Smartphones - bane or a boon of education ?

We all have read the writing on the wall. The mobiles are changing the way people live. Already everyone has a cell phone - family, friends, students - and even maids, drivers, plumbers.  But there is another writing on the wall. Most mobiles will be "smartphones" - I guess already 50% of the beings on the campus are carrying a smartphone. I define a smartphone as one which can connect and browse the net. These days every phone costing more than r Rs 10000 has an internet connectivity. What are the consequences of this?

A survey of 1500 smart phone users shows that people with smartphones have twice the propensity of ordinary cell users to connect to the net ! Among smartphone users, 45% check email constantly during the day via multiple devices ( phone, PC)  and 28% check Facebook with the same frequency, The same figures for non-smartphone users were 28% and 12% respectively.

I am already beginning to see this in our classrooms. The students don't need a laptop anymore to be on the net - they can now do it by merely looking down under the table and reading off their smartphones. Even the mentors in a major company mentioned recently that attention spans are coming down and it is difficult to make people sit in one place and concentrate for a given time - to complete an assignment or an essay or something which requires reflection and creativity. What do you think?

Red Book Day

Red book is a compendium of articles. Each student group 'teaches" the class the essence of the article assigned to them. The students were expectedly articulate. But they put too much material on each slide. I was confused whether to read the slide or listen to the presenter. Don't they know that the slide is an "aid" but the presenter is the student herself. They also did not realize that less is more. The less you speak, and more slowly you speak, the better the impression.

The students did not seem to notice a very fundamental contradiction. They were not even aware they were "parroting" from the article without giving their own opinion - in life you cannot operate without a mind of your own.  Some students argued for "customer focus" (wear customer goggles, do not think of products but only of customer needs and behaviors etc) whereas others showed tools which were "product" based ( like BCG matrix ). Dont they realize there was a contradiction? Marketing should actually be a bridge between what the customer needs and what the company wants to do.