What technology will be pervasive in a generation?
I've pondered that question on occasion. The answers you get are pretty strange. The computer and the other communications devices will continue to grow in power, connectivity and speed. At the same time, they will get smaller and the price for what they currently do will go down. I say that last carefully because with technology, they sell you what you can't do now. That part stays on the spendy end, but even the cost of a high-end computer has gone down over time.
I suppose a person might look at an iPhone or a laptop keyboard and ask, "How can this possibly get much smaller?" Well, just wait. It will. Did you know that the chip manufactures are coming up on a physical limitation in the speed of chips? There will shortly need to be a major breakthrough in the design of computer chips to allow the speed of techonological devices to continue unabated. I'm pretty sure that breakthrough will happen in due course, and it is possible most people won't even know that it happened.
I suppose it might be some other way of getting around the problem. It could be that in a few years it will be common to have 64 processors burned onto a chip and to stick all of them into a computer at one go. You might even have 80 or so, and be guartanteed that 64 of them will work. (It will be iffy at first.) But, however it happens, the speed and power of the computer will continue to climb, and the size will continue to shrink. You might wonder how this could be. Well, I don't know exactly.
However, I do think that when my students are out teaching, they'll have a dilly of time trying separate their students from their technology during a test. And, for that matter, they'll have dilly of time separating their students from each other during a test.
Sometimes it's hard now, actually. It's hard to know the difference between a thinking student and a txting student. It will only get trickier as time goes on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
the increasingly blurry line between using technology and behaving normally is one of my favorite topics in sci-fi. my favorite anime show (i'm sure any sentence that starts that way is sure raise red flags), Ghost in the Shell examines what the future might look like if cybernetic augmentation were the norm. what would math class look like if kids' brains had processors built in already?
ReplyDeleteAn interesting question about math class, as I've taught math. It would change the rules somewhat. I'm not quite sure how, but it would definitely change them. The biggest thing would be the (implied) connection among the people so connected. That would sort of break down the way that a classroom works. The boost in calculating ability would also sort of change how the math class works, too.
ReplyDelete