The annual Horizon Report...seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education....
As it does each year, the Horizon Advisory Board again reviewed key trends in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity, and ranked those it considered most important for campuses to watch....
Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased....
The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Amateur scholars are weighing in on scholarly debates with reasoned if not always expert opinions, and websites like the Wikipedia have caused the very notion of what an expert is to be reconsidered. Hobbyists and enthusiasts are engaged in data collection and field studies that are making real contributions in a great many fields at the same time that they are encouraging debate on what constitutes scholarly work—and who should be doing it. Still to be resolved is the question of how compatible the consensus sapientum and the wisdom of the academy will be....
The 2007 Horizon Project Advisory Board also considered critical challenges facing higher education over the five-year time period described in this report....
There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward. At few points in the history of the academy has there been an opportunity to really impact the ways in which learners and scholars interact. We are seeing the convergence of many new ideas on how we work, learn and interact, and it will take visionary leadership to see and capitalize on these shifts. At the same time, few leaders are following critical trends such as those listed in the previous section, and fewer still are speaking out on the issues that accompany them. The thoughtful perspectives of university presidents, provosts, and other learning-focused leaders, for example, could temper the moral panics that hamper effective conversations on critical topics such as digital rights, online safety, and access....
PS: The report does not identify OA as one of the trends or challenges worth watching. It only mentions OA explicitly once, in an innocuous sentence on p. 21: "The proliferation of audience-generated content combined with open-access content models is changing the way we think about scholarship and publication—and the way these activities are conducted."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/18/2007 09:56:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
