TBers,

Harry Pence will be giving a presentation on April 24, 2-3 in Milne Room 108 entitled “Is the Post-PC World real or just Apple hype?”

Abstract: Steve Jobs once observed that we live in a "post-PC world."  I would argue that this is not just hype from Apple, but rather says something fundamental about our society in the 21st Century.  We increasingly live in a media-saturated, multitasking, collaborative world.  This is the era of the mobile ecosystem, when users carry their internet connections with them all the time, and so expect to find answers to most questions literally in the palm of their hand.  Preliminary research already indicates that many people are using their mobile devices as auxiliary memory to store and organize the flood of information that is all around us.  This does not mean that the millions of desktop and laptop computers found on campuses and in offices all over the world are going to become obsolete overnight, but it does describe a fundamental change in the way that humans are interacting with computers.  This should change the teaching emphasis from what we need to know to how we can find what we need to know and, more importantly, how we evaluate the accuracy of what we find.