functionality; simply tap into the social graph.

[edit] Examples

• Google’s OpenSocial APIs let widgets share data: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
• The German company Aka’Aki alerts you to people you might want to meet while you are, say, at the grocery store: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/akaaki

[edit] For Further Reading

Giant Global Graph
(Tim Berners-Lee, Dig (timbl’s blog), November 21, 2007)
This blog post discusses the social graph (or the giant global graph) in terms of its relationship to the Internet as a whole and to the Semantic Web. http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

The Social Network Operating System
(Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Radar, October 12, 2007)
This blog post describes the benefits of the social graph. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/social_network_operating_system.html

Thoughts on the Social Graph
(Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon, August 17, 2007)
This article discusses the need for a social graph that exists outside of systems like Facebook, so that applications can take advantage of the fact that you already know who your contacts are. http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

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[edit] Discussion

Add your thoughts, suggestions, examples to add here, and indicate who wrote it-- e.g. [Alan]