College CIO Predicts Tablets Will Kill Smart Boards

CowboyRobot writes "Keith Fowlkes (vice chancellor for information technology and CIO at the University of Virginia's College at Wise) has a commentary at Information Week in which he makes the point that moving forward, colleges will be able to dump all the 'smart' classroom tools and devices (e.g. electronic whiteboards, clickers, projection systems, etc.) and will only need to support students' tablets. The reasoning comes down to the return on investment, which is easy to argue for tablets but not for other classroom technologies. Standardization of video across devices remains a problem, as does the issue of where files are stored and how they are shared. But these are solvable problems and we will soon see the day when electronic whiteboards are a distant memory." I think the issue of file storage was solved by openafs a long time ago, certainly at the scale of a small university.

Comments

Re:Then why didn't that happen with notebooks?

[BitZtream]

Being worried about the exact spot a graphic is in means you give two shits about how your presentation looks. It's a presentation, so like, visuals are sort of key.

You've already failed.

Powerpoint presentations are almost universally bad because people spend more time making the presentation than they do making the content they are going to speak about, and you're just type type of person confirming that fact.

The visuals of a presentation either need to present and image/animation/movie of something that can't be described by the speaker accurately enough, or simply a rehash of the major bullet points of the presentation itself.

The powerpoint IS NOT THE PRESENTATION, it is a SECONDARY AID to help with the speaker's description.

Unless the aspect ratio is WAY off, it is irrelevant. HTML is PERFECTLY acceptable for presentations if they are done properly.

The issue you have with HTML versus powerpoint means you're doing it wrong in the first place, not that HTML is the issue.