Back to work after five weeks away, including three week’s leave, and there is plenty to focus attention on 🙂 I have a few presentations coming up based on CORE’s Ten Trends, and so was interested to see the presentation above put together by Mary Meeker, currently managing director at the investment bank of Morgan Stanley. Meeker has been producing regular reports on internet trends for some years now and is highly regarded in the industry for her work – so I guess is worth taking notice of. The slides in the presentation are pretty dense with data, but do provide a very compelling picture of the rise of mobile devices in the future of the internet – summed up in slide 5 which predicts that sometime in 2012 sales of phones will exceed those of PCs. I also found slide 14 of interest, comparing the number of days to reach 1 million units sold of a range of technologies, showing the iPad to be one of the fastest growing consumer computing devices ever.

From a different direction, the ReadWriteWeb recently published their 5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web. Not surprisingly, mobile technologies are the top of their list also – followed by real-time web, internet of things, augmented reality and structured data.

It’s encouraging to see that the trends are all in alignment with what CORE has been working on in it’s ten trends research – the key thing for us as educators is to not only be aware of what these trends are, but of the implications of each for what we are doing in our schools and, indeed, on the very nature and activity in our schools and of learning in the future.

In particular, we need to be thinking about how we will accommodate the potentially huge changes that may occur as a result of the impact of mobile devices used for learning. Slide 14 in the MorganStanley presentation provides a really useful diagrammatic summary of what the changes are from a technology point of view – but again, it’s how we imagine the implications of this for learning that will be important, both in terms of what learning might be like in the mobile-enabled future learning environments, and what learning we must be doing to prepare our students for living and learning in a mobile-enabled future.