Though it’s mostly about K-12 education, the UK’s Chalkface Project has a pretty bold—and pretty prescient—discussion of the impact they foresaw for the iPhone back in January. Among other things, they say

Before I go on to the benefits of the iPhone, I need to resolve the obvious objection: it’s too small to do anything useful. No. It’s too small for you to do anything useful with. Your students overcame that when they put their existing mobile phones at the heart of their social lives. They dealt with the small keyboard by learning predictive text. And the small screen? Well, even a speed reader can only ‘fix’ a few words at once. They simply developed the habits of dexterity to deal with it.

Back to the benefits. I predict that the iPhone, and its descendants and imitators, will replace desktops and laptops as the workhorse educational computing device, because:

• Adoption. Every kid will carry one of these voluntarily long before they all have laptops, or you have enough desktops in the school.
• Portability. Ever tried playing football on your way home carrying a laptop? But you’d do it with a phone in your pocket, wouldn’t you.
• Connectivity. It’s got both GPRS and wifi. So you don’t have to think about how you are connected, you just are.
• Flexibility. It’s borrowed one thing from the desktop computer; OSX. So it runs real programs. Lots of them.

Everything we’re seeing says the Chalkface folks were onto something way back in January… As these devices appear more and more on our campuses and as new applications appear for them, the four characteristics—adoption, portability, connectivity, and flexibility—seem to be very compelling indeed.

Is this the next big platform? Only time—and our students and faculty—will help us know for sure…