Introduction

Mobile computing is one of the most important and controversial topics in technology today. It's abilities and applications increase on a regular basis and form an ever changing and ever expanding mobile landscape. Soon enough it won't matter whether someone is sitting at home on their desktop or on their smartphone on the bus, the capabilities and connections will be the same. This report is to outline the future predictions for mobile computing in 2025 and provide some information into the topic's past and present as well. As this course is based online the implications of mobile computing on education were also included as it is a relevant to both this assignment and topic. Mobile computing has progressed exponentially over the last ten years and will continue to flourish and improve over the next ten.

What is Mobile Computing?

Wikipedia defines mobile computing as “human-computer interaction by which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for transmission of data, voice and video.” There are three major components to mobile computing and they include communication, hardware and software. Many of the innovations in each sector depend on the evolution of another to provide support and render them viable.

Mobile technologies are what connects our real world experiences with the digital landscape, whether it’s social, academic or in the workplace. Since these devices are designed to be portable many of them are hand held or are small and light enough to be worn without being restrictive. Mobile devices consist of many of the same components and software abilities as a regular desktop computer; such as internet connection, microprocessors, data storage and memory. Examples of these devices include smartphones, laptops, wearable technology (glasses, watches etc.), tablets, cameras, carputers and handheld game consoles. There are also many wireless extensions to these technologies through low radius networks like Bluetooth and Airplay, which include objects such as speakers, keyboards, headsets, mice and displays.

Data plans and Wi-Fi have enabled Mobile computing to thrive, especially with the rate at which new and improved networks have and will become available with faster connections and larger radiuses. Every day we as humans become more connected than the last and we have mobile computing to thank for it.

Education

Mobile computing is one of the most controversial topics in the world of higher education. Almost every student and teacher in the current educational environment has some sort of mobile technology, which they use for both personal and academic reasons. Due to this trend many institutions have been investigating methods of integrating new technologies to improve the educational experiences they offer. Academia isn’t the only field where mobile computing has the ability to improve it, administrative and organizational processes can be streamlined and completed more efficiently through new technologies and networks.

One pressing implication regarding the future of higher education is the impending plateau of technological advancement and the shift of importance to the mobility of the students and faculty. Many institutions in modern education centre much of their programs around apps and mobile websites to make information more accessible for people on the go, thought the next step will be complete integration on a platform that would resemble certain social network platforms such as Facebook. By 2025 the entire educational landscape will change partly because of mobile computing and it’s capabilities, as it has in the last ten years. In the past people needed to go to a library to find what they need but now almost anything can be found at the click of a button and soon it won’t make a difference whether people are using their desktops or mobile devices.

Mobile Scales

As the world’s demand for education increases along with the prevalence of mobile technology, opportunities arise in institutions ability to cater their educational experiences to their students on a more personal level. Theses opportunities will provide students with access to increasing amounts of information at the touch of a screen. Mobile devices would become an educational concierge of sorts serving relevant information wherever and whenever needed.

This doesn’t only have implications in education; we will be able to carry our entire lives around with us in our pockets, whatever the situation may be. By 2025 with the internet of thing becoming more and more popular the scale and ability of mobile technologies will skyrocket to the point where we will likely have the abilities of a full sized computer in the palms of our hands.

Augmented Mobile Realities

As mobile devices become increasingly popular they will become filters through which we view reality. These filters would be considered a form of augmented reality, which is essentially a live view of a real world environment that has been enhanced by an overlay of computer generated imaging to serve a purpose such as photo editing or gathering contextual information. Certain examples of this Augmented Reality are projects like HealthCARe, which provides students at City University with the ability to find relevant information on health care issues simply pointing their phone at something. Another prime example of this technology is the SCARLET project out of the University of Manchester that uses Augmented Reality to make extremely rare books more accessible to students and provide them with additional information to improve their research and educational abilities. In the future this technology has the ability to completely revitalize how we all gain and process information both in education and our every day lives.

The Internet of Things

“The history of our recent technologies is one of carefully repackaging the artifacts of our lives in smaller and smaller boxes.” (Ben Showers, 09/29/2012)

The most prominent form of this trend is in fact mobile computing; currently that consists of mainly mobile phones and tablets but new wearable technologies such as the Google glasses and the Apple Watch are becoming more and more prevalent. These wearable technologies are only possible because of the emergence of Augmented Reality and they represent the growing connection between our physical bodies and technology.

With the rate of innovation and technological development that has only continued to increase in the last number of years we can expect our mobile formats and vehicles to change drastically by 2025.

As personalised as devices are now in the future they will only become more so which will impact what students will expect from their educational experiences. Most higher education institutions use a bring your own device model to their teaching styles but in future this may cause support issues as there will be a variety of available mediums.

Future Devices

By 2025 we should expect to see many innovations in mobile hardware with features such as flexible screens, built-in projectors, seamless voice control, 3-D displays and holograms.

As of today there are about two internet-connected devices for every person alive and by 2025 experts forecast that this ratio will increase to over 6 per person. This means that it is likely that there will be approximately 50 billion devices connected to the internet over the course of the next decade.

These devices won’t be limited to the formats we have today, by 2025 many of the everyday objects we take for granted will be interconnected through new technology to serve a bigger purpose. Many of our clothes will be integrated with different forms of technology whether it be sensors to react with our devices or them actually become devices themselves. By 2025 the landscape of available devices will change drastically, especially if you look at the progression of mobile computing over the last 10 years and predictions for the next 10.