I would like to briefly explore collaboration and creativity related to today’s society and educational practices. Skills in these areas are now in high demand. Open any newspaper and learn of tasks, requiring once cherished skills, being outsourced. Read Friedman’s Flat World or Dan Pinks Whole New Mind and you will see a clear picture of how important it will be for individuals to develop their creative sides and their ability to collaborate with others.

Now look at what our kids can accomplish on their own with the tools they have at their disposal. What high school student does not have a Facebook or search content on Youtube? The Pew report for the past several years has tracked Internet usage of teens and here is some of what they have found:

• 48 percent of all Internet users use video sharing sites such as YouTube (2008)
• 64 percent of users 12 to 17 years old participate in content creation on the Internet (2007)
• 55 percent of American teens are active in social networks like Facebook and MySpace (2007)
• 39 percent of online teens share their own artistic creations (2007)
• 26 percent of online teens remix existing content into new personal creations (2007)
• 28 percent of online teens create blogs- online journals (2007)

One important finding is that all of these numbers are increasing as more teens turn to the web for collaboration and creativity. How do these numbers compare with opportunities for creation and collaboration in many of America’s classrooms? How about our classrooms? What role will technology play in the future development of in accessibility to creative outlets and opportunities of collaboration? What will this mean for education?

One organization looking at these trends is Educause. Each year they produce a report that looks at the technological forces that have the greatest potential for shaping education over the next 5 years. They break their findings into categories based on expected time to adoption: one year or less, 2-3 years, 4-5 years. You can read the entire report at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5320.pdf . I recommend that you down load the report and give it a quick read. Besides learning about technological forces shaping our kids future and the future of education, you will find some links to some amazing sites on the web. As you read their findings, you will notice that each of them have collaboration and creativity at their epistemological roots. Here is a summary of their findings:

Time to Adoption: One Year or Less

Grassroots Video

Video is everywhere—and almost any device that can access the Internet can play (and probably capture) it. From user-created clips and machinima to creative mashups to excerpts from news or television shows, video has become a popular medium for personal communication. Editing and distribution can be done easily with affordable tools, lowering the barriers for production. Ubiquitous video capture capabilities have literally put the ability to record events in the hands of almost everyone. Once the exclusive province of highly trained professionals, video content production has gone grassroots.

Collaboration Webs

In today’s workplace, be it in education or industry, it is not unusual for a typical work week to include a virtual meeting or conference. Tools to support collaborative online work are easy to find and uncomplicated to use. Any networked computer can serve as a multi-function videoconference room, a gateway to a gathering in a virtual world, or a joint workstation where several people can author the same documents together. Virtual collaboration has been made increasingly seamless by a host of complimentary developments in networking infrastructure, social networking tools, web applications, and collaborative workspaces.

Time to Adoption: Two to Three Years

Mobile Broadband

Mobile devices have come a long way in the past few years. From portable (if bulky) telephones they became slim little cameras, audio recorders, digital video recorders, pocket datebooks, photo albums, and music players. Now they are video players, web browsers, document editors, news readers, and more. The technology and infrastructure have developed to the point where mobile devices are becoming essential tools, bringing the whole of the Internet and all your social connections to the palm of your hand.

Data mashups

Overlay the location of every Flickr photo tagged with “bluejay” on a map of the United States and see where people are finding blue jays (www.flickr.com/map). See Twitter updates from your geographical area (www. twittermap.com) or follow the global progress of the public stream (www.twittervision.com). Each of these applications is a mashup: a combination of data from multiple sources in a single tool. Mashups have been around for several years, but in recent months they have captured greater interest, due in part to a broader exposure from their integration with social networking systems like Facebook. While most current examples are focused on the integration of maps with a variety of data, it is not difficult to picture broad educational and scholarly applications for mashups.

Time to Adoption: Four to Five Years

Collective Intelligence

Two new forms of information stores are being created in real time by thousands of people in the course of their daily activities, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge stores like the Wikipedia and Freebase, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and actions. The data in these new information stores has come to be called “collective intelligence” and both forms have already proven to be compelling applications of the network. Explicit knowledge stores refine knowledge through the contributions of thousands of authors; implicit stores allow the discovery of entirely new knowledge by capturing trillions of key clicks and decisions as people use the network in the course of their everyday lives.

Social Operating Systems

Social networking systems have led us to a new understanding of how people connect. Relationships are the currency of these systems, but we are only beginning to realize how valuable a currency they truly are. The next generation of social networking systems—social operating systems—will change the way we search for, work with, and understand information by placing people at the center of the network. The first social operating system tools, only just emerging now, understand who we know, how we know them, and how deep our relationships actually are. They can lead us to connections we would otherwise have missed. As they develop further, these tools will transform the academy in significant ways we can only begin to imagine.

There are prizes in the prize bin for individuals who e-mail me with a web site they reviewed from the 2008 Horizon Report. Two prizes will be awarded. Oh, these are also cool prizes!