Predicting Tech Trends in Education is Hard, Especially about the Future

In the last few months, two "predictive" documents found their way into our hands. The first one is the 2016 NMC[1]/CoSN[2] Horizon report for elementary and secondary education and the second is the SURF Trend report 2016: How technological trends enable customised education. Both are very interesting and well-written reports. However they're also a bit tricky in that they're not really underpinned by concrete evidence from the educational sciences and therefore, their predictions are in our opinion a bit like reading tea leaves: They're very visible, but what do they mean? As a preamble to discussing the SURF Trend report 2016 an aside to frame some background. Last year, Paul Kirschner presented a keynote at the 6th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK16).