Fellow Big Think blogger Scott McLeod invited me to write a dual post with him on our thoughts about the 2011 K12 Horizon Report today. Although my background is more in the education 2.0 start-up world as you might know, I found the report very insightful and it was very interesting to read about the adoption of new technologies in the K12 space. 

The report focuses on six key technologies and estimates the time of adoption. In my post I will try compare those findings with what we have seen in the start-up space over the past three years.

Cloud Computing

The report estimates the adoption of of Cloud Computing to one year or less. And of course there are a couple of reasons for this, one of them being the relatively low cost of hosting content in the cloud.

We have seen the same happening in the start-up scene and I would even go so far that cloud hosting services like Amazon S3 were and still are major drivers of innovation. This service made it very affordable for small start-ups on a shoe string budget to build scalable platforms. There is a saying that “success can kill you” which essentially means that if you had not the financial means to pay for extra traffic caused by a huge amount of visitors to your web platform, this might likely put you out of business as you were not able to pay the bills.

As the report points out, today traffic costs pennies per gigabyte.

Another important driver for innovation and growth are of course products like Google Apps, which are widely used in K12 as well. And there are now cloud based software solutions like writing, spreadsheet and presentation tools etc.

All this sums up to a massive opportunity for schools to save money that have been hit by the recent budget cuts. They can outsource their data centers, don’t have to buy expensive software etc. I recently did a video interview with one of the start-ups featured in the report called LearnBoost that builds an open source LMS with Google Apps integration.

Mobiles

Here, the report estimates the adoption to again one year or less. The main catalyst for this is almost naturally the iPad. The report also names other devices but for the time being I don’t see any other tablet to be a real competitor for the Apple device. The numbers we saw yesterday at the WWDC speak for themselves with 25 million sold iPads from launch til today.

Edutainment applications for iOS devices are becoming very popular in the start-up scene but what is probably even more important, they also receive funding from investors. This is due to the proven business model of Apple’s iTunes App Store. Up to now, Apple have paid out more than $2.5 billion to app developers and the whole Apple ecosystem has been trained for years now that applications have a price tag which is a huge difference to the Internet where the perception still is that everything essentially is either free or freemium.

Because of this Apple can attract talent that wants to develop for the iOS platform and therefore we saw a rising group of really fascinating educational applications, some of which received significant funding North of $1 million. Again, investors can be pretty sure that those app developers will actually earn money and therefore it’s a safe bet.

If you take a look at the 500Startups incubator / accelerator of super angel Dave McClure you will already find a number of education start-ups amongst the first 100 of his investments. There are for instance MindSnacks, MotionMath, YongoPal and 955 Dreams that are creating products solely for iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad).

Another driving factor is the easy adoption of those devices, especially the iPad. Kids love it and with its launch we saw a lot of videos with kids in it, playing around with the device easily without the need of in depth instruction from their parents. Or, as Fast Company’s Kit Eaton wrote lately, the iPad is a $500 Kids game. Think about it, Apple even sells them at Toys’R’Us.

So, parents know already what a great device the iPad is for learning and with new apps, like Brainracer for example, launching every week on the app store, there is a change in the mindset. Like the report points out, the benefits outweigh the potential risks.

Game-based Learning

The next point covered is game-based learning or serious games. Time to adoption is estimated between two to three years. If we rewind human history it is obvious that playing games has always been an important part of how we learn. Children back then learned how to hunt by playing hunting games. This was a core skill in order to survive.