Link: JISC Observatory technology forecast literature review (doc).

This report is a summary of technology themes extracted from the major technology forecasting publications from business and other sectors that could conceivably be relevant to the UK higher education system. We do not attempt to make evaluative comments concerning these trends, and specifically we do not attempt to speculate on the importance of the technologies identified for education.

The work leading to publication comprised three stages: selection of sources, scanning these sources to extract specific emerging technologies and grouping these technologies into themes.

Around thirty “horizon scanning” publications describing emerging technologies predicted to be important to domains other than education, were suggested by members of JISC’s two Innovation Support Centres, CETIS and UKOLN. These are listed on the delicious website. These were read and technologies they identify summarised in a Google Doc. These technologies were then grouped into themes for discussion in this report.

For each theme, we provide a brief introductory definition, a short snapshot of relevant technologies and applications in business and the wider world, and its implications to an organisation’s IT and business strategies. We have used ‘Google Insights for Search’ to visualise the trend of interest on each theme or relevant technologies over time (2004 – present); this is for illustrative purposes only. The themes are presented in no particular order.

[word http://publications.cetis.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/LiteratureScan_Formatted.doc]