I couldn’t believe it…no laptop with me or even a pen / paper in my hand…and here was Ian Jukes delivering the opening keynote at this years Laptop Institute. I couldn’t believe I was so unprepared!! Thanks to fellow blogger Vinny Vrotny, who was obviously much better prepared than me, I was able to review his liveblog of the presentation.
It was my first time to hear my fellow canuck speak – Ian is from the west coast of Canada – and I was quite amazed by the information. The frantic pace of the information streaming past was overwhelming at times…perhaps a foreshadow of what our future environments may be like? Ian’s personal and passionate plea to rethink not the technology but to retool our curriculum – the very essence of WHAT we teach, made it hard not to buy what he was saying.
In a nutshell, Ian makes the case that the intersection of two trends (Moore’s Law) led to the growth of the third component, the Internet. These three trends converged to create the fourth, and the most challenging trend – InfoWhelm.
Perhaps the most interesting – and mind-boggling – of the many facts and ideas presented, was the projections of Moore’s Law. Using expectations based on existing understandings and conservative projections, we are able to look at the increasing power per dollar in our computing systems.
1979 – 8k, 128k storage, 2 Mhz, cost $5000
1984 – 128 k, 400k storage, 10 Mhz, $3900
2007 – 512oook, 80000000k storage, 200 Mhz, $800
Projected —- 2019 (that’s 12 years from now….a new Grade 1 student will be graduating) 208,000 GB, 40, 060 GB, 1224 Mhz, $1.38
Can’t get my mind wrapped around those numbers. Is this really the reality? Whatever the end case, one thing is for certain – access will no longer be an issue. The issue will be what skills do our students need to be developing to survive, let alone thrive, in this new world.
Ian is up again tomorrow morning, as is Will Richardson…stay tuned.
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