Introduction Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) educators are generally hesitant to embrace unproven technologies as part of an ICT curriculum (Gillard, Bailey, & Nolan, 2008). This caution has been hard-learnt and reflects the wisdom of experience. Who can forget the hyperbole surrounding the advent of e-commerce and the rush to develop education programs that later had to be dismantled in the wake of the dot com downturn? Unfortunately, the recent boom and bust of ICT education has had important repercussions; despite fluctuating economic conditions and the touting of "off-shoring" solutions, the need for ICT workers has remained consistently above that of other business disciplines. The current shortfall in trained ICT professionals is real and growing. The pace of technology advances, particularly in the area of mobile computing, have not abated, but there are less trained workers in a position to leverage these new technologies for economic growth. XML--eXtensible Markup Language--surfaced in the mid-1990s as an emerging technological approach to expand hypertext markup language capability to include metadata tags (Debreceny, Felden, Ochocki, Piechocki, & Piechock, 2009; Hoffman, Pippert, & Walenga, 2005; Siegel, 2009). HTML and Web styling technologies specifically address the problem of data presentation and hyperlinks in a web browser through a codified tag structure and style sheets. For example, the HTML snippet: 1000 displays the alphanumeric characters as bolded text. The same text enclosed in XML tags: 1000 reveals context and meaning. Thus the focus of XML is on data representation, creating the capacity to store and transport data via a web browser with its meaning and context intact. XML has already demonstrated considerable potential across multiple applications and is one of the drivers of the "semantic" web. The purpose of this paper is to focus on one manifestation of XML--eXtensible Business Reporting Language or XBRL--that has garnered considerable acceptance and influence in accounting and financial domains (Schneider & Hawes, 2009). (Podcast remarks available at: http://macpamedia.org/media/audio/CPASpotlight/Hawes.mp3) Indeed, XBRL is poised to become the de facto standard for regulatory financial reporting in many areas of the world. The benefits of XBRL extend well beyond implications for reducing operating and financial reporting costs. Because of its potential to increase data transparency, XBRL has the potential to reduce uncertainty and perceived risk in capital-provision decisions for capital providers. Indeed, there are a number of efforts underway that are designed to expand the use of XBRL into all aspects of the information supply chain and to use it as the supporting structure for business intelligence analysis (Schneider & Wallin, 2009). To date, academic interest in XBRL has been limited and largely confined to the accounting field (Baldwin, Brown, & Trinkle, 2006). The purpose of this paper is to explicate a case for including XBRL as an important emerging technology for ICT educators that warrants increased research and inclusion in ICT curricula. The next section provides a condensed description and history of XBRL to date. The third explains the implications of XBRL going forward. The fourth section argues the advantages and disadvantages of including XBRL as an emerging technology topic in ICT curricula. The fifth section concludes the paper. History and Description of XBRL XBRL is firmly rooted within the framework of XML and the semantic web as delineated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 (Hoffman et al., 2005). Whereas, the World Wide Web uses hypertext markup language (HTML) as a means of tagging data for human consumption; the semantic web and XML extend open standards for information tag syntax to incorporate semantic meaning. …