Back to work today after a welcome three weeks away camping, no phone, no computer and no broadband –  it’s likely to be quite a culture shock!

Browsing through my email in-box over the weekend I came across the thoughts of a number of others who, like me, are pondering what the new year might bring…

Each year since 1985, the editors of The Futurist have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine to go into their annual Outlook report. Here is a summary of the editors’ top 10 forecasts, covering topics as diverse as the environment, energy, religion, and the nature of knowledge.

Network World’s 9 Web Sites IT pros should master in 2009 includes reference to Yammer, an application that I’ve recently started using with colleagues at work – It’s essentially Twitter for the office.

The authors of the ReadWriteWeb blog offer their 2009 Web Predictions in a series of lists – worth reading the comments to this post which has links to a number of other lists created by individuals, including Gerhard who shares his predictions for digital trends in 2009 – with a focus on the South African context.

e-Learn magazine has also published its predictions for 2009, summarising the contributions of a number of education luminaries, including Chris Dede, Jay Cross and Stephen Downes – always useful to see what these people have to say, and great to have it reported in such a concise manner.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch have announced their second annual Crunchies awards, with the categories alone well worth a browse to understand just how broad this whole field is. Always amazes me to think how many of these categories simply didn’t exist just a few years ago – a sign of how rapidly things are developing in this area.

For those interested in the tertiary space, Lev Gonick from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio has posted his top 10 trends for Higher Education in 2009. I like what he has to say as it is couched within the context of the current world economic climate and the realities faced by tertiary organisations – whilst obviously written for the US context, the issues are the same for NZ.

From HandHeldLearning is a post titled Is the 21st Century Here Yet? which contains the thoughts of an eclectic group of ICT specialists, broadcasters, educators and journalists whose predictions look at the wider context of schools and education.

For a slightly different take, check out the Agitationist‘s blog, which offers a month by month series of predictions for the web world in 2009: – a little tongue-in-cheek, but well worth a read anyway.

Wow – such a lot to digest, but interesting to see the things that keep cropping up (Facebook, Web2.0, Cloud Computing etc etc). Interesting to note the number of things already covered in CORE’s Ten Trends for 2008 – on of my tasks for this week is to finalise the CORE’s Ten Trends for 2009, with a NZ flavour, so this gives me plenty of food for thought.