I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how computer technology might change in the next ten years and how that will affect schools. I did a little checking and discovered that the first Pentium processor was introduced ten years ago. PCs then typically came with 16 MB of memory and 1-GB hard drives. That original Pentium had just over 3 million transistors and could perform approximately 100 million instructions per second (MIPS). Today I can buy a PC based on a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor with more than 1 GB of RAM and at least 100 GB of hard disk space. Of course, the computing power available on the average desktop has grown dramatically too. That new Pentium 4 can do approximately 7,000 MIPS and contains 125,000,000 transistors.

It’s interesting to consider Moore’s Law which predicts, depending on the particular formulation you read, that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. At that rate, ten years will produce almost seven doublings and you can see that Moore’s Law has held up pretty well over the last decade.

How will students and teachers be using technology in ten years? It’s a fool’s errand to speculate, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to say that the computing power available to them will be a couple orders of magnitude greatly than what we have now. Not merely faster, tomorrow’s computers will be smaller and cheaper too. All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.

But how will that powerful new technology change how students and teachers go about their business? I’m reminded of the maxim that says the effects of new technology are usually overestimated in the near term and underestimated in the long term. Despite the hype, most teachers will continue business as usual speaking in their thick digital immigrant accents. (See Prensky’s Overcoming Educators’ Digital Immigrant Accents: A Rebuttal.) In time, however, the digital natives will become the teachers and technology will dramatically change the teaching and learning process. In the meantime, it’s going to take a lot of work for all of us to lose our accents.