Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, recently presented at Stanford University on web trends. Her presentation contains eighty-eight slides full of interesting and thought-provoking information. Her message is that the evolving web forces us to re-imagine everything. For those of us in faculty development, it is suggestive of changes that will impact our classrooms – however “classrooms” are defined in the coming years.
Several trends stand out to me:
- USA adults who own tablets or eReaders has grown from 2% to 29% in three years
- Mobile internet traffic has surpassed desktop internet traffic in India. When will that happen in USA?
- During the recent Black Friday shopping, one-quarter of shopping traffic was on mobile devices rather than desktops, up from only 6 percent two years ago.
This presentation focuses on business, but if the world is moving to “beautiful, relevant, personalized, curated content for consumers,” will not the same be expected in higher education for students?
Meeker has some interesting before and now visualizations in her “Re-Imagine” section. I do not know that any by themselves are earth-shattering, but taken together, they certainly suggest a world that is evolving at an ever increasing pace, which raises questions on how we adapt.
As always, I would be interested in your views. What stands out for you?
