Children have their heads in the cloud because that is where what they are tasked to learn by education is now. In the image above, Dell illustrates its new Inspiron Mini 9 with a child viewing a pagoda. That pagoda is not on the hard drive of the device displaying it. The pagoda is in the internet content cloud.
The image on the left shows my iPhone G3 in the hands of my eight-year-old great niece Melinda. Using the iPhone, she can display the same pagoda from the cloud. Children the age of those in the images would be hard put to find anything in their analog experiences that would provide knowledge remotely as complete and compelling for a pagoda as they reach in the cloud.
In announcing Fizzbook, another mini laptop competitive to the Inspiron and available soon in the UK, Silicon.com explains:
With its inspiration coming from the One Laptop Per Child initiative, Intel has teamed up with Zoostorm to launch a budget laptop for school kids in the UK.
It is based on the second generation Intel Classmate PC - part of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and is called the Fizzbook. It includes a fully functioning Windows XP operating system and comes with the Intel Atom chip processor.
The mini laptop can be used for learning activities as well as general computer tasks such as surfing the internet, playing media and, of course, games.
In the early stages of personal computer device development, a fundamental assumption was that the device had to have a big memory so what its owner would use it for would be available on its hard drive. If you wanted to learn about pagodas, you had to feed your computer CDs to download an encyclopedia with an article about pagodas. If you were a school library, you had to buy digitized knowledge resources for students to learn from. Those were the old days.
People who are children today will embrace the subjects they learn in the cloud, which is the open online network of what is known by humankind. The cloud abounds with mathematics, sciences, humanities, technologies — liberal arts, business studies, skill training — what is known about these subjects is already out there in the cloud. For example, if you are learning about pagodas, just about every pagoda on earth is in this network.
A key question for educators: It is the 21st century, do you know where our children are? For the part of the answer about where their minds are, the answer is: in the cloud.
