Great article: study: Your kids will use touch screens in 2015 April 7, 2010.
Kids like to touch toys. If you're an adult reading this, you might think a touch screen is a nice feature to a computer. To a kid, not having a touch screen is a lack of a feature. You add it, and say "that'd be nice to have." They think, "Why can't I touch the screen?"
That's my interest in multitouch technology. Students will be using laptops and netbooks and tablets more and more frequently in the future, and I still foresee a day where all students are issued one of the three. And depending on the age of the student, they may much rather have a screen to touch and not just watch.
The One Laptop Per Child program from MIT put millions of laptops into the hands of children around the world. While it didn't yet reach its goal of a laptop for $100, it did end up starting the netbook market you and I are familiar with. Before that project, a laptop easily cost $500 at the least. Now you can get a netbook for around $250 (in 2010) and for even less in the future.
Now, this $250 netbook you can buy in the store doesn't have multitouch technology. Those netbooks are still at a premium, at about $500. I use a multitouch netbook made by Asus modeled T91MT (read my T91MT review)... it's got a 9 inch screen, stylus, keyboard, usb ports, all that. And it's freaking amazing.
The next version of Adobe Flash will be supporting Multitouch screens, and Google just announced that its netbook OS, Google Crome OS, will be supporting Flash. I'm hoping that means Google will have a multitouch netbook, and that it costs a lot closer to $250 than $500.
But Google's OS will also support HTML5, the same technology that Apple's iPad and iPhone use for web browsing.
So how does this all fit together? Not everyone who will be developing courses, games, and tutorials will be able to afford a copy of Adobe Flash. It's currently about $700. So a team of three people, that's $2100. You can see how this can add up. If HTML5 is used, there will presumably be several free options. That's why I'm so excited about HTML5, and how it could affect education with the multitouch revolution.