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.

Which tablets?

[History's Coming To]

Makes sense. Why have just the one big screen that can display information when you could have a whole department devoted to a system that can push information to a wide range of tablets with different operating systems, software installations and capabilities. It's far more fun trying to work around the 30% of students who don't have LaTeX installed, the 42% without Flash, the 19% without an HTML5 browser and the guy who should be expelled because he prefers a notebook and pen.