The Horizon Project

I follow Vicky Davis's blog, CoolCat Teacher Blog (one of my favorites, in fact her feed is in my "Circle of the Wise" folder) and she is also a twitter contact I follow. Lately, almost all her twittering is about her new obsession, the Horizon Project as well as a few blog posts.

Getting ready to cook dinner -- go on horizon project and send a note to expert judges to check in with their teams. Is this my life? ;-)

I'm also honored to on one of several panels of observers, the Journalist Panel (or maybe it should be Citizen Journalist Panel).   The role of the Journalist Panel is:

These journalists will be given priority access to the teachers and on a permission basis will be allowed to interview students with teachers present. The purpose is to promote wider scale discussion and pursuit of collaborative projects among the K12 classrooms. Several small scale discussions via Skype will be had with the teachers and these journalists. We believe that this sort of project is something that all teachers can eventually incorporate at the high school level and is an essential tool for developing effective digital citizenship.

So this sort of my preparation for figuring out who I want to interview or what aspect of the project I want to write about in more depth.  There's so much here that is catching my eye and so much to dig into

The overall intent of the  Horizon Project is to demonstrate the exciting benefits of a global connected learning experience.  There are approximately 50-60 students in five different countries working together to peer into the future of learning based upon the Horizon Project Report 2007 Edition by the New Media Consortium and Educause (pdf).   

The Horizon Report, a research-oriented effort to identify emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education.  The report identifies six areas of emerging technology over the next one-to-five years: 

• User-Created Content
• Social Networking
• Mobile Phones
• Virtual Worlds
• New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming

The Horizon Project Wikispace is where teams of students and teachers from around the globe working on action learning experiments using these emerging technologies.  The geeks out there will appreciate the array of Web2.0 tools being deployed including Wikispaces, Delicious, Slideshare, Ning, Twitter, Meebo, YouTube and many others)  We will students researching and experiencing social web enabled learning unfold on the wiki.  Their work products, process, and learning will also be assessed using these rubrics.

There's lot of rich learning here that can certainly enrich our work in the nonprofit sector, although some translation is required.  So, my lens is focused how does one translate lessons learned from edtech sector to nptech sector?

Let look at the tagging standards for the project. So, rather than once tag to capture everything, we have some differentiation here.  It isn't quite a taxonomy, but it does layout the tags according to key aspects of the project.  How were the tagging standards developed?  Who had input?  How well will people remember to use them?   I like the pointer to David Warlock's Tag Generator.

I also think the Student Code of Ethics are good model too - sort of like online community standards or codes of conduct.   What struck me was the code of ethics for Virtual Worlds:

Virtual Worlds
Act in second life like you would in your first life. Your face may not be there for people to see, but you should still act right.

I can very well understand how this is important for a student project and even with some of the grown up projects I've been involved with in Second Life.

I just checked Twitter and learned that it was Vicky's birthday - Happy Birthday!  This Horizon Project is a great gift to us all.

hz07 horizonproject07

Comments

[Nick]

Some people you know are part of the panel for the report, now in it's 4th year.

[Vicki Davis]

Thank you for this great outline, I've referred to it in my blog tonight!

I look forward to sharing with you and making some students available for interview when the time is right. The wiki action is starting to heat up and it is getting very exciting. The great thing is that a lot of discussion are taking place about these topics spurred by this project -- the conversations are very good!

Thank you for being a part. Your writing is excellent! Twit you later!