At the 2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia on May 9th Bill Gates shared some more of his enthusiasm for the Tablet PCs and more specifically Tablets in education.
“….I’ve got one last thing to show, and I previewed this earlier, and that’s related to the student Tablet. To me this is an important milestone, and Microsoft has been investing in this for a long time. We see lots of ways that we’re going to drive this into the mainstream. In fact, my own daughter goes to a school where she uses a Tablet PC, and it’s phenomenal to see how comfortable she is, how she learns better. She tries out her knowledge, she communicates with her teacher in a new way. It is completely digital. The Internet is there, the ability to create things is there.”
and on technology in schools:
“One of the things that I always share my enthusiasm for when I talk about the future of technology is the idea of students having a computer individually, and later today you’re going to hear from a teacher and a student who are experiencing that, and piloting what that’s like. Clearly that has to be a very robust machine that can last – you can drop it – it’s got to be inexpensive, it’s go to be powerful, but the hardware and software changes make it a question of when we can do that, not a question of if we can do that. Textbooks are on their way out. In some countries, that will happen in three or four years. In some it will be five or six, but I’ll be so bold as to say that over the next decade we’ll look at a textbook the same way we look at things like a paper-based encyclopedia today. And we look at it and we say, hey, it’s not rich enough, it’s not animated, it’s not inexpensive enough, it’s not flexible enough, it doesn’t give you the richness that the digital form of that can provide. And so these advances really make a huge difference.
One that I think is particularly interesting is that the way that we interact with these machines will change. We use the keyboard and the mouse today. On the mobile phone, we largely use the little keyboard, and it’s impressive how well people are able to use that small keyboard. But we should complement that with new approaches, and there’s a number of additional approaches that I refer to as natural interface. Speech input, where you talk and the system recognizes it. Pen, where you take a pen and you write ink, and it recognizes what you’ve written. Touch, where you can just point to things and move them around. A great example of this is that in the future the desk of a worker will be a touch-sensitive surface. The cost of that display and having the software that can see what you’re doing will be very, very low, and so you can take different documents, have them laid out there, point to one, expand it, have the sales data, or the survey data, or the quality data, or the calendar easily manipulable so you can navigate through it just by pointing at things, and then if you see something that surprises you, you can take your pen, write a little note, pick which colleague you think should take a look at that, click on that, and off it goes. And it’s very straightforward.
Likewise, your walls will be able to display information, because the cost of the screen will be very low, and they too will have a camera that can watch what you’re doing with the magic of software. And so your whiteboard, what was the chalkboard, will be intelligent. That will be true in the office, in the meeting room, in the classroom, at home. And so things like taking photos and organizing them, just very natural.
This is the kind of thing you’ve seen in science fiction movies, but in fact it’s now moving into the market, and moving into the market in very low cost. Our first product in this space is called Microsoft Surface. It’s a flat table. And just a few months ago that rolled out to the early customers and the response has been phenomenal that people love that natural capability of interacting.
Well now, with computer technology being so amazing, and so empowering to the individual, how do we get it so that we have broad benefit? Whenever we make scientific advances, we’re faced with this dilemma, and when we have new medicines, are they only for the rich? We go all the way back to look at reading, which of course in its early days only the very elites were literate, and it took hundreds of years before low cost printing, and government programs around libraries and schools got to the point where every country took a goal of saying that all the population deserves to the literate. And the world as a whole, most of the world, has done very, very well on that. Well now we have almost a new type of literacy, digital literacy, and making the computer accessible.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
As I read comments like this I jump inside with excitement. Who knows how long it’s going to take to achieve and whether it all comes out like we think it should, but is there any doubt that we’re going to figure out even more ways to make our lives more efficient, more connected, more enjoyable?