The rise in use of mobile technologies is identified as one of CORE’s ten trends, and the release of the iPhone last week in NZ and around the world certainly attracted a huge amount of publicity (With the New York TImes reporting over a million new iPhones sold in the US in one weekend!). But behind the hype there are indications of where the future of ICT and online communications are headed. Someone who definitely sees it this way is Chris Deering, former Chairman and President of Sony Europe, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and now Chairman of Handheld Learning who considers his bet’s on the new Apple iPhone in an article titled The New Apple Core. In it he makes a number of predictions, beginning with; “the terms TV and PC will sound as outdated as “8 Track” tape decks within 2-3 years. Everything will be capable of delivery over Internet Protocol (IP). Live sports to big screens and everything else.”
Read the rest yourself..
Agree that mobile and ubiquitous devices will be a key element in life and therefore learning. A major current barrier at present though is the prohibitively expensive data plans that the iPhone, for instance, is being touted at in NZ. The power only comes when the technology is in the hands of the many, not the few. My impression is that with a duopoly on mobile service provision there is no effective competition to drive prices down.
Hi Nigel – I agree with you about the cost of access being a major barrier – certainly in NZ it will limit the spread of these devices in the near future. Important to note the themes in Deering’s article however, to understand where these trends will/may take us once the issue of cost and access does come down. I recall not too many years ago discussions I had with teachers on in-service courses at the College of Ed about the cost of high end software (eg PageMaker, Video Editing, CAD etc) as a barrier to introducing this to secondary school students – and now most of this stuff is available in free or open source versions. I’m sure we’ll see breakthroughs in the current data plan pricing – the issue for us as educators is to think about how prepared we’ll be within our systems once this happens.
Hi Derek
Agree that software has become competitive, especially with the FLOSS pressure. Data plans in the UK are also more competitive but I wonder about the effect of only having two providers here in NZ?
Ubiquitous computing will increase and probably mainly through Smartphones, although the ultra mini laptops such as the eeePC may also be significant.
Quite agree that we need to skill up for what is already available. We are currently about to pilot delivering formative quizzes to mobile phones. I think that something relatively simple like this may be more accessible for the present than projects such as ALPS http://www.alps-cetl.ac.uk that I had some involvement in. It has promise but is also a bit of a behemoth!