Keep your eyes on the Horizon Project

This is a simul-post with Vicki Davis' My Heart is on the Horizon. I strongly suggest you read Vicki's comprehensive her post as well as it provides additional details about who is involved around the world and how YOU can become involved in our new project!

We are all very excited to announce that on Tuesday April 17, the following classrooms begin a project to look into the future of education based upon the Horizon Report 2007 Edition by the New Media Consortium and Educause:

• Australia - Presbyterian Ladies College (Melbourne) Grade 10 Digital Innovation (John Turner)
• Austria - Vienna International School (Vienna) Grade 11 Information Technology in a Global Society (Barbara Stefanics)
• China - Shanghai American School (Shanghai) Media Literacy (Ed Kidd) Blog: http://blogs.saschinaonline .org/edkidd/
• Bangladesh - International School Dhaka (Dhaka) Grade 11 Information Technology in a Global Society (Julie Lindsay) Blog: http://elgg.net/itgs/weblog
• USA - Westwood Schools (Camilla, GA) Introduction to Computer Science, (Vicki Davis) Blog: http://computers4teens.blogspot.com

The project is called The Horizon Project and includes about 60 students in five countries but represents many more nationalities and cultures. It also involves a number of volunteer educators around the world who will be observing, providing feedback, doing research, 'judging' for awards and interacting with the five main classrooms over the 4-week project length.

This slideshare I created aims to explain the basics of the project:


More pertinent details can be found on these wiki pages:

• Horizon Project Rubric and Objectives
  
• Horizon Project Wiki Templates (what the students will be doing)
• Project Timeline

We are analyzing the trends that will significantly impact post-secondary education (and our society) in the next 1-5 years. We are looking at them now, predicting the future, and making proposals about what the students think needs to happen.

Here are the areas of fundamental change as highlighted in the Horizon Report:

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

We are also combining these six main trends with areas of impact and asking students to consider how technological change is going to affect the world as we know it in these broad areas:

• Education
• Employment and Politics &Government
• Arts, Entertainment and Leisure
• Science and the Environment as well as Health

One of the main challenges the students will have is analysing the impact of the trends on the areas and trying to work out 'What the future will look like'.

So, why are we doing this?
What are our goals and who is involved? We've created a very complete About Us page naming the people who thus far have agreed or volunteered to help and explaining the "why's" as best we can. But our focus is the students!

Amazingly twenty six of you have agreed to help in several areas. We appreciate it, but know that if you are interested in such a project for your school we have room for more.

Here is my introductory message from Bangladesh to start:



Features of the Horizon Project
Like the Flat Classroom Project we are researching the trends to do with the impact of technology AND experiencing the trends. The project is wiki-centric and also uses other Web.2.0 facilities to communicate, share and publish.
We have spent hours revising the assessment rubric and appreciate our original flat classroom judges coming back to advise us. (We were very concerned with the flaws in the old one that many were copying the old rubric! We felt it was too cumbersome and didn't focus enough on the thinking skills we are trying to teach.)

New features for this project include:

• Peer Review Sounding Boards (Headed by Sharon Peters)
• Advisory Panel and Expert Review Panel
• Researcher Panel
• Journalist Panel
• A Student Summit (in the planning stages still) to culminate the project
  

This is the project that never sleeps!
Learn more at About Us.
Also, read our Tagging Standards wiki page. To make it simple for edubloggers, if you are writing about the Horizon Project tag your post hz07 first, then horizonproject07.

In the words of Vicki Davis: "Our heart is on the horizon. If your heart is on the horizon... will you join us?"

Thank you Vicki for your inspiration, hard work and dedication! Thank you Barbara and John and Ed for believing that such projects can be done!

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