I believe that this stunning blog article suitably commemorates my nearly simultaneous launch into the world of mobile computing (a Droid Incredible 2 is on going to replace my dumbphone next week) and my foray into higher education come August. While researching the usefulness of smartphones in grad school (thanks to helpful input from my friends at GradCafe), I was impressed by how many useful, brilliant, and plain neat apps there are for these mini-computers. Scan a page and it becomes a PDF, deposited in your Dropbox account (which you can access anywhere). Access your Google docs, calendar, and mail on the go. See a bird on your way to class and ID it...
The Gideon Burton of the blog Academic Evolution has strong words for those who resist the smartphone experience. In
Scholarly Communications must be Mobile, he writes: "Mobile computing is the future for computing, period. ... The PC revolution of the 20th century will be imitated by the smartphone revolution of the 21st."
In fact, "Scholars unwilling to use mobile computing are going to be disconnected from their peers. When everyone else is getting instantaneous updates about critical issues in the field through RSS feeds or microblogging updates, but you are waiting a month or more for your copy of The New England Journal of Medicine to come out -- well, you aren't going to seem very professional. You know that one professor who was a holdout from email for so long and still needs the secretary to show him how to mail attachments? In the near future, a professor without a smartphone just won't be all that smart.
"Mobile computing will drive demand in scholarship, prompting ideas and enabling on-the-fly collaboration and coordination, and forcing it to become more timely, more rhetorically nimble, more accessible on multiple levels. It is going to improve learned communication to have it piped into the hands of the masses."
