(2010-08-09) Pesce Ipad Future Computer

Mark Pesce sees the future of computing, and Educating Kids, in the IPad Tablet. It’s not clear that computers as we know them today – that is, desktops and laptops – will be common in a decade’s time. They may still be employed in very specialized tasks. For almost everything else, we will be using our iPads. They’ll rarely leave our sides. They will become so pervasive that in many environments – around the home, in the office, or at school – we will simply have a supply of them sufficient to the task. When everything is so well connected, you don’t need to have personal information stored in a specific iPad. You will be able to pick up any iPad and – almost instantaneously – the custom features which mark that device as uniquely yours will be downloaded into it.

*How do we make education in 2020 meet their expectations? This is not the universe of ‘chalk and talk’. This is a world where the classroom walls have been effectively leveled by the pervasive presence of the network, and a device which can display anything on that network. This is a world where education can be provided anywhere, on demand, as called for. This is a world where the constructivist premise of learning-by-doing can be implemented beyond year two. Where a student working on an engine can stare at a three-dimensional breakout model of the components while engaging in a conversation with an instructor half a continent away. Where a student learning French can actually engage with a French student learning English, and do so without much more than a press of a few buttons. Where a student learning about the Eureka Stockade can survey the ground, iPad in hand, and find within the device hidden depths to the history. iPad is the handheld schoolhouse, and it is, in many ways, the thing that replaces the chalkboard, the classroom, and the library.

But iPad does not replace the educator.

The National Curriculum outlines the subject areas to be covered, but says very little if anything about pedagogy... Precisely because it places educators and students throughout the nation onto the same page, the National Curriculum also offers up an enormous opportunity.* (To have Critical Mass of Learning Objects.) I'm not convinced this approach is necessary: even if the overall Curriculum is decentralized, a given Learning Object can have be used in many of them.