A school in Mumbai has made it mandatory for its students of class VI to XII to buy iPad tablets for learning in the class. A university in Indonesia has decided to go paperless in the class room for its approx 5000 students and have decided to give them Motorola Xoom tablet at subsidised prices for learning. American Airlines in US has got permission and now its pilots can use iPad for selected aircrafts for flight manoeuvring, for initial period of six months and if the experiment is successful then this use will be extended to other aircrafts also. No need for pilots to carry flight manuals and other papers.
Technology has advantages as well as disadvantages also. The school children’ s dependence upon latest gadgets like tablets and smartphones will reduce their social activities and in the time to come, I wonder where will be the necessacity for a student to go to a school if he or she can study everything on a tablet and interact with a teacher through the same device and even the teacher need not travel all the way to school and can impart all the lectures or solve the problems online.
We already have space crunch in India and may be there will be no need of brick and mortar institutions like schools and colleges as all the information and text books can be downloaded from a server and the students can get all the information while sitting at home. They will not have to bother to step out from their homes and can write the annual or semester examinations online from the confines of their homes.
Since our cities are already crowded and there is no place for playgrounds, the children can spend their free time playing games on their tablets and smartphones and Angry Birds and other games will be more liked than cricket and soccer. Cricket stadiums have already started remaining empty and in the days to come much of the cricket will be played online and some smart guy will develop beautiful game of cricket and Sachins and Dravids of today will be replicated in the online games!
As I was reading news in the media that a clothing retailer has unveiled a new application that offers viewers a peep into what’s underneath the clothes of catalogue models. I shudder at the thought what other apps are going to be developed in the future and whether we will be able to live a normal life or wholly dependent upon such apps.
What will happen to our relationships? It is anybody’s guess?
