You don’t get to be a futurist unless you make some bold, sometimes unrealistic predictions, right? According to an upcoming report from the New Media Consortium, students will be able to kiss all of those backbreaking college textbooks goodbye in the next two to three years.
Laurence F. Johnson, futurist and founder of the organization said the following in a statement issued today, “The prospect of holding all the materials you will need in a single device weighing less than a kilo is a powerful driver from the student side, and we are seeing a number of universities that are pushing publishers to move in this direction.”
That’s all well and good, and who among us wouldn’t have traded in years of lower back pain for a shiny new eBook reader, given the chance? But does it seem realistic? As e-reader prices continue to drop, there seems little doubt that deployment of the devices in an educational setting will continue to grow more and more commonplace.
As for full deployment, that seems more dependant on specific institutions. Let’s face it, some school are just quicker to adopt technology than others–you know how, at the beginning of every school year, you hear about colleges giving all of their students iPods or laptops?
Plenty will no doubt happily ride the PR wave that comes along with early adoption. As for widescale deployment–well, we’ll see…
