Lightning in a Bottle

Just to underscore another powerful trend, a number of manufacturers announced new camera and camcorder memory cards at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, and the Washington Post covers several. Being a tech person old enough to remember spending $1,000 for 1 megabyte of computer memory, it boggles my mind that Panasonic will be coming out with an SD (Secure Digital) card that has a capacity of 32 gigabytes. In one of those little camera chips about the size of a postage stamp, you’ll be able to store eight hours of high-definition video. Prices haven’t been announced, but I would guess that little bitty chip will be in the $1,000 range. Not even accounting for inflation, that’s buying 32,000 times more memory for the same cost.

Another way to look at it - in 1985, a megabyte of memory cost $1,000. Today, it costs 3 cents. At that rate of change, in ten years it will cost .04 cents, or four hundredths of a cent. Free, for all intents and purposes.

This is a challenge we haven’t really addressed in our planning for educational technology. We still focus on how costly things are, and often plan for resource-starved settings. How would we plan if we operated on the assumption that the technology will eventually be free? Back in December Guy Kawasaki shared a video looking at that exact concept - planning for when technology will be free. It’s a presentation by Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine, and it’s an overview of a new book he has coming out. It’s pretty challenging, but I think his message is very important, and one we need to start considering sooner rather than later.

My technology explorations over the last few weeks have been in the world of the small. I’ve been using an iPod Touch and an Asus EeePC. The iPod Touch looks just like an iPhone, and whenever I pull it out everyone is somewhat disappointed to find that it isn’t. However, it will hook up to the wireless network in my home and office without a hitch, and I can browse just about any website I want at speeds close to laptop speed. Yes, it’s a small screen, but it has incredibly crisp resolution and can zoom in and out quickly and easily. I wouldn’t permanently replace my laptop with it, but it’s amazing to be able to pull a web browser out of my pocket for a trip quick to Google.

The EeePc (which I pronounce “e pc” because it gets really tiring to say “e e e pc” all the time) weighs two pounds and has a slightly smaller footprint than a composition book. The model I purchased has 512 megabytes of RAM, and 4 gigabytes of flash memory instead of a hard drive. It has a seven-inch screen, wireless networking, 4 USB ports, a VGA out port, an SD card slot, an Ethernet port, and a built-in webcam. It runs a version of Linux, and has a OpenOffice, the Firefox web browser, Skype, and a variety of other applications built in. It’s only $400.

I love its size, portability, power and quick boot-up time. (Under 30 seconds.) It would be a remarkable machine for students to use on a regular basis. I have just two quibbles with it. First, the seven inch screen is really bright and very readable, but the resolution of the screen means a lot of scrolling up and down on some web pages. That should be fixed in upcoming versions of the machine. Second, so far the wireless network connection seems to be unable to remember networks that I’ve connected to in the past, which means I have to re-enter the security code when return to my work network (which is a really long, ugly, irrational string of characters). That’s probably something that can be fixed by someone that understands Linux more than I do.

Both devices are a peek into a future that isn’t that far away, when we will have options for incredibly inexpensive yet incredibly powerful devices that we can carry with us anywhere and keep us connected to the vast resources available on the Internet, as well as each other. There may be a lot of upsides and downsides to this, but it is inevitable.