Prelude

May 2040 at a private school in Montreal, students are attending a geography class and actively listening to the teacher’s presentation. While the teacher is gesturing at the elegant Surface 5.x board to present the different slides, students are taking notes on their tablets and they use theirs active speech recognition engines to detect key words and create knowledge concepts’ map for the course.

At the end of the class, the teacher gives as assignment a 2000 words essay on the extinction of dinosaurs. He agrees with the students on a deadline date and use the Surface 5.x board to broadcast the assignment on the student’s tablets. An automatic reminder is set on the smart device and a countdown displayed on its desktop. After the class, Ethan, one of the students, go back home. He reviews what was done at school that day, from its mathematics class at 10:00 am to the late geography class at 04:00 pm. While he goes trough the notes on its tablet, a knowledge agent compiles all the articles found on Wikipedia and related to the concepts maps he built during the classes. He docks its tablet on the table and start writing his essay about the dinosaurs’ extinction. He has been anxiously waiting for this; Ethan is a big fan of the Jurassic Park TV Show.

Tablets and education

The previous paragraph is certainly a fiction and will not happen in the next months or in the next year. But decades from now, there is a big chance tablets will play a role in the way we learn.

Advantages of using a tablet at school are:

  • It has a permanent memory
  • We can install school related applications on it
  • We can run speech recognition technologies and other gesture technologies for a more intuitive learning experience
  • It can keep a considerable amount of knowledge in its memory
  • It is a connected device that can give a student access to the internet so to more knowledge trough search engines

But one of the questions to ask ourselves is if using tablets at school will make us smarter or just more dependant on technologies. One thing that is sure, introducing tablets at school will imply changing the educational system so that it adapts to the new ways teachers and students are interacting. Also, the ways students are being evaluated may change since tablets become powerful aides during exams and other school related works. From a human development point of view, students will get more and more accustomed to technology and more efficient using computers and other electronic devices (Homo-Geek era?)

All these changes will certainly impact school fees, as the whole new learning methodologies will require massive investments in broadband connectivity, educational apps development and hosting infrastructure.

In application

At the Dawson College in Montreal, IPads have made their way to the teachers’ desks, allowing them to interact with students in a unique way. In South Korea, students will be using media tablets by 2015 instead of the regular text books. Every book needed at school will be digitalized by then. Several other programs have emerged in schools around the globe.

The Hype

Let’s look now at the Hype Cycle, it is a graph released by Gartner every year that helps to assess technologies’ maturity and to forecast when these technologies get adopted. According to the Hype Cycle, the Media Tablets are currently sliding from a ‘peak of inflated expectations’ to ‘trough of disillusionment’. The first paragraph of this article carries a lot of expectations regarding the usage of tablets in education but as we mentioned later, it brings a larger-scale challenge that is revamping the educational system to center it on technologies. We have a lot to learn from these little gadgets and as such many failures will result from our attempts to make them part of the educational system. But it is only by trying and finding a balance that we will make proper use of these technologies at school.

Parallel world

May 2040, in a universe parallel to ours, students are attending a graduation ceremony at university. Each of them will receive a unique object that will change their lives forever: they will get a smart companion (enhanced media tablet), a device that allows them to get access to a broader source of data. It marks an achievement of a life, they all got their bachelor degrees and are now ready to face the challenges of the world, while counting on their unique artifacts to help them collect, analyze and share data or knowledge.

What is your view? Will tablets make us smarter?

Originally published on Innovation Tales