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The New Media Consortia has been publishing their annual Horizon report on trends in higher education for ten years. To celebrate that effort NMC brought together 100 thought leaders in education for a three day convocation in Austin.  The group identified 28 megatrends in education and released a press release that documented the most important first 10.  Here from their press release (NMC) A wide lens was aimed at the world around education, and that lens had a uniquely global focus. What interested the group - which represented 20 countries from six continents - was what trends are truly international? Which are impacting learning and education worldwide, from the most advanced countries to the poorest?  From these discussions, 28 hugely important metatrends were identified. The ten most significant are listed here and will be the focus of the upcoming NMC Horizon Project 10th Anniversary Report:

Social ads are increasingly assuming mainstream status, as brands focus on devising newer ways to engage user attention. While traditional advertisers focus on targeting users with contextual ads wherein ads are served on the basis of content, in social advertising factors such as peer and social influences as well as recommendations are taken into consideration for targeting users. Rapid increase in social media activities in the recent years has driven advertisers to take up social ads.

"Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It's what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting."

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

Game-Based Learning, and particularly serious games that teach content, are fast becoming utilized in the classroom. Frequent success stories are appearing, from Minecraft in the elementary classroom to games that teach civics. There is curriculum that pairs World of Warcraft with language arts standards, and many other variations where the gaming focus is on content. What about 21st century skills? Yes, games can be used to teach and assess 21st century skills! As the conversation in education reform moves forward, and educators are increasingly leveraging 21st century skills, we need to consider how to couple games with reform. Let's take a look at what many consider the top three 21st century skills and how games can teach and assess them.

"What does it mean to socialize the enterprise? Often, the primary focus of this term is the outward-facing social media strategy of the company and/or the social collaboration infrastructure it uses. But in reality, these two aspects are just the tip of the iceberg. A socialized enterprise incorporates the entire stakeholder landscape and platforms for bridging these connections: the consumer-facing social media strategy of the company, collaboration within the organization and the way the company interacts with clients and, no less important, its external partners."

"In the "e-learning era" the focus of training moved to designing and developing sophisticated, self-paced, online course content, and then managing access to it in a LMS. With the emergence of the "networked learning era" training departments have begun to think about how they can add "social" into the mix."

Another example of the increasing focus on content intelligence - salsaDev - http://bit.ly/riy5BV

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It's not just the number of hours we're working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time. What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse. Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you're taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you're driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn't? The biggest cost - assuming you don't crash - is to your productivity. In part, that's a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you're partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it's because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you're increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

Gamification is the latest buzzword on the street. It ranked a keynote panel session at Enterprise 2.0 in November and it was one of two main topics discussed at the recent Institute for Social, Search and Mobile Marketing (ISSMM) K1 Executive Roundtable.  

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.