Slides for a 1-day workshop on "Future Technologies and Their Applications" facilitated by Brian Kelly and Tony Hirst at the ILI 2013 conference on Monday 14 October 2013. See http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/events/ili-2013-workshop/ See http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/events/ili-2013-workshop/

1. Future Technologies and
Their Applications
A one-day workshop
at ILI 2013 facilitated
by Brian Kelly and
Tony Hirst
Twitter hashtag:
#ili2013fut
Available under a
Creative Commons
(CC-BY licence)
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D1: Predicting Technology
Trends:
Gathering your
Interests

2. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
What technologies / technology-related areas
do you feel will be important in your area of
work?:
• In the short-term (in the next two years)?
• In the medium term (in two - five years)?
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3. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Group exercise:
• Agree on four (only four!) areas which you
feel will be important in the short-term
• Agree on four (only four!) areas which you
feel will be important in the medium-term
Spend ten minutes on this and be prepared to give
a brief summary of the areas
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4. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Collating The Responses
Important in the short-term:
4
Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5

5. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Collating The Responses
Important in the medium term:
5
Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5

6. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Collating The Responses
Important in the medium term:
6
Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5

7. Reaching Consensus
Voting on the topics
• Now vote on the other groups proposed
areas.
• Give each proposed area scores of:
3: Felt very likely to be of significant
importance to the organisation
2: Likely to have some importance to the
organisation
1: May have some importance for the
organisation
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8. Reviewing the Consensus
Analysis of the Votes
We now have some broad consensus on:
• Technological developments which are felt to
be importance to the organisation
• Some ranking of their level of importance
We can now:
• Explore some areas of technological
developments
• Explore ways in which we can see if they may
be the new Web or the new Second Life
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9. About The Process
This Delphi process:
• Is an established and structured communication
technique for interactive forecasting reliant on a
selected panel of experts.
• Has been adopted by the US-based New Media
Consortium (NMC) for the NMC Horizon project
centrepiece activity charting the international
landscape of emerging technologies initiative as they
relate to "teaching, learning , research creative
inquiry and information management".
• Has been used at events organised by UKOLN and
CETIS to predict the potential impact of technology
on learning and teaching in the short, medium and
long term.9

10. Use of the Delphi Process
The group was presented with a number of key trend statements, as identified by the NMC horizon scan
activities 2013, an example of which was "Openness; concepts like open content, open date and open
resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information, is becoming a
value" and significant challenges such as "Faculty training still does not acknowledge the fact that digital
media literacy continues to rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession".
Participants were split into smaller groups and posed a series of response questions; Question 1 being
"Given the technology trends and challenges just discussed which technologies do you think will have
greatest impact on Higher Education (Teaching and Learning from the CETIS 13 expert group) over the
next twelve months (near term)?
The expert groups were given ten minutes to discuss the question, collectively agree and provide three
technologies identified. The technologies identified by the expert groups were listed and presented to the
whole group. Each of the smaller working group were given a further five minutes to discuss the other
groups suggestions asked to vote for the suggestions, excluding their own. The scores were collated and
the three technologies emerging with the highest overall group scores were put forward as the three
technologies with potentially greatest impact on teaching and learning in the near term.
The process was then repeated for the medium (2-3 years) and long term (3-5 years) questions. In an hour
the expert group were able to produce a list of technologies that they considered would have impact on
higher Education in the short, medium and long term the results of which were then compared with the
NMC Horizon scan findings and other group findings for further discussion and debate. The value of such a
process is two-fold; firstly the finding and outputs and secondly as a process by which to instigate
discussion and debate around technologies amongst experts.
From “Reflecting on Yesterday, Understanding Today, Planning for Tomorrow”, Kelly and Hollins, Umbrella
201310

11. Questions
Any questions?
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