The seeds of the future lie buried in the past

News today that Georgia is considering a pilot program of iPads in schools. I want to be on record as saying that the convergence of cloud technology to store data and tablets that work will be the dominant educational and commercial data toolset of the next 50 years.

Why? Because tablets have the benefit of being portable (even laptops are awkward to carry around to meetings and work locations) and social (you attend a meeting and take notes without the monitor acting as a barrier) and processing power / memory have advanced to the point where a tablet has medium to high performance and can store moderate amounts of data. At the same time cloud- and mobile- app technology means that it is easy for users to use the tablet as a thin-client/terminal to access work data, send messages, read books, etc. This is a big deal (although to be clear it's not an innvoation, just the natural progression of technology) and may be the tipping point for both cloud and tablets which could not survive independently.