The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education. This session will introduce the six technologies covered in the 2008 Horizon Report, the fifth in the series. Participants will explore examples in each category and contribute to the ongoing Call to Scholarship with their own ideas and suggestions. The 2008 Horizon Report is available online at no cost at http://horizon.nmc.org

Rachel Smith is Vice President, NMC Services for the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of more than 250 world- class universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression. She is recognized for her work in making new technologies approachable for higher education faculty and staff. She participates in the publication of the annual Horizon Report, which identifies emerging technologies that will have an impact on learning organizations.

The Web contains thousands of mashups that recombine everything including Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon.com, NASA, the New York Times, and Wikipedia with useful information about travel, finance, real estate, and more. By fusing elements from multiple web sites, mashups are often informative, useful, fun, and even transformative. This talk will show you about how to create and apply mashups to make sense of the web, especially in the context of libraries.

Raymond Yee is a data architect, consultant, trainer, and author of Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (Apress, 2008). He is currently a visiting scholar at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where he teaches the course "Mixing and Remixing Information". Yee is also the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to K-11 students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. As a software architect and developer, he focuses on developing software to support learning, teaching, scholarship, and research.

Visual searching is a new way to search existing databases. A visual search displays the information in a visual format rather than simply text-based results. This presentation will demonstrate many visual search tools available on the Internet, including mashups for web search engines, databases, news, shopping, music, photos, social networking, and more. Included will be discussion of learning styles relating to visual searching and educational application of visual search methods.