Imagining Tomorrow's Future Today

Art St. George and the 2007 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee write in EDUCAUSE Review about "'imagining the future,' . . . seven technologies and trends of 2007: the Web, Google Apps, Web conferencing, m-learning, 3D printing, virtualization, and information lifecycle management and physical storage technologies for digital preservation."

Today, at the end of 2007, there are evident consolidations in wireless, storage, and virtualization, and the path forward seems clearer now than previously. Trends from last year continue strongly, particularly Web 2.0 and the shift to user-driven environments and Internet sites where significant data and video processing is available to those without local resources. Yet forecasting is still as much of an art as a science. Campus IT "seers" will continue to work hard to stay in front of the experienced users who come to campus with high expectations of the academic environment, mirroring or exceeding their expectations of the private sector.

IT has moved to a place where new technologies are not simply replacing older ones but are increasing in complexity and are interweaving themselves with other technologies as well as the social and economic systems that support them. Even a few years ago, who could have imagined that libraries' use of social tagging, accessible by multiple connected technologies, would develop into a significant research tool? And IT will continue to evolve. In imagining tomorrow's future today, those of us in campus IT need to skate to the next new place—while keeping our eyes on the puck in the meantime.