Futures
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. [attributed to William Gibson]
The UKOLN ISC is charged with advising the JISC and the wider Further and Higher Education communities about trends in the development and adoption of relevant technologies. Often this is not a predictive task so much as one of detecting patterns of usage and adoption at the cutting edge, and relating these to the mainstream. We tend to view the ‘future’ as 3-5 years from now, although we will examine closer ‘futures’ or engage in more speculative, long-term horizon-scanning activities as appropriate. Our primary framework for this kind of activity is the JISC Observatory.
About the JISC Observatory
The JISC Observatory aims to identify key trends in technology, standards and practice which may affect the medium- and longer-term strategic decisions about core learning and teaching, research and administrative services.
The JISC Observatory is a joint initiative between the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN and JISC CETIS.
Key People
The co-directors of the JISC Observatory are Paul Walk (UKOLN) and Adam Cooper (JISC CETIS). The project manager is Thom Bunting and the communications manager is Brian Kelly, both of whom work for the ISC at UKOLN. Richard Waller is working as production editor on forth-coming TechWatch reports.
Finding Out More
Early work of the JISC Observatory has been featured in the JISC Inform newsletter (issue 32).
This article describes how the Observatory has pulled together top issues that are on the horizon within the year, within two to three years, and within four to five years.
Highlighted developments include:
- On the horizon or here now: cloud computing; mobiles and tablet computers
- Two to three years away: game-based learning; new scholarship; learning analytics and semantic applications.
- Four to five years away: augmented reality; telepresence and collective intelligence and smart objects.
