Footprint in your pocket and head in the cloud -The Little Black Device

Travelling back from London  during London Fashion week it struck me that one of the things that the IT industry and fashion industry have in common is a fondness for the thin client. The IT world has a track record of failing to deliver on the promise of the thin client, but that may be about to change.

The thin client concept—a computer or computer programme that depends on interaction with a server to provide functionality to the end user, with commensurate savings in hardware and administration costs—was originally popularised by vendors such as Oracle and Sun Microsystems with products such as the JavaStation, a diskless Network Computer (NC). However, the ultra-competitive PC marketplace made it difficult for NCs to be much cheaper than a low-end PC, and NCs failed to gain market share.

In the last 12 months we have seen a new class of device gain market share: smart phones such as the iPhone and various phones using the Android operating system, sometimes referred to as Google phones. Let’s be clear -  these devices are not just phones, as a quick look at the Android operating system in fig1 below will confirm: that the phone functionality is a tiny part of the device’s capability.

Fig 1 Android OS

What’s the big deal?

The photograph below (fig 2) shows a collection of all the devices that I have had and carried around since just the start of the century—phones, PDAs, music players, GPS, cameras, video recorders and media players.  Devices such as the iPhone and the Google phone combine all the capabilities of those pictured. Consequently they can provide a whole new class of applications that:

• are aware of their location;
• seamlessly adapt to the highest bandwidth available;
• know which direction they are pointing.

Users can now experience a full, rich, ‘always online’ set of services anywhere where there is a connection..

Fig 2 My gadgets since 200

The iPod is dead

This ability to access services from the internet (this is described in more detail in the section on the “cloud”) is a seismic shift for marketing. Consumers will almost always prefer access to live media over the dead digital detritus that clogs up our iPods. For example this week sees the launch of a Sky subscription for the iPhone. Meanwhile services such as Spotify delivering the whole back catalogue for an artist whom you only heard about ten minutes ago.  We like our news current and instant, and it is for this reason offline news services such as Avantgo could not compete with Google and others’ “push” technologies, that deliver newsfeeds personalised to your interests, up to the minute and in your hand.

A footprint in your pocket and their head in the cloud

Anyone who has drawn a diagram of the internet in the last twenty years has in all likelihood drawn a cloud, so one could be excused at wondering what all the buzz around cloud computing is about.  My take is that the defining characteristic from a user’s perspective is that they gain access to processing power, storage and services not residing on the user’s own device—not so very different from the original definition of the thin client.  What has become special is the ability for service providers to deploy and manage processing, storage and integrated services dynamically, reducing the unit cost of all components and creating an expandable model (sometimes called grid computing).  This has been achievable only due to a number of technological advances, in particular a big increase in processing power, steep reductions in the cost of storage and, critically, improvements in the bandwidth and distribution of Wide Area connectivity.

We are now at a tipping point, with Google leading the charge and (in the opinion of this author) well set to be the dominant provider of IT-enabled productivity tools and services of the next two decades. Google’s commitment to the development of an Open Source operating system for mobile devices (Android) was a brilliant move and when combined with its new Chrome operating system for larger devices (also Open Source) can only consolidate its grip on the emerging market for cloud-based services.  It’s not hard to find evidence to support this trend.

Recently Google closed a deal with Los Angeles civic authority to migrate the majority of its employees from the more traditional Microsoft Office to Google Apps. This suite of online applications offers email, word-processing, presentations, and spreadsheets.  Accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection and requiring little or no application software to be pre-installed on the user’s PC or phone.

Meanwhile at least 6 new phone like devices using the Android operating system have been announced including one from Dell, a company known for creating personal and office computing devices.

Alongside this Google has released a free SatNav application for Android phones. This can access live traffic data, your personal cloud address information, and the full power of all the Internet directory and mapping services. This transforms what has hitherto been provided largely as a static service into a dynamic one: and it is free.

These services will work on any computer with a browser. However the business advantage that Microsoft previously had in delivering its Office applications almost exclusively on its own operating systems will transfer to Google, with Google similarly ensuring that its services are optimised to run on Chrome.

In the last wave of innovation Microsoft took ownership of the operating system and then provided its Office applications on top. The constant requirement to upgrade provided an incentive to users to consider cheaper alternatives.. It is interesting that Google has started with a suite of services and can now offer its platforms as optimal environments on which to run the services.  And having made the Android phone operating system and Chromium Open Source they have at a stroke eliminated the arguments about anti-competitive behaviour which continue to dog Microsoft.

What are the implications of this new class of device for education and educational processes?

In a world where 80% of the world’s population is covered by GPRS connectivity or better — and in which students increasingly mediate their social lives and much of their informal learning online — students will arrive in formal learning expecting to use these capabilities.

Within five years we will be able to rely on students coming to school, college, or university with a personal device that they can use to mediate administration functions such as: registration (your phone is unique and increasingly has a GPS so knows where it is); assignment and course-work submission, and evidence administration.

If we leave it at that then we will have missed a trick because we know that strong rapid formative assessment is at the core of a strong pedagogic model (Dylan Wiliam) and that traditional group based learning models inevitably introduce delays.  The ability to rapidly assess learner’s understanding, and use that interaction to shape learning activities would alleviate the marking burden on academic staff, improve learner comprehension, provide more time for tuition, as well as ensure that a learner gained timely feedback on their course work.

Within five years we can expect to be seeing objects in the world which can as a minimum identify themselves (sometimes called smart objects). This can be done today with machine-readable barcodes or Quick Response (QR) codes.  The embedding of RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags linked within devices will enable an object to identify itself to one of these new personal devices. Combined with location information, the personal device will be able to provide instruction which will be up to date and in the right language.

In short we are talking about a world that has information, knowledge, and education at its centre.

So what?

There can be few that doubt that computing power has changed our world and in the last half century we have seen several waves of capability each of which have opened up new possibilities.

It would be hard to imagine our financial services or today’s engineering without the power contained within a mainframe.  The computer revolution has enabled many repetitive tasks such as payroll to be automated to a point where we trust our payslips.  The mass adoption of the microprocessor has facilitated an explosion of services that gives the ordinary citizen access to more information than the richest person in the world had less than 10 years ago.

I believe that smart personal portable devices like iPhones and Google phones are the first wave of what will become the norm. The impact of this on learners, learning, and the organisation of learning will be profound.

Published 14th December 2009

References

Dylan Wiliam  formative assessment http://weaeducation.typepad.co.uk/files/blackbox-1.pdf

Economist report on phone adoption  http://www.economist.com/specialreports/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=14483856

Dell launch a G Phone http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/29545/dell-to-launch-android-smartphone

New Horizon Report New Zealand http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2009-Horizon-Report.pdf

Google Wave http://toolsandtaxonomy.com/2009/07/21/4/