Last summer I attended a meeting with my former fellow students. After more than thirty years it was a pleasure to discuss with people who had been dreaming to teach math or to work with numbers in an epoch when no material advantages could be obtained by developing such skills.
We’ve graduated several years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the latter being followed by significant changes in our lives - more of my former fellow students having now jobs in other countries. As many of them are now respectable senior teachers in public schools, I consider well-founded their concerns regarding the problems brought by the ubiquitous mobile devices.
Our generation used to employ classic tools for learning, we enjoyed rich social life, and our personal relationships are still based on direct meetings rather than messaging tools. For a teacher of our generation may be disappointing to see all over the place youngsters absorbed in their smartphones, or wasting their free hours in front of a computer game and chatting instead of spending time together.
One of my former group-mates as a mother of three and as a teacher has been particularly concerned about today's teenagers, many of them apparently addicted to their smartphones. I attempted to calm her by saying “don-t worry, smartphones will disappear ...it won’t happen during the next two weeks, but they are going to be replaced gradually by other tools”. My words have taken her by surprise, but at least I felt I was able to offer her a different perspective.
Many of our generation are sharing the preoccupation for the future of today's kids, the most pessimistic of them envisioning a society of consumer-zombies unable to face real-life challenges.
Regarding the brainwashing effect of smartphones I’m considering myself an optimist. The technology, which has turned mobile devices into consumer goods it’s not yet mature, and as all products, the mobile devices have already started to follow the rule of diversification and specialization.
Several marketing authorities keep telling that Microsoft’s efforts put in popularizing tablets are mistaken, because people are wishing smartphones and are spending money on phones rather than tablets.
In my opinion the smartphone’s form factor is the real winner, being very handy for a high variety of activities. The guys from Microsoft have invested in IoT, and in time the smart things will have a consistently valuable market.
Each industry has its toolset, and very likely each group of people with specific needs are going to have their particular smart kits equipped with sensors and software developed for them. Those smart kits may accespt optional and autonomous extensions like wearables.
Taking in account that a modern basic phone is small enough to be shaped as a wearable, it does not always makes sense to put the phone in the same box with the computer (smart phones are in fact computers), but it's important to assure good integration between them.
So yes, I believe that in future we will have the possibility to choose from a high variety of smart devices, and there will be trendy again to talk to each other.
