"I would argue the classroom twenty years from now will be a space reconfigured and repurposed for different needs," he said. "No more 'tablet armchairs.' The classrooms may look more like living rooms. We're going to see classrooms moving away from lectures to a more collaborative environment, heavy on group projects. I could see a student's tools all contained on one device, sharing wirelessly on a common screen or with each other, device-to-device, and much more web-based."
The devices they use will also continue to shrink. Students are already showing a preference for tablets and web-books over laptops.
"The social web has enforced a powerful notion of collaborative knowledge creation," Jim Groom, instructional technology specialist and adjunct professor at Virginia's University of Mary Washington told Ars. "How can a classroom in this moment ignore the shape of the web?" he asked. His university is planning a pilot program to give 900 new students not just their own blogs, but a complete domain and space in which they will work, archive, sandbox, rant and play, and over which they have complete control.